Asiajin

Fuji Television (Fuji TV), a Tokyo key station who has nationwide network, announced their coming Spring drama program which features Twitter.

The drama “Sunao ni Narenakute” [J], which directly means “I cannot be honest.” in English, but it is also the same as the translation of Chicago’s song “Hard to Say I’m Sorry“.

The synopsis [J] says,

Five young guys and girls, who are unsure that they are still in their youth or not, are feeling like nowhere to go. On Twitter, where people post their emotions and actions on the web in short 140 letters message(tweets), where others registered(followed) to watch those tweets, they become to know each other, make real friendship.

The screenwriter Eriko Kitagawa, known by her several successful TV drama series, posted her Ameba Now(Twitter clone by Cyber Agent boasts thousand of celebrities blogs) 3 weeks ago in a reply to other actress,

“Hi, how are you? Will not this message reach you? I don’t understand both Twitter and Ameba Now.” [J]

She got advices from her fans on her Ameba Now, and now stated,

Thank you for your avalanche of comments. I’m feeling my heartbeat speeding up (by microblog’s speed) so for now, or maybe for ever, I will only use blog. Yes, now I understand Twitter and Ameba Now completely, with these practices and researches.
[J]

If scriptwriter did not know Twitter, the idea to put “Twitter” on just another young idols drama might come from a producer, or a sponsor. Anyway, Twitter now has a power to drive them to add it on prime time TV even without understanding what it is.

Tags: Japan, Trend by Akky Akimoto
No Comments »

News on the latter half of January 2010 which we did not write as a dedicated article. Part 1 is here.

Referred pages are all in Japanese, unless otherwise stated.

• METI Lottery In Exchange For Used Cellphone Campaign Collaborates Hatsune Miku
• Chinese Guy In Saitama Arrested By Providing Proxy Servers For Chinese Gamers To Play (and earn by RMT) Japanese Online Game
• Harlequin Novels On Nintendo DS
• Kobe-based sports tabloid Daily Sports to start publishing e-edition.
• “Onsei Ninshiki Fusen ST”, iPhone App to Memo by speech-recognition
• Mekiki’s Patent Lawsuits Against Facebook Explained By American Lawfirm
• Sekai Camera’s Tonchi Dot and 5 companies Runs St. Valentein Day’s AR Event at Shibuya
• KDDI says 10 million cellphone sale this fiscal year will be difficult, at 3Q report
• Transcosmos Sells DART Business To Google, Lawsuit To Be Dissolved
• Twitter Japanese Mobile Site Adds Cellphone-mail-to-tweet function
• Nifty Lanches Cloud Service
• Sending Thousands of Origami Crane to Haiti Project On Mixi Causes controversy on Japanese web
• Over 200km Freekick Machine
• Kakaku.com launches Android app
• Two Fishing Boats In Tokyo Bay Starts To Tweet 1 2
• Mobage Open Platform begins, 92 apps by 40 companies at the launch day
• TV Tokyo’s Documentary Went Too Far On Taking Sony Walkman’s (one month) Takeover Against iPod
• Digital Garage Makes Another Investment To Twitter
• Dentsu purchases Innovation Interactive [English]
• University of Tokyo associate professor complained on Google Japan’s Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) applied to students during the recruitment
• Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications starts the internet contents self-rating experiment
• January Forbes Asia Cover Features Gree Yoshikazu Tanaka
• A blogger counts how many common apps on Mixi Appli and Mobage Appli platforms. 36 out of 86 Mobage Apps are also on Mixi
• CyberAgent CEO admitted (their Twitter Clone) Failed to investors, but he has not given up
• Softbank Continues Free iPhone 3GS Plan
• KDDI, Hakuhodo DY Media Partners and Hokkaido Broadcasting To Hold An AR Event At Sapporo Yukimatsuri
• Docomo President Shows Interest In iPad At 3Q Fiscal Report Meeting
• Thanko’s 80 ports USB Charger
• A new Japanese font Kazuraki fully-proportional in both writing directions
• Asahi writes about Twitter user reports from Stopped Shinkansen train

Please let us know if you think we should write details on any news above.

Tags: Japan by Akky Akimoto
1 Comment »

Real time speech translation is the hot topic in last few days because of Google’s speech-to-speech translation development news and our reported Japanese government experiment. However, translation among human languages seems far behind Canis language translation, you can tell if you are a native dog language speaker (unfortunately I am not).

BowLingual, Dog-to-human language translator which got The 2002 Ig Nobel Peace Prize, is planned to be released for iPhone in summer 2010, Tokyo-based Index Corporation announced [J].

The latest BowLingual will have Twitter support, by which dog owners can send what their puppy says to the world directly on iPhone. The owner can also send dog’s photo and their comments, which is supposed to make dog owners networking.

BowLingual was bundled to one model of Vodaphone cellphone in 2003 (Ketai Watch) [J], but did not go on another Japanese cellphones at that time.

Tags: Japan, Joke by Akky Akimoto
4 Comments »

Japan’s legendary reality television show comes back with heavy usage of Twitter.

Denpa Shonen 2010 (Denpa Shonen = Radio-Wave Boy), a successor program of the Susume Denpa Shonen, which started in 1992, is running their new program under the same producer (Producer T).

The program name is “Denpa Shonen 2010 – Hito-wa Tsubuyaki Dakede Ikite Ikeruka?” [J]. The subtitle means “Can people live on Twitter alone?”.

It started on January 25th and will continue for 2 months. On the game, two commanders direct two pair of comedians to drive around Japan, to take points to win under some rules.

All commands and communications should be done by Twitter. This scene is when one pair gets the next command on Twitter.

The rule of the game, which is subject to change, is posted here [J]. The basic rules are,

• You lose if you violate traffic laws.
• Cover all living expenses by Twitter.
• No cash is allowed to have.
• The team gets more points win.

Additional rules provides how to get points. For example, the first one to be able to take a photo of Toyota dealer in the directed city acquires 500 points. (Toyota provides 2 corolla as a main sponsor)

There are more and more rules added every day to avoid possible problems, such like not recording copyrighted music as background, because broadcasting will be restricted by them, etc.

Hashtag #denpa2010 seems to be used a lot by those directors, competitors and TV watchers.

See Also:

Reality Television on Wikipedia

Susunu Denpa Shonen (sequel of the first one) on English Wikipedia

Tags: Japan by Akky Akimoto
2 Comments »

Suddenly in Japan, small shop owners start thinking Twitter as a guerilla marketing tool. Ashton Kutcher could have eaten over $40,000 worth sushi in Tokyo if he knew it.

The first one was a board game shop Sugorokuya(@sugorokuya) [J] at Koenji of west Tokyo, which offered “discount by number of your Twitter followers” campaign [J] from January 25th.

That was rapidly spread among Japanese Twitter users. Within a week, at least three popular blogger/Twitter users, who are followed by over 100,000, visited the shop, @akiyan (report), @taguchi of 100shiki and @kotoripiyopiyo of Gizmodo Japan.

All of those big names, however, used very small chunk of their massive followers power. On their report, all of them got one inexpensive game for free, and purchased another. Instead they wrote a report on their blog and all of them were in hot topics.

They could have bought $2000 boardgames, but the shop’s condition is to tweet about the purchase. So person who already took fame may not want to dump their reputations. It seems working so far.

Their discount will last until February 7th, unless their campaign budget exhausts (this condition was added by advises on reply tweets).

The second follower is a sushi restaurant Saisho in Shinagawa, Tokyo.

On their twitter, “discount by number of your followers” day was announced, which was today February 4th.

There are some really popular Twitter users appeared,

• ksorano – Japanese Amanda Congdon (not recorded but live streaming) (10,943 followers)
• Hamachiya2 – individual web security enlightener (9,579)
• otsune – well known “web watcher” (8,201)
• yteppei – tech blogger (116,810)
• gothedistance – blogger (3,123). his report
• kansai_takako – Retweeter (4,176)

and more.

Inside of the sushi restaurant was broadcasted both on Ustream and TwitCasting which was just released yesterday. Total viewers of them passed 1,000, though it was not known who would show up.

There is a hotel offering the same “number of followers” discount in Mie prefecture. Takoyaki restaurant in Kagoshima prefecture announced “1/10 of your followers discount”.

Tags: Japan, Trend by Akky Akimoto
2 Comments »