Headline:
Flat Beer Sales Bring Drinks Online At Key Asahi Brewery
Sorry again please??
This is for a story about how one Asahi brewery has had convert its output to soft drinks and “chu-hi” (sort of like wine coolers) due to a slump in beer sales. At first I thought they were selling “flat beer” but then realized that the whole headline was kind of funky.
The Net Neutrality debate rages on, and I’m sure every reader is enough aware of the basics so that I need not summarize. My friend Younghusband over at the Cominganarchy blog made a brief post earlier in support of Net Neutrality. I began to write my own thoughts as a comment there but then thought, why not post it here instead?
Without Net Neutrality the hopes for future innovation, future disruptive technologies in the future are dim.
The fundamental misunderstanding about Net Neutrality is the nature of what some of the network providers really want to do when it’s gone. Net freedom advocates have been trying to paint a picture of a world in which the network providers are allowed to charge content providers for higher quality service to that network’s customers and to then throttle down the speed and reliabilty of servers that have not paid up. Unfortunately, there is a general misconception that this is how it already works, because content providers must pay for their bandwidth.
Let me be clear- this is NOT how it works now. Yes, when you connect a server to the Internet you pay for the size of the connection you get, for the amount of data that you send. But this payment is only on the server end, and while it may be expensive if you send alot of data, it is also a single payment (leaving out regional mirrors or media distribution services like Akamai or whatever).
What network providers would like to be able to do is force servers to pay not only at their end, but also to each individual ISP, for premium access to that ISP’s customers. This would mean that, say, Youtube would have to pay not just for the fair cost of their presumably massive network connection, but also pay each and every single ISP, AT&T, Comcast, AOL, SBC, Earthlink if they wanted all Americans to be able to access their service.
Now imagine how much worse it gets in an international environment. Youtube is an American company, primarily aimed at Americans, and yet it has become very popular in Japan despite not even having a Japanese language interface. If a so called “tiered internet” were standard, then Youtube would have had to pay KDDI, NTT and YahooBB to guarantee access to the Japanese market before they could have become popular. But their popularity here was unexpected and unmarketed, spread by word of mouth. This sort of serendipitous success that has made the Internet what it is today would be no more.
There would be no more underground successes like, in reverse chronological order, Youtube, Myspace, iTunes, Friendster, Google, Napster, Yahoo. Everything would have to have its target market planned out in advance. For a startup without the budget to pay for access to every local ISP in the world, they would have to identify in advance their projected customer base through marketing surveys, demographic analysis, and the other insults and discrimination towards consumers that we as a society have become used to over the decades. It would be the death of grassroots popularity and a return to the centralized marketing driven media hegemony of the past, and it would be an awful tragedy.
I speak English and Japanese, but not French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian or any other Western language. So when you hear me talk about the “Western media” I am basically talking about sources from English-speaking world or occasionally English language services of “Western” publications. Just wanted you to know that.
Want to know what just happened in Japan or areas that Japan cares about? Well if you can read Japanese fragment sentences, the best free place to turn is probably Sankei Breaking News. I bet you didn’t know that eel prices are up 20% on low catches of sardines and fewer imports from China, did you?
Only thing is you actually have to load the site to see it. That is so 2003!
Some of you might be wondering where the hell I am most of the time. This conversation is illustrative:
Adamu: sup man
Joe: watching TV
Adamu: cweet
Joe: just saw ryoko hirosue score a penalty kick against a dog
Joe: then watched a guy get punk’d by another guy who dressed up as a panda
Normally, I hate TV, but there’s a lot of awesome stuff I’ve been watching lately:
Someday I’ll get in on the act with my own show, “Bengoshi no JOE!” Every Thursday night, I’ll decide a case along with my two co-judges, a random comedian/dietperson and a random “talent” with huge breasts.
Seriously, I am just so sick of this crap:
Are people still interested to see what else the Sanrio people can put Hello Kitty’s face on who else signs up to beat the dead horse that is licensed Sanrio merchandise? If so, get over it! Please! A Hello Kitty guitar simply does not deserve to be front page news these days (as of now it’s the top image at MDN). Last I checked, Hello Kitty merchandise was the Snakes on a Plane of 2 years ago. That is, it all of a sudden started appearing everywhere online, only to spark a quick backlash once it became overexposed.
Consider these two phenomena:
1) Athletes endorsing products that supposedly help their performance; and
2) Exploitive marketing of second language learning products that offer a specific pattern of drills as a purported secret to learning the language.
By themselves, they are typical, if somewhat sleazy parts of everyday consumer life. But put them together and you get this nugget of infotainment from the ethically-challenged Daily Yomiuri:
Bobby Valentine learns the joy of Japanese
Yoko Mizui Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer
“The most exciting thing that ever happened to me was not winning the Asian Championship and the Japan Championship last year. Nor was it winning the Major League. It was not even winning koryusen this year,” said Chiba Lotte Marines baseball team manager Bobby Valentine. “The most exciting thing was that at the age of 50 plus, I could discover Step Up Nihongo and learn the language.”
Valentine talked about how he learned the Japanese language and utilizes it in managing his team at a seminar to introduce a new e-learning system, “eSUN,” in Tokyo on June 26.
Step Up Nihongo (SUN) is a set of textbooks for non-Japanese to study the Japanese language, written by Shigekatsu Yamauchi, who also writes the monthly column “Japanese in Depth” for the Language Connection page of The Daily Yomiuri.
That’s right, just when you think Chiba Marines manager Bobby Valentine is going to give us some insight into ups and downs of his attempts to learn the language of his adopted home (which he incidentally lives away from in the off-season), BAM you get a sales pitch. There is nothing indicating that this article is an advertisement meant to promote a specific product. And adding insult to injury, there’s next to no info about how good Valentine’s Japanese actually is or how he really learned it. I guess it’s up to us to try eSUN and find out, right?
In the interest of fairness, there are dozens of press releases put out and promotional events held every single day in Japan announcing the arrival of some great new product. Every one of them claims to be newsworthy, making it up to the reporter/editor’s judgment to know what is really worth printing. If we give the Yomiuri the benefit of the doubt, “Bobby Valentine endorses Japanese study method” could be newsworthy in and of itself. He’s yet another success story of a foreigner in Japan, so people want to hear just about any tidbit of information that’s available. I mean, color me ignorant, but I didn’t even know Valentine was seriously studying Japanese, although I’m not about to start believing it now (Question: is his Japanese any good? According to this Nov 2005 interview it’s “a major problem”). Unfortunately, the article is not exactly written to emphasize the newsworthy aspects of the event. Again and again the writer emphasizes the benefits of eSUN.
Keep in mind that in the Japanese media, product placement passed off as news (i.e.: with no mark denoting that you’re looking at an ad rather than actual news) is rampant (for example, Nikkei has an entire Saturday supplement for just such a purpose). Marxy has some good coverage of that phenomenon on his blog.
I would say this article fits snugly into that tradition of unannounced advertising. Especially since after about 10 minutes of the most cursory research, I was able to unearth a good bit of info to that makes it unlikely that Valentine is merely a volunteer supporter of this learning technique.
First let’s consider: are we really expected to believe that the discovery of this product was the most exciting moment ever in the life of the Bobby Valentine, the only foreign manager (except for Sadaharu Oh I guess but he doesn’t count) in Japanese baseball to ever win the Pacific League and Japan Series championships and, coincidentally, the inventor of the “wrap” sandwich?
If it is, he’s been quiet about it up to now – he only mentions the product once on his official blog (which in turn is a marketing gimmick for a different site) in the form of a brief non-sequitur in a February 2006 post explaining how the blog works:
It is very interesting to note that David, who is bilingual in English and Japanese, learned his Japanese from the same teacher I am currently learning mine! Our teacher is Shige Yamauchi-sensei of ICI, a foreign language school in Tokyo. Using Step Up Nihongo (SUN), which is a wonderful teaching tool for those that want to learn Japanese, students can not only learn it by book and tape form but also interactive internet lessons as well.
But that brief endorsement was enough to warrant ICI, creator of the Step Up method and the company featured in the article in question, to include a full-on graphic logo (linked to the above blog post) on their website to let potential students know that Valentine endorses their methods:
And I’m sure he does – but I have a tough time believing he’s doing this simply as an uncompensated advocate. The article claims that Valentine was hooked on eSUN after someone handed it to him on a plane. Sure, and James Bond drives a BMW to impress chicks. Valentine is a businessman. Look at the way he’s doing his blog: some secretary is recording his thoughts while he’s on the road, and then transcribing them onto a blog that links directly to a major Valentine investment. Pretty shrewd!
And from the get-go, the seminar that constitutes the “where” of the article was held by a company run by a Yomiuri contributor. Considering that the very existence of his column is a convenient way to drum up business, sneaking in a cheap promotion of a celebrity endorsement of his product doesn’t make for much of an intellectual stretch. And being a part of the Yomiuri establishment must make it easy to cut in line ahead of other, less-connected Japanese learning methods.
So we’ve got a) An article that is clearly pushing a specific product but does not identify itself as an ad; b) a subject who in all likelihood is a paid (but unannounced) spokesman for the product; and c) The company offering said product has personal and financial connections to Yomiuri. In my own amateur opinion, such an article violates the “newspaper ethics” that the Yomiuri supposedly subscribes to as a member of the Japan Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association (NSK). Here’s the relevant excerpt of the NSK’s Journalistic Canon, Newspaper Advertising Printing Standards (for some reason these standards are left out of the English version of the NSK website):
[Newspapers] shall not print advertisements that correspond to the following:
[omitted]
3. Falsehoods or items for which there is a danger of misinterpretation.
“Items for which there is a danger of misinterpretation” refers to the following:
(1) [Advertisements] that use formatting and expressions that look ambiguously like editorial matter, making the fact that it is an advertisement unclear.
[rest omitted]
So as long as the journalistic canon applies to online articles (at least it seems to in the US) the DY might consider sticking the word “advertisement” above articles that serve little purpose than to sell us something. Until either that happens or I get definitive proof that Bobby Valentine has no endorsement deal with Step Up Nihongo, I will continue to be properly offended.
(Thanks to FG for pointing this article out to me)
Yahoo Japan’s “everybody’s politics” section is becoming quite an amazing little site. I mean look at this hot top image promoting their new 2007 Upper House election feature:
It’s like dueling Kim Jong Ils!
Just look at some of these amazing features:
Best of all everything is free and better yet ad-free. Why? My guess: They are gearing up to claim to have a significant impact on next year’s Upper House elections and in the process boost traffic.
One of their newer features, however, indicates a major shift by some of the traditional media content providers – free, full-length articles from Japan’s weekly and monthly magazines! The Japanese internet so far has been pretty devoid of good free political analysis or even in-depth news coverage. This is largely explained by the newspapers and magazines’ reluctance to put their content online for fear of losing readership and, in the case of newspapers, the considerable special privileges they get as so-called public institutions. is “Read and Compare Political Articles” which reprints the main political articles in weekly journals, in their entirety, completely free of charge (or even banner ads, while we’re on the topic)! Downsides: No pictures, and the articles are deleted fairly soon after publication (about a month it looks like). But if you’re diligent you can at least save the articles you want on your computer (or if you’re like me, g-mail them to yourself).
This serves as an essential boon to Japanese and Japan watchers overseas (who can now vote in all aspects of Japanese elections after a court decision), who before could only view headlines for free, unless they wanted to sign up for media companies’ exorbitantly expensive pay services.
There still leaves much to be desired in terms of Japanese media content being available on the web (full newspapers, anyone?). But this is a very helpful step in the right direction!
In the West, few social problems are thought of as more typically Japanese than the random molester, known aschikan . He may lurk in a parking garage or dark alley, as if some sort of fungus, but his most common natural habitat is the train. During rush hour, when commuters of all ages, professions, genders are packed together like sardines-to the point that certain stations in Tokyo famously (used to?) have platform workers help people squeeze inside before the doors shut-and the hapless victim has no escape from the perverts embrace. Whether he merely breaths too close and too damply to her neck, rubs his pelvis up against her side, slides his hands over her breasts, crotch or buttocks, slips them into her clothes, or actually opens his own clothing to perform that most inappropriate of public acts, the response is always the same-nothing. The woman may be disgusted or terrified, fellow passengers may see, feel, or hear what is going on, but regardless nobody stops it, nobody calls the police, and of course nobody is ever punished.
Of course, this is all a product of Japan’s unique culture, superficially sexually repressed and yet if you scratch the surface ever so perverted. In other, normal, nations perhaps these chikan would be well-adjusted men, allowed to slake their sexual appetites with their wives or girlfriends, instead of being forced to work like robots for a family that doesn’t love them, virtually castrated by society. With no accepted outlet, he turns to increasingly depraved pornography, which gradually programs his pyche to associate his libidinous urges not just with the image of a pretty girl but outlandish scenarios until merely watching is no longer enough, and without any good Protestant values to reign him in, he feels compelled to take to the streets and do something about his fantasies, heedless of the victim’s rights or the consequences.
At least that is how the common stereotype goes. But really it’s all absolute rubbish.
The New York Times has an article on the prevalence of illegal sexual groping and exposure on the NYC subway system.
This week, as the Police Department announced the arrest of 13 men charged with groping and flashing women in the subways, women around the city nodded. Yes, they said, this had happened to them. Yesterday. Last month. Last fall. Twenty years ago.
“Every girl I know has at least one story,” said Barbara Vencebi, 23, a studio photographer standing outside the No. 6 train station at 116th Street in East Harlem yesterday.
It is a crime abetted by the peculiar landscape of the underworld that is the subway system, by the anonymity of a crowded car where everybody is avoiding eye contact. And by the opportunity for a quick escape at the next stop, to disappear behind a pillar, into a tunnel, up an escalator.
An impromptu survey of riders during the morning rush yesterday found that, for many women who have experienced it, the worst part of the crime is the sense of helplessness. What is the right way to react to a humiliating, but not life-threatening, situation? Should you announce to an entire car of strangers that you have just been violated?
Most of the time, the women said, they seethe inwardly but say nothing.
Certainly Japan has its share of sex crimes, does it really have MORE than its share? I heard so many times over the years about the prevalence of chikan and other sexual assault in Japan, but is it really any more common than other countries, or is the belief in its exceptional commonality just another turn in the decades old racial and cultural stereotypes seen in American media since before World Was II?
As an aside, for an interesting take on chikan, check out the novella J (cover image above) by the nobel prize winning Oe Kenzaburo, in which the Jay Gatsby-ish title character apprentices himself to an elderly subway chikan
