The video below has been making the email rounds recently, and it certainly doesn’t look like a fun commute. At any rate, I think the train line itself is pretty easy to identify. I think I know which station it is based on some cues in the video, but I’m not saying what I think just yet.
I’ll write down what I think with some way to timestamp it. Tokyo densha otakus, what station do you think is in that video and why?
Shame on us for not reporting this a bit sooner, but Japan’s Prime Minister, Yasuo Fukuda, has apparently taken up vlogging as a hobby (Or, more properly put, his party, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, has taken up vlogging as a PR campaign). Here is his most recent release, a New Year’s message recorded in English and released on January 1st:
Thus far, there have been 1,466 views of the English version and 2,837 views of the Japanese version of the Prime Minister’s video.
What’s more telling, however, is the presentation of the “LDP channel” on You Tube. In terms of public relations, this is a great move for the LDP. No, the videos really aren’t that exciting, and no - it doesn’t seem that many people are watching them yet. But, we hope that the LDP will be able to use the format to communicate better with the public. Unfortunately, LDP Secretary General Ibuki Bunmei doesn’t come across as too exciting in his most recent clip: (Read on …)
Before I write what I’m going to write, I will let the media tell their story, since they havn’t had much of one to tell until now.
On Monday night, the following twelve minute spot detailing problems at the embattled Nova Corporation aired on Kansai TV. Thanks to Let’s Japan forum member Muteki for posting the videos.
I’ve been receiving email from Nova employees, reporters and, in one case, the concerned parents of a Nova instructor. Thank you to everyone who has been writing to us and commenting, and thank you to all those who are in a position at media sources to publicize what has been going on with this company.
I would like to share an email with our readers. This arrived last night:
What do you do when you become the man in the know on the Nova fiasco? You talk to Radio New Zealand’s Morning Report about it.
Our man Ken Worsley is on the phone with them as this is published, answering New Zealand’s questions about Nova’s financial crisis, which affects the at least 500 New Zealanders currently employed by Nova and is surely of interest to the thousands more who have worked there in the past.
The interview will air on tomorrow morning’s edition of the show, at 8:00 a.m. Wednesday, NZ time, which is 5:00 a.m., Japan time, or 4:00 p.m. Tuesday, US Eastern time.
Over at Japan Economy Watch, Edward Hugh is posting his ongoing commentary of the election results. An excellent read.
The Japan Observer is also posting a live blog of the results as they come in.
I’ve posted my own (slightly irreverent) live blog at Japan Economy News.
If you know of any others, give us a shout.
Nearly six weeks after the murder of Lindsay Ann Hawker, police have released a video showing prime suspect Tatsuya Ichihashi riding the elevator in his apartment building in Ichikawa. According to the BBC, the footage was apparently taken in the days before Miss Hawker’s murder occured.
Click here to watch the footage directly from the BBC in a popup window.
Note: If you’re using Firefox and opening new windows in tabs, the BBC site will resize your browser. You can just maximize it when it loads. Better yet, right-click it and select ‘Open in New Window’
Hopefully this will be Youtubed soon, but at least for now we have something.
Ok, fellow amateur forensic psychologists, the ball is in your court: tell us about Mr Ichihashi.
Many thanks to Japan Probe for bringing this one to our attention. On March 29, Fareed Zakaria interviewed Yoshihisa Komori, a Washington DC-based Editor-at-Large for Japan’s Sankei Shinbun for the PBS series Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria. The two men discussed the so-called ‘comfort women’ issue and what was meant by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s comments concerning the involvement of Japan’s military in the recruitment of such women during the Second World War.
Not to knock Komori too hard, since I’ll leave that to the commentators, but three things struck me: He looks off camera quite a bit, he brings up every red herring and irrelevant side issue he can think of, and he’s well fixated on playing the ‘victim’ game. I don’t think he was a wise choice at all for Japan to have speaking on its behalf.
Veracifier is a (relatively) new show (vlog?) about politics being produced by Next New Networks (an interesting Business Week writeup on what they’re doing).
I first came across the show when I read about their interview with John Kerry before his appearance on the Colbert Report. Veracifier had footage of Colbert out of character, which I couldn’t resist seeing. That led me to their website, where I found that “Japanese-Iraqi Solidarity Feeds Hungry Iraq” was the title of their first release. Here it is:
What’s interesting about this? Truth is, aside from a couple of short interviews, we don’t get to hear much from people on the ground at all. And, in terms of what Japan’s Self-Defense Forces members are doing, we hear very little, and see even less. We get to see some yellow bags with an expression of gratitude printed on them.
Well enough. Nonetheless, what I think we’re seeing is a very simple example of what the Ministry of Defense or the Ministry of Foreign Affairs could be doing if they desired to increase public awareness of what their mission in Iraq is all about. If.
Ambulances, cops, crying kids, confusion - the usual hallmarks of breaking news coverage of a disaster. The bits, no news station can resist - graphical semi-dramatizations of what might have happened based on snippets of eyewitness, or, more often, secondhand testimony. In this case, yellow humanoid things lined up against a wall as a green humanoid thing in a baseball cap aimed a gun at them, then at his own head, never firing.
Now for a bit of disclosure, I’m not going to pretend that my Japanese is perfect. I’m not going to pretend that I never make mistakes or mishear things on TV. I will eagerly admit that there are many words I don’t know, some of which may sound like words I do know. However, I don’t usually get really lost following TV news and what I heard, more than once, and confirmed with people who do speak Japanese just about perfectly, being Japanese and all, was that there was a shooting at Virginia Tech.
So far so good.
Then I heard that the shooter was a Korean exchange student in his third year studying English language.
Got it.
Then I heard that he might have singled out Japanese students.
