Category: Net culture

Saaya Irie on YouTube

My quick letter to YouTube:

Dear Youtube:

It looks like dozens of videos of 12-year-old Japanese actress Saaya Irie are making their way around your site. At least one video was popular enough to appear on the top videos of Japanese YouTube search site, Qooqle Clippers. I watched the video, and it’s of Irie in a white bikini with a cameraman in the background telling her to pose. She is 12 years old making suggestive poses. It looks like something out of a Stephen King novel. One hopes that a nightmare sewer clown killed the cameraman moments after the video was shot.

As much as I like your service, videos of this nature are highly inappropriate and may be illegal under US law. In the off chance that you view one of the many videos on your site depicting Saaya Irie and conclude that she is engaging in nothing more risque than normal child modeling, let me assure you that she is intended for the Japanese softcore child porn consuming public, as has been documented (see links below). Often in Japan, child acts make a show of appealing to fellow youngsters while in fact courting older fans who then purchase “photobooks” that feature no nudity but are nevertheless softcore pornography. While tolerated in Japan, an American site should not in good conscience enable this behavior. Considering the extent to which you accommodate copyright holders to ensure that infringing content is deleted in good faith, I can only hope you will make the utmost effort to remove material that depicts child exploitation as well.

Regards,

Adamu

Links: 1 2

Don’t mess with 2ch: ZAKZAK, Sankei Sports report

A couple interesting articles on the building discontent with 2ch and its founder’s scofflaw ways. Debito has the articles full-text in Japanese only on his awesome new blog (such discrimination!) but I have decided to translate them (not verbatim but true to the original, as usual) for the discerning English-reading public. BTW, I’ll only have really nice things to say about 2ch in the future:

ZAKZAK!

2-Channel in a state of lawlessness – Attacks on individuals left on the site

A 30-year-old customer service worker recalls her painful memories:

hiroyuki 061105sha20061105001_MDE00430G061104T.jpg“I went back to my parents’ house after my home address was revealed on the Internet, but harassing phone calls kept coming into my office. Even my customers started to distrust me, thinking that I had someone (harassing me).”

The woman took the brunt of insults such as “ex-prostitute,” “too much plastic surgery,” and threats including “I’ll kill you,” and “Just die.”

There were rumors that “an old acquaintence in the same business posted the offending material around the time when (the woman) opened her own store,” but the “culprit” could not be identified. The woman filed a civil law suit holding message board’s moderator Hiroyuki Nishimura (age 29, pictured) responsible.

The Tokyo Regional Court ordered deletion of the posts and 1 million yen in compensation, but the court victory spawed a second round of attacks. On 2ch, there were several posts including “don’t get bent out of shape over such things,” “I’ll beat you to death,” and “Hurry up and hang yourself.” Her workplace’s web site was also flooded with similar posts, shutting it down. The woman took leave from work for a while due to the stress.

Nishimura’s reaction at the time was, “Since it wasn’t just a demand to delete the posts, but litigation to take money from the message board’s moderator, I think it happened because it provoked protest from regular users.”
Continue reading Don’t mess with 2ch: ZAKZAK, Sankei Sports report

Mr. Arai and his dream

Candidate for my new favorite Diet member now that Koizumi has decided to stop being awesome:

Etsuji Nii.jpg

Meet Etsuji Arai, LDP lower house member from Saitama’s 11th district. Doesn’t he look like a Japanese Napoleon Dynamite?

His web site address is “My Dream” – one of those English phrases that every Japanese person knows, but in Japanese rather than sounding lame, it absolutely reeks of conviction and sincerity.

As an LDP member, his basic stances should be pretty predictable, but he stands out in the following ways:

  • He remains one of the few LDP Diet members to have an official web site featuring an RSS feed (more on that later).
  • He’s a dentist.
  • He’s not the son of a former Diet member (but his older brother is “reformist” mayor of Fukaya City, Saitama, Iemitsu Arai.
  • He was elected to the Diet last year as one of the “Koizumi Children” to replace Dietman Ryuji Koizumi, who opposed the postal privatization bills.

    • Anyway, I just liked his picture really. He is apparently very active as a new Dietman, so let’s look forward to his continued success!

    Behind the Deletion of 30,000 Japanese videos from Youtube

    You may have heard that YouTube deleted 30,000 Japanese videos from YouTube on the request of the powerful music industry group JASRAC. Well, here’s an article that goes into more detail on the efforts to quash the online sharing of copyrighted content.

    Translated/paraphrased (translaphased?) from Nikkei (via 2ch):

    Behind the Scenes of the “Request to Delete 30,000 Files” from Youtube – The 2nd Act May be to “Eliminate Anonymity”

    Even if you did not receive complaints after putting another person’s music on your blog without permission in the 5 days following Oct 2, you should not rest at ease. That is because JASRAC’s monitoring team was constantly connected to American video posting site YouTube from 9 to 5 during that period. We have taken a look at the “Week of Strengthening Measures Against Youtube” during which 23 copyright-holding companies and groups launched a concentrated attack, making simultaneous requests for deletion.

    “30,000 videos in 5 days” the Limit

    JASRAC was responsible for about 10% of the 30,000 deleted videos. It’s a tiny number compared to the tens of thousands of videos per day on YouTube, but even regularly having a special person in charge of going around various sites on the Internet and monitoring copyright infringements, we were told in what was close to a scream, “Deletion procedures are an extremely minute process. Anything more than that is impossible.”

    On YouTube, there is a web site, which regular users cannot see, that is reserved for rightsholders for them to request that videos be deleted. They search for videos by keyword and place a check next to videos subject to the request. Once the deletion request is sent to YouTube, most of the time deletion is completed the next day.

    These requests seem simple, but they are rather work intensive. The page is of course in English. Since the name of the song used in the video is not displayed, there are times when it is impossible to judge whether the video actually constitutes a violation unless it is watched to the end. They cannot neglect to listen to even one part of the song.
    Continue reading Behind the Deletion of 30,000 Japanese videos from Youtube

    Right wing blog, 2-channel harassing Mainichi reporter of Korean ancestry for left-wing stances, speaking rudely about emperor

    Popular right wing nutjob blog murmur mumur, along with his buddies at 2ch, are furious over the behavior of a reporter for the Mainichi Shimbun, a third-generation zainichi (Japanese of Korean ancestry) named Park Chong Ju, at recent press conferences given by the Saga prefectural governor (UPDATE: For the record, murmur’s blog hasn’t commented on the emperor press conference specifically, but he probably will since Park is the subject of a “series” on the blog). In particular, people are angry over a 9/28 press conference given by the Saga prefectural governor announcing that the emperor would be attending a ocean-themed festival (that apparently already took place on 10/29) in the prefecture. Park was rude when questioning the necessity of spending millions of dollars to bring the emperor to the prefecture when govt finances are in trouble. He not only failed to use the proper honorifics when speaking of the emperor and his wife (calling the imperial couple “those two” rather than the formal 天皇皇后両陛下 “their majesties, the emperor and empress”), he questioned “the meaning” of an imperial visit, suggested that the money spent on the imperial visit could be used to help “the less fortunate,” and asked whether people would be forced to wave the Japanese flag, an act controversial among Japan’s left wing. Others were annoyed by his “interrogation” style of questioning, which is actually pretty common from what I’ve observed of reporters. It’s not pretty, but it’s also not something that’s usually publicized since press conferences like this have only recently been posted in full online and by their nature are not that popular to watch.

    You can watch the video on Youtube or take a look at the transcript. In Japanese only.

    To express his dissatisfaction with Park, Murmur mumurhas decided to use his favorite tactic and put up Park’s personal information, including mobile phone number, business card, and photographs, in an attempt to encourage readers to harass the man and contact his employers to complain about his performance. Consider it the online equivalent of black sound trucks outside a Communist Party picnic.

    Basically, Zainichi can do no good in the eyes of the Japanese right wing. Almost anything Koreans do sets them up for ridicule and scorn, or denouncements as spies in their midst. The mere knowledge that a well-known person has Korean blood makes them a member of the Korean conspiracy. Apparently this reporter has an activist streak who thinks of himself as a representative of the people (a more recent incident had the Saga governor informing Park “This isn’t a place for reporters to state their opinions!”). He’s written articles critical of revisionist textbooks and in favor of allowing more government participation for the zainichi population, in addition to his critical stance on using tax revenues on the emperor’s visit.

    As another commenter on 2ch pointed out, these stances make Park an easy straw man for those with a more conservative outlook (the majority of 2ch for starters). There have been several threads posted criticizing his manners, politics, and the definition of his own role as a reporter.

    I want to say stuff like this makes me feel good about the state of American political discourse, but of course we’re no better, what with our own countless examples of petty harassment.

    We still miss you Koizumi!

    Koizumi post PM stump speech 200610160287.jpg
    Koizumi has made his first public speeches since leaving office in support of LDP bids for office in two simultaneous by-elections to be held this Sunday in Kanagawa and Osaka Prefectures. I’m not all that interested in the races, since they both seem to be swinging LDP, it’s great to see the man’s face again.

    Unfortunately, it looks next to impossible to get a full version of this speech. TV stations seem to only have carried parts of it, the online news sites don’t seem to be carrying it, Koizumi doesn’t have his own website, and the LDP’s site hasn’t uploaded it yet, if they plan to at all. Japan does have something like America’s C-Span, but it’s an extremely minor channel that very few Japanese people receive.

    And yes I checked YouTube as well, but it wasn’t there. Thankfully I found some sweet footage while I was looking:

  • A Koizumi anime outlining some highlights of his administration, such as his style in selecting cabinet members and bringing his own boxed lunch to the historical summit meeting with Kim Jong Il – even Abe looks interesting when animated!
  • A TV clip reporting on a magazine article in Shukan Post that Koizumi moved out of the PM’s official residence the next day after the LDP presidential election, stayed in a 520k yen per night hotel room, only to move into a meager 50k yen/night room immediately after stepping down as PM. He brought dozens of classical music CDs with him, said he’d take a year to “recharge” and is enjoying a “leisurely retirement.” Meanwhile, Yoshiro Mori, Koizumi’s predecessor, has increased his political wheeling and dealing and is rumored to have a great influence on Abe. Mori had pledged to step down as his party faction’s chairman when Koizumi left, but apparently since Abe will do whatever he says, leading the faction is just too “fun” to quit. Despite Abe’s pledge to go it alone when deciding on a cabinet, Mori leaked to the press that he had a sit-down with Abe to discuss his new administration. The rumors are
  • And last but not least, a great retrospective of what made Koizumi rock – the photo ops. Watch closely to see Koizumi in a Guardian Angels uniform, with beret!

    • I know you’re busy, Mr. Abe, but…

    Update your website!!!!

    abe_top.jpg

    (As of the evening of Oct 2, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s website still indicated that he was still Chief Cabinet Secretary and was still trying to use some sort of DOS prompt to “./configure –with-passion=/home/abe/blood”. Blood?)

    Hopefully his people are just too busy gearing up to make Abe the first world leader to offer a regular podcast… or a mixi profile?

    Google coming around

    You might remember that I railed on Google’s products for being hard to use in Japan.

    Well, two of my four beefs seem to be resolved. Tokyo weather is mostly accurate nowadays, and Google Calendar now sends properly-encoded notifications to Japanese mobile phones.

    Now we just need stock quotes and mobile browser support, and I can almost consolidate my web services! (Except, of course, for del.icio.us and rememberthemilk.com and my bank accounts and…)