Asiajin

On Friday, Japan’s very own video portal and geek paradise Nico Nico Douga announced a partnership with this country’s most influential web site, Yahoo! Japan.

First, Nico Nico decided to expand its “ichiba” (market place) offering by adding a Yahoo! Shopping button beneath all of its videos. Users can alternatively click on an Amazon button to see merchandise which is somehow related to the videos they are watching. Moreover, it is possible to download music and ringtones.

Picture: New Yahoo! Shopping button

Picture: Search results from Yahoo! Shooping

It is about time Nico Nico Douga made a move. While the site is wildly popular especially in the otaku community, Dwango (Nico Nico Douga’s parent company) is said to lose around 100 million Yen a month due to high server and other costs.

Further moves announced

Also, Yahoo! Japan now integrates videos from Nico Nico into its search index (under the video tab). This is the first time Nico Nico shares information with outside parties. Users still need to login in order to actually view the material though.

As a third result of the collaboration, it is planned that users owning a Yahoo! Japan ID can soon login to Nico Nico without registering to the video service (probably by OpenID).

If this collaboration doesn’t help Nico Nico to further expand its user base and sales, I don’t know what will.

Tags: Japan, News, Video by serkantoto
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Recently a dangerous method of commiting suicide became a phenomenon in Japan. The method involves using a bottle of cleaner and bath salts to create lethal hydrogen sulfide gas.

This method was spread through the notorious ‘2ch’ bulletin board system. It is assumed someone explained the suicide method on some board, and many people copied and pasted it into many other boards.

This suicide method endangers family members and ambulance team because large amount of hydrogen sulfide gas are generated and the gas will last for hours.

The Products needed can be easily obtained at local drugstores. It’s obviously a serious threat to public safety. It is really sad that the Internet community kills people.

If you search a name of bath salts at Google, Google suggests ’suicide’ as a related keyword. Amazon recommends a ‘complete suicide handbook’ (完全自殺マニュアル) for bath salts.

Some people say the major coverage of mass-media worsens the situation. Historically, there were many suicidal phenomena in Japan. The media should be really careful when covering suicide incidents.

In the 18th century, Chikamatsu Monzaemon wrote a play called ‘Sonezaki Shinju’. The play had generated a big shinju (double suicide) boom in Edo (later Tokyo).

Around 2000, there was a phenomenon which involved people committing suicide with coal briquettes. They burned briquettes inside a small room or a car to generate carbon monoxide. This method was also spread through the Internet and mass-media. Sometimes people commit suicide with people they met in Internet communities focused on suicide. This is called ‘Net shinju’ (ネット心中).

A partial list of hydrogen sulfide suicidal incidents:
* 2007 July, a college student killed himself. His mother and brother died by gas.
* Feb. 29th, a grad school student killed himself. His mother and grandmother were hospitalized.
* March 12th, a highschool student killed himself. His mother died by gas.
* March 27th, a part-time worker killed himself. His family member were hospitalized.
* April 24th, a junior highschool student killed herself. 20 people living in the apartment were hospitalized, a woman is in serious condition. 50 are evacuated from the apartment.

See also:

• Asahi.com article: Girl uses hydrogen sulfide in suspected suicide; dozens sick 

Tags: Japan, News by shunichi arai
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We found it. Anyone can switch your twitter to Japanese menu (and advertising!) from [Settings]->[Account tab]->[Language drop down]-[Japanese]. Or if your browser’s language settings precedes Japanese, you will see Japanese interface on twitter.com

Here you are,

At top of the sidebar, you can see an ad box, which is planned to be backported to English version.

The JP domain - twitter.jp -, which we expected a Japanese version, is merely forwarding to twitter.com . Whether it is owned by twitter or not is unknown. (confirmed that twitter Inc. owns twitter.jp [J])

Top page before login also can be switched to Japanese,

What kind of ads?

Now I’m seeing following ads on Japanese twitter.

• Toyota
• en-Japan (outplacement service company)
• two twitter guidebooks (kind of “twitter for dummies” books)
• twitter API guidebook

Toyota’s ad takes you to the page which encourages you to follow their portal Gazoo.com.

See Also:

twitter Japan launched … where?

Press Conference on Ustream [Live]

[Update]

Press Rrelease by Digital Garage [J]

Official twitter blog (English) mentioned

Digital Garage founder Joi Ito’s blog

Tags: Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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Nikkei Shimbun wrote that twitter, Inc. (San Francisco, California) starts its Japanese localized version on 23rd (already today in Japan, JST = Japan Standard Time).

Digital Garage has been working on this localization. Japanese tweets (messages on twitter) are gaining about 20 % of all twitter users, and its interface are expected to be translated for expanding to regular internet users.

This Japanese version is said to have advertisement from beginning, hoping to be profitable. This advertisement method is planned to be exported back to original English version, as the news said.

twitter’s Japan domain, http://twitter.jp/ is still showing “not found” error page then redirected to English version. We will report when we found it on.

[Updated] we’ve found it.

via Nikkei Net

See Also:

Twitter Japan dev team showed some plans

Tags: Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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According to Mainichi, for new citizen judge system planning to be introduced in May 2009, Japanese supreme court developed guidance that what kind of jobs are excusable to decline jury duty summons.

The jobs list, having over 10 jobs and situations as initial draft, includes System Engineer (often said “SE”, a bit different from the original meaning. SE is now a Japanese IT industry parlance means senior software engineer) because “they need to be dispatched for emergency in information-system trouble”.

A bill for the citizen judge system states refusal of duty is only permitted when selected citizen are: over 70 years old, student, severely ill, in charge of caring relatives and minors living together, or attending causes brutal mental and/or economical loss.

See Also:

Face of the lay judge system - The Japan Times Online

Tags: Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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Nifty Laboratory, a marketing research section of Nifty, which owns one of the biggest ISP in Japan @nifty, also provides big blog hosting service Cocolog, announced its new splog(spam blog) filtering technology combining several different splog finder methods.

They also applied the filter to Japanese blog articles, sampled 100,000 for each month from their 450 million article archives (which they claim 90 % of Japanese blog articles). The result is, averagely 40% of blog entries are spam in Japanese blogosphere.

Japanese blogosphere is known the biggest in the world by numbers, as reported often on Technorati’s quarterly State of the Blogosphere report.

Tags: Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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Drecom announced that their board had decided business alliance with, and will raise 900 million yen shares to Rakuten, Japan’s top E-Commerce firm.

Drecom, which is a blog system vendor for small and mid sized companies, also doing web services. Rakuten will be the second shareholder of Drecom with 20.02% stocks, following to the founder/CEO Hiroyuki Naitoh’s 43.2%

Drecom is supposed to spend 600 to 700 million yen out of earning 900 million for repayment of debt.

via BBWatch

See also:

Drecom’s Release [pdf]

Rakuten: online shopping monopoly | Asiajin

Drecom: next scandal or …?

Tags: Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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Ishinokoe (means “voice of stone”) K.K. announced their newly designed tombstone series “Kuyou no mado” (”commemoration windows”), which has QR Code (Japanese 2D bar code) inside.

This QR Code, enhanced version “Design QR Code”, developed and trademarked by IT Design, can have small extra images in the code, which does not prevent proper code scanning. In this case, the QR Code has the word “Kuyou no mado” at the center.

Visitors of the graveyard will be able to take a picture of the QR Code by cellphone, to access to the deceased person’s memorable photos and profiles.

The site is also planned to have a log feature that records who visits when, then families and relatives can share the history in future, as they said. They are also developing a plan to provide virtual grave visiting by celler phone for young generation’s convenience.

I am sure that this release hits also Japanese media, as this concept is weird even for Japanese people, however, this product also shows that how QR Code are commoditized in Japan. They are now flooding over typical usage on train ads, business cards and coupon flyers.

via Impress K-tai Watch

See Also:

Mobile barcodes:Huge success in Japan so far. | Asiajin

Tags: Cellular Phone, Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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Trendmicro Japan announced that some of their website pages are found to be modified from March 9th to 12th. Those hacked pages had a virus by which visitors could have got on their PC.

Their infected page list contains both Japanese and English pages about some virus information, but we could not find the counterpart English announce on Trendmicro US page.

Trendmicro’s “Virus Buster” shares Japan’s anti-virus software market with Symantec and Source-Next. (Symantec: 32%, Trendmicro: 26.9%, Source-Next: 25.8% by *)

[Update]

Nikkei ITPro reported that Trendmicro confirmed the attack was caused by SQL injection. Japanese security company LAC warns that hack attempts to Japanese websites using ASP(Active Server Pages) are observed.

See also:

Trendmicro’s announce (only in Japan page)

(*) BCN Ranking : Security package market share report 2007-10-09 [J]

Tags: Japan, News by Akky Akimoto
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The Osaka prefectural police is investigating ‘Orben‘, a public company, for securities fraud. Orben acquired 16 companies in two years from 2004. Orben executives allegedly reported false income and revenue for their subsidiaries. Supposedly, owners of Orben had sold their stocks at very high prices.

An industry expert says Orben is well known for Yakuza involvement.

Daisuke Enomoto, Ex-Livedoor executive, was allegedly involved in the plot. Livedoor is one of the earliest Internet company in Japan, and was accused with securities fraud. Livedoor scandal was the biggest news in the history of the Japanese Internet industry.

See Also: (in English)

1. A Wikipedia article about Livedoor
2. Orben stock quote

Tags: Company, Japan, News by shunichi arai
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