Global Voices Online

With “Love Japan“, Rakuten Inc. has enabled personal donations to politicians via credit card, a first in Japan. Hit Okano [ja] ponders about the relationship between the amount of donated money and its influence on politicians, while blogger Satotaku [ja] refers to U.S. President Obama's success with online contributions and expects other services to follow.

Lawyer and blogger raymiyatake expresses his doubts [ja] over the election of Japanese diplomat Yukiya Amano as director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). First, he says, Amano was supported by only 23 nations out of 35. Second, he points out the difficult situation that the Agency is dealing with, at present, and the “unfairness” of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which should be applied also to the five members already recognized as possessing nuclear power. Lastly, he suggests that instead of promoting a “pacific use” of nuclear energy, this should be replaced with clean energy sources (such as the geothermal or the aeolian ones).

This year is Mobile Suit Gundam's 30th birthday.
While a giant statue of the robot stands in Odaiba's park (in the Tokyo bay area), in a theatre of northern Tokyo, blogger/actress Rie Takahashi [ja] and her crew pay tribute to the animated television series in stage play Robot.

Ian Wright at Japanian analyzes the implications of the diminishing population in Japan from an economic, political, and military point of view.

Astronaut Koichi Wakata on the International Space Station posted some photographs, including one of Sarychev Volcano while it was erupting (Also part of NASA's Image of the Day Gallery), and a tanka poem: “My home planet enwrapped / The blue light of the atmosphere shines”.

Esu-kei remembers [ja] the popular video game Moonwalker featuring the animated version of Michael Jackson. The object of the action game by Sega is to score points destroying the bad guys with moondust and choreographic kicks. When the enemies are all beaten, the children are safe.

“You can't get really the details of the Iran election protests from the Japanese newspapers and TV stations, but the situation is updated by the minute on Twitter.” - Hiroto Kobayashi set up iranelection, a Digg-style news aggregator specifically for this topic, where users are submitting links to content in any language with a short intro in Japanese.

Takeshi Yamaya links to 2ch Kan Riben (2ch看日本), a blog that posts Chinese translations of interesting threads from the Japanese Internet forum 2channel. He appreciates the thoughtful observations made by their commenters.

Gompagompagompa tells about his last trip in Iran, before the elections. The blogger describes Iranians as an extremely kind and hospitable people and explains how he decided to write this post to let Japanese people know that “Iran” is not equal to “terrorism”.