Chris Salzberg
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3 March 2009
Japan: To you who will graduate this year
Spring is fast approaching, and in Japan that means two things: the fall of cherry blossoms and the start of the new school year, which coincides with last year's graduates joining the workforce. One blogger and university professor posted a letter to a student which struck a drew a huge reaction among Japanese bloggers. The first line of the letter begins, "To you who will graduate this year"...
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1 March 2009
Japan
Japanese blogger id:eliya, who is doing economics research abroad, writes that he is often asked by colleagues why Japanese work so hard [ja]. Referring to economics professor Masami Nomura's book, “Employment Instability” (雇用不安) [ja], he explains that Japanese work hard basically because the penalty for being fired from your job is very high: Japanese corporations, for example, are unlikely to hire a worker who has already been fired from another job mid-career.
27 February 2009
Japan: Bloggers on the Nakagawa affair
Over a week has passed since now-infamous footage of Japan's former finance minister Shōichi Nakagawa stumbling through a 20 minute speech at the G7 meeting in Rome made world headlines and hit the top of YouTube charts. In this post I feature a handful of responses to the speech by Japanese bloggers.
14 February 2009
Japan: Municipal opposition to Street View
Demands by municipal assemblies and bar associations across Japan that Google revise [ja] or even halt altogether its new Street View service, rolled out in 12 Japanese cities late last summer to mixed reactions, have triggered renewed debate on issues of privacy and the limits of public space. The latest moves by municipal governments come on the heels of demands by a group of Japanese lawyers and professors, who petitioned Google in mid-December to retract its service.
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13 February 2009
Japan
Motohiko Tokuriki at Tokuriki.com posts a long discussion [ja] of the recent PayPerPost incident at Google Japan. Tokuriki writes that while he does not agree with the PayPerPost approach, there is nonetheless a distinction to be made between the PayPerPost strategy in which funding is openly acknowledged, and the strategy in which it is not; this case came to light precisely because it was mentioned in posts that the bloggers in question were participating in a CyberBuzz campaign.
12 February 2009
Japan
Blogger Hiromitsu Takagi posts a transcript [ja] of a recent open meeting [ja] organized by the Tokyo metropolitan government about Google's Street View service, introduced in major Japanese cities last summer. Google was invited to the meeting and reportedly told that, in future cases, the company should give advance notification [ja] before photographing neighbourhoods. Renewed demands to outright stop the service altogether have been mounted in recent months by citizen groups, lawyers, professors and journalists.
I have just had some news about Iaiá, from Alcinéia. She did another jump at...