Sadakazu Tanigaki (official site) [J], the president of Liberal Democratic Party(LDP), which is a political party who had dominated Japanese politics for half an century since the mid-1950s and got debacle at last national election against Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), started Twitter (@Tanigaki_S), with taking back his former remarks that he would never use Twitter in January. [J]

So far, he tweeted 12 messages in four days, most of which are long, close to 140 limit, with no replies(@). He quickly got about 30,000 followers but only follows 44, most of them are LDP represents.

But one tweet [J] is to thank to suggestions to follow his opponent DPJ’s head prime minister Yukio Hatoyama (@hatoyamayukio, and he followed Hatoyama’s account. @hatoyamayukio has about 540,000 followers, which is ranked 2nd in Japanese only behind everyone’s hero @Gachapin.

As we reported on the beginning of this year, LDP’s head, Japan’s prime minister has been tweeting for 4 months now. We may see tweet-to-tweet debates between two big party leaders soon.

Tags: Japan, Person by Akky Akimoto
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A fishermen’s cooperative[J] in Yokosuka, a Tokyo suburb known for having a U.S. fleet activities, launched a fish and seafood e-commerce site that sells what have been caught in Tokyo Bay in the morning of the day. Fishermen on boats take pictures of their fishing results and put them on the website with retail prices before coming back to their home port.

Fishermen’s benefit: no fish broker nor auction market process is required.
Buyers’ benefit: fish and seafood you’ve ordered on the website before 9am will be delivered to your home within the same day. (It is expected to be delivered within 12 hours from being caught by fishermen to a consumer’s kitchen.)   C.O.D. available.

Fishermen post snapshots and short movies of the morning’s recommendations from boats with their cellphone handsets.

Fuud Corporation[J], a Tokyo’s tech start-up specializing in developing system solutions supporting agricultural and fishery business, assists the cooperative to develop the system.

Tags: Japan, New Service, News by Masaru IKEDA
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NKB[J], the transit ad agency running well-known restaurant guide Gourmet Navigator(Gournavi) on the web, is now discussing in-subway 1-seg TV service (refer to these stories about 1-seg) with Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications for obtaining a TV station license.   The company expects the service will be provided in subway trains running, at subway stations and underground shopping malls, and it keeps passengers update with news, weather, regional event information and delays of train’s arrivals.

The ministry expects the service will eliminate information dead zones in undergrounds where radio signals cannot reach, and it may also contribute to preventing people from panic and fear when a natural disaster hit our city and everyone’s cellphone is out of service.

The company expects test operation to be completed in this year, and its official service will be released next year if everything goes well.

Tags: Cellular Phone, Japan, New Service, News by Masaru IKEDA
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Shoko Nakagawa (aka Shokotan), one of the most successful Japanese celebrity bloggers, finally started Twitter (@shokonakagawa) on February 24th with a tweet “I begin to chirp…” [J].

This could have been a milestone for Japanese Twitter to show the centre of the celebrity blogging moving from regular blog to microblog. However, after posting 15 tweets sparsely in 2 months, she posted that she “gave up doing both blog and Twitter” [J].

Her blogging style, which make her very unique among celebrities her early days to become popular, is to post a lot of one line entries and/or photos taken by her cellphone, sometimes makes 50 posts per day. You may see those numbers on the left sidebar’s monthly archives. Her style made a lot of followers of Japanese celebrity bloggers.

In the end, what she did on blog platforms (she has been switched her blog hosting twice) is “microblogging on blog”, and if so, she could not find any advantage on Twitter, which does not have built-in photo upload/show features and the Japanese cellphone version of which has room to be improved.

CyberAgent‘s Ameba blog, which holds over thousand celebrity bloggers including Shokotan, has been running its own Twitter clone Ameba Now, to hope to keep their bloggers within the Ameba sites. And this incident may be a hint that they can lean on and extend their clone, as Twitter will not be able to enhance its functionalities only for Japanese celebrity market.

Tags: Japan, Person by Akky Akimoto
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