On November 28th at Kanazawa city, Ishikawa prefecture, Japan there was a mayor election. The two leading candidates, incumbent Tamotsu Yamade [J], 79, and Yukiyoshi Yamano [J], 48, competed closely, gained 56,840 and 58,204 votes respectively. Only 1,364 difference.

The things causing a fuss is, the young winner Yamano's team reportedly had been using Twitter during the campaign period, which violates the Japan's public office electian law which bans all “documents and drawings” distribution are prohibited.

According to Mainichi, not Yamano himself did not update his Twitter but his secretary and the chief of internet strategy, who runs IT company, made many tweets with attaching candidate's photo like addressing.

The election committee was said to caution Yamano's office more than 3 times, and also informed Ishikawa prefecture police, but the police did not make caution. A topsider of the police commented that it was difficult to prosecute as lifting of the Internet ban is in recent trend.

The chief of internet strategy said that he understood that it was illegal, but thinks okay unless the result of the election gets revoked.

via Mainichi

See Also:

Japan’s Internet-Banned Election Probed By Voice Over Twitter

Japan Kicks Off Twitter-Free Election Campaign - TIME

Tags: Japan by Akky Akimoto
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Zynga Japan released its flagship social game "FarmVille" in Japan under the name "ファームビレッジ(FarmVillage)" on December 1. Why is it Village not Ville? According to Zynga Japan general manager Shintaro Yamada's tweet [J], "Because the pronunciation of FarmVille and Biru(Building in Japanese, from English) are the same in Japanese and will confuse people".

SoftBank financed Zynga Japan. And the FarmVillage was released on SNS "Mixi" of the biggest in Japan.

SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son(Radish), Zynga Japan CEO Robert Goldberg(Eggplant) and mixi CEO Kenji Kasahara(Carrot)
Another photo from Son's tweet

FarmVillage is a social game for mobile. Goldberg said "Social game for PC is not yet mainstream in Japan" at the press conference.

FarmVillage's top page.

The duck explains the tutorial.

There is no avatar.

This is my farm. It's considerably different from FarmVille.

The design of farm products are also original. And the duck wears the business suit.

It's necessary to manage energy. So it rather resembles FrontierVille and CityVille.

The duck wears schoolgirl's uniform!

The area of the farm will broaden when you raise the level.

Of course, the present for friends function got implemented, too.

FarmVillage looks like the new game which is totally different from the FarmVille and FarmVille iPhone version. The operation has been optimized to the Japanese mobile. This is "only in Japan".

Clear images are here (Zynga Japan's web site) [J]
http://www.zynga.co.jp/service/farmvillage.html

Tags: Japan by Chiho Komoriya
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Halls Eater is a free iPhone/iPad app to promote Halls candy. The app is developed by Kamakura-based Kayac Inc (Asiajin). The app seems English/Japanese bilingual.

You can move your two fingers like your lips biting the virtual candy given by one of four beautiful Japanese talents.

Participating Talent (in order of appearance in app)

・ Rei Kawashima (Miss Young Magazine 2010):
Say “Ahhh,” fed by this lovely-dovey babe.
・ Izumi Hinata (Readers’ Special Award 2010):
Say “Ahhh,” fed by this naughty lovely.
・ Haruka Tachibana (Judges’ Special Award 2010):
Say “Ahhh,” fed by this familiar Tsundere*.
・ Fumika Shimizu (Miss Shukan Shonen Magazine 2010):
Say “Ahhh,” fed by this vivacious junior fellow.

*Tsundere: Describes a person who is initially cold and hostile, gradually warms over time.

It should be easy to know how it works by watching this amazing fan-made movie,

Tags: Japan, Joke by Akky Akimoto
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Before smartphone, there were feature phone applications. Java MIDP is one of the application environment used on Softbank/Wilcom/KDDI au in Japan, and also on Motorola feature phone, etc. Android is known to use Java-derived environment. Google made different virtual machine Dalvik with avoiding using Sun's(and now Oracle's) Java, but Java/CLDC profile MIDP is authentic standard which you could develop cellphon applications.

Because of its long history, there are tons of MIDP applications exist on those cellphone. MIDP is very limited in comparison with Java for regular PCs, but it was well chosen for the limited cellphone environment.

Helped both by hardware and software improvement, a Japanese programmer Yukoba, who says himself as "Virtual machines on JavaScript and ActionScript otaku", released this "Java MIDP implementation on HTML5 and Flash" at Firefox Developers Conference 2010 in November, where jQuery developer John Resig attended.

His compiler generates JavaScript from MIDP Java class files, so the applications written for feature phone can be run on HTML5 browsers - Firefox. He also developed a compiler to ActionScript, to run it on Internet Explorer 8.

He also launched a showcase-site where you may play about 20 games and utilities made on Java MIDP.

He seems to be working on improvement of the emulator now. As I said above, there are a lot of MIDP application resources in Japan so it is good to run them on the modern web browsers.

Tags: Japan, Technology by Akky Akimoto
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Japanese cellphone is the birthplace of emoji - emoticon as a single letter. Now they are usable outside of Japan on Gmail and iPhone. By Google's and others effort, October 11, 2010, they were included in the international standard, Unicode version 6.0. So now those pictogram are supposed to be used for communication among anyone using Unicode capable computers.

However, on legacy system, i.e. Japanese cellphone, three carriers adopted emoji separately, left some incompatibilities. A Japanese blogger Nakamura001 verified a case which sometimes had been rumored, musical note emoticon gets unintended conversion to a poop character.

He tested if it really happens, and if so under what situation. The one combination he found was sending single note emoji from Docomo cellphone,

will be converted to poop on Gmail on iPhone,

As you see, the second letter, three notes on Docomo, was also changed into a flower letter. The third one, a musical note in regular letter (not a new emoji) stays the same.

Some emoji before Unicode standard is not compatible among carriers, and there are gateways by Softbank Mobile and/or Gmail to take care of converting them, it looks like a mapping bug.

Japanese use musical note letter a lot in casual mail, to show cheeriness emotion. Nakamura001 wrote there could be many bad conversion happened. For example,

"I love you(poop)"
"Thank you(poop)"
"You can do it(poop)"
"Yummy Curry(poop)"

Tags: Japan, Joke by Akky Akimoto
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