Global Voices Online

Pink Tentacle has translated into English all of the “Top 60 Japanese words/phrases of 2009″, released by publisher Jiyu Kokuminsha: Included are plenty of references to Japan’s recent political shake-up, the ailing economy, and the blurring of traditional gender roles.

Anpontan's post about the word “obamu” (オバむ) , a Japanese word play that's a verb form of “Obama”, was picked up by James Fallows at the Atlantic and is making its way across the blogosphere, although very few Japanese people actually seem to have heard of the word, as Daniel Krieger at cnngo reports.

The Kirai blog describes what happened at his company after an employee caught a case of H1N1: “Notice that from his perspective, he is NOT a victim, he is the culprit of having caused so much trouble to the company: because he couldn’t work for one week and we had to wear a mask and worry about our health.“

Ed Jacob posted an English translation of an article “about how there was pretty much no garbage in Japan’s Edo Period because almost everything got recycled“.

Hideki Sakamoto (坂本 英樹)comments on the topic of the week: the bizarre results of the predictive search function of some Japanese search engines.
“If you enter the word otto (夫,　husband) in the Google search bar, and then press space, a few phrases are shown. But at the head of the list is the keyword 夫死んでほしい (I want my husband dead), with 674,000 hits […].”
Though, the most searched one is 夫嫌い (otto kirai, I hate my husband), with 2,190,000 hits.
Besides, according to blogger Sakamoto, the first two keywords to be `suggested` after otto in the Yahoo Japan search bar are 浮気　(uwaki, infidelity) and 小遣い平均 (kozukai heikin, average pocket money).

Naoki Motoyama (本山直樹), guest professor at Tokyo University of Agriculture, addresses [ja] a post to Tatsuya Ichihashi　（市橋達也）, the alleged murderer of Lindsay Hawker captured on Tuesday after having been on the run for almost two years.
The blogger, who used to belong to the same karate club at Chiba School of Horticulture as Ichihashi, remembers one of the last conversations they had and invites him to apologize to the victim`s family and pay for his crime.

The Kininaruu blog is enthusiastic about Manga no Shinbun ('Manga Newspaper'), a new Japanese website that publishes news stories as manga illustrations. Boo-hee thinks it's a good medium in a world overflowing with information [ja]. Hiroshi Hara posted an image of a similar attempt in his high school years.

Blogger Satonao tells [ja] about him having dinner with Prime Minister Hatoyama and other politicians in a restaurant of Tokyo on Sept. 30.
On that occasion, he could explain Mr. Hatoyama what Twitter is and exchange a few words on the condition of social media in Japan.
Here are some of Satonao`s tweets [ja] during the dinner.

Yama explains [ja] in detail the architecture of Todaiji temple [ja] (東大寺) in Nara and of its Great Buddha Hall (大仏殿 Daibutsuden), the largest wooden building in the world. Pictures of the temple complex are also provided.