hightext

Blogs of Japanese people living in the UK

Most of them have photos, so you can see what has caught their eye even if you don't read Japanese.

Love-hate London
Poohotosama's Joke Diary
Stay Cool (Manchester)
Living in the UK
London with time on my hands
Denko@London
Typically English? Everyday life
KTMorris' what happened today
Oink Oink
Sort of thing
Finding small happinesses
Yummy (living in Sheffield)
Living in London Diary
Family life in the UK
Inside Chicken World

A lot of them are about food again...

Food moblogs

I said a couple of weeks' ago that I would try to pick up a few Japanese blogs. I will highlight the food blogs this time. This is partly to develop what I was arguing in the previous entry, that MMS take up may be slow at first, because when people start taking cameraphone pictures, they take photos that they want to share face to face - of children, boyfriends etc. Then they start taking photos of less personal things and these do get sent by MMS (maps, clothes) - or in this case, food.

Similarly, there's been discussions about the 'dying off' of moblogs, but as you can see from the examples below, if the moblog concentrates on a specific topic of burning interest to others, then the moblogger keeps moblogging. And yes, Japanese people are on the whole obsessed by food. Hence the new Casio 3.2 megapixel cameraphone A5406CA for KDDI's Au service that has a special 'food' setting along with portrait, night, scenery, twilight and fireworks.

Japanese food blogs/moblogs:
Gourmand's antenna
A disinterested record of everything eaten
Dainty food and plain food gastronomy
Tokyo gourmet blog
French dainty food village
Lunch diary - Tokyo's Ebisu and Ichigaya area
Selfish gene
Junk Food Mania
Ruifood
The Kobayashi family lunchboxes
Concentrating on food
Supper at Deko's house
Non solo Italiano
kurukuru food
Snail Blog
Yamaken's eat till you drop on a business trip diary

Asparagus is in season at the moment, so, from the last blog above, something he ate in a Tokyo restaurant:

There was another beautiful blog kept by someone who was running a guesthouse in the countryside, showing photos of the vegetables he or she got out of the garden, and what they cooked with it, but I can't find it again.

Later - I found it again. It's called 'In awe of Dash Village'. Actually I misremembered - the blogger used to be a guesthouse owner, but is now growing vegetables on their balcony and cooking for themselves. The reason for the strange title is that Japanese TV station NTV seem to be running some kind of reality TV series like Iron Age Village or Edwardian house or whatever, called Dash Village, where people are living in traditional Japanese houses, and farming for a living.

Europeans don't...

There's been a couple of surveys saying European mobile subscribers are not using Java or Multimedia Messaging Services (MMS).

As Tom Hume says, you could actually flip the statistics on the MMS one and instead say "look how often Europeans are sending MMS, considering how new the technology is". Also, anecdotally but also based on how the sector evolved in Japan, people tend to take photos of friends, children etc when they first get a cameraphone. These are the kinds of photos that you want to share with people, but you also want their face to face reaction. My anecdotal evidence - when I went to pick up our son from nursery recently, one of the staff showed me a photo she had taken of him with her mobile - it was a great photo and she obviously wanted to see my proud face when she showed it to me, rather than send it to my mobile. Also, a friend of mine has just been to stay the weekend, and she showed me various photos of prospective and current boyfriends, whilst I showed her photos of our son, both on our mobiles, after lots of wine - a highly sociable and intimate bit of communication that is best done face to face.

As for Java, I think that as soon as operators and developers stop seeing Java only as a way of delivering sophisticated (and high cost) games to mobiles, and start incorporating it into screensavers, ringtones, calendars, lotteries, horoscopes etc delivered to mobiles, then we will see the kind of Java usage in Europe that you see in Japan and South Korea.

IT and political activism

This is a useful historical overview of the uses of IT for political activism from Today Online from Singapore.

Wireless Watch Japan

Daniel Scuka of Wireless Watch Japan has done an excellent report on the latest wireless developments in Japan, following his recent trip there. As Daniel used to live in Japan and knows all the key companies, what he says is far more in-depth and hands-on then most reports out there about Japan.

Points that stood out for me:
1) People are paying for and companies are making big money out of chaku-uta - the next generation of ringtones which are of CD quality, from the original music, so more royalties to the master right holders (the record companies). Which shows how recent surveys showing that people are not willing to pay for mobile music are misleading.
2) Mobile e-mail (not SMS) is still the killer app - especially popular is the ability to put emoji (emoticons) into e-mails. I'm not sure whether this feature is one that will be so popular in Europe, as this is a cultural difference to do with wanting to express feelings non-verbally.
3) Cameraphones being used in creative ways that have nothing to do with European operator defined ideas of MMS etc. One man who was a ramen noodle fanatic takes photos of every bowl of noodles he has. OK this might be to do with Japanese tendencies towards being 'otaku' (obsessive) about particular things, but in Europe we have our anoraks, geeks and nerds too. It's true that in Japan being 'otaku' about food is pretty widespread. I intend to post an entry soon about Japanese food blogs.

China - mobile phones and religion

Dr Genevieve Bell seems to have one of those jobs I didn't realise people could get paid to do other than in academia - travelling round the world watching people using technology with an Intel salary. She's quoted in a BBC News online article about Chinese people using their mobile phones to access the lunar almanac - something I'm sure Japanese mobile content providers can supply too. She says that Asian cultures are 're-imaging' the role of the mobile phone - which rather assumes that the role of the mobile phone has been defined by Western cultures first.

I would look at it more by starting with the role of religion in daily life, particularly the kind of religious practices that are based on lunar almanacs or finding the right direction for Mecca. Mobile phones are part of everyday life both in the West and in Asia, but in Asian cultures, religion is not something separate from daily life, to be practiced in a church on Sundays only - even without being 'religious' as such, a Chinese or Japanese person would want to know whether a day was auspicious or not, before starting a new venture, and would consult their mobile phone if such a service was available, rather as anyone might use their mobile to find out the weather forecast.

18th century Japanese almanac

Japanese blogs

I have been lazy about reading Japanese blogs in Japanese. I read Gen Kanai's and Joi Itoh's blogs, which are written in English and mostly link to English language material. I also read blogs written in English by expats in Japan such as the beautiful looking and award-winning Antipixel, Mediatinker and Cerebral Soup.

And now there seems to be some controversy over an article on The Feature which talks about the low uptake of moblogging even in Japan. I've said before that we Anglophones should be very careful about inventing a term, defining it and then assuming that it is the universal term and definition, allowing us to judge whether non-Anglophone cultures 'do it' or are any good at it.

This point came up again at The Royal Institute of International Affairs Japan Group meeting yesterday in London, where someone pointed to a recent survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit, which ranked the UK second in terms of 'e-readiness' and Japan 25th. 'E-readiness' is, according to the EIU, "a collection of factors that indicate how amenable a market is to Internet-based opportunities." As far as I can work out, Japan is placed rather low despite high uptakes of 3G, broadband, local loop unbundling etc - because it scored badly on 'consumer and business adoption' (presumably the low penetration rate of PCs - but what about the fact that people can and do access e-mail, the Web and do e-commerce from their mobile phones?) and 'supporting e-services' (meaning consulting and IT services). Well I guess this criterion has been included because the survey is sponsored by IBM, who want to drop a big hint at Japanese companies and the Japanese government who have traditionally preferred to do things in-house, rather employ consultants...

There is no doubt that a lot of Japanese people are blogging, and have been doing something like blogging from their mobile phones since 1999, when i-mode was launched. It may be that 'moblog' software as has been developed in the US and Europe does not exist in the same way, but being a very visual culture, Japanese bloggers have found ways to incorporate all kinds of images, some from cameraphones, into their websites. For example, this site, Magic Island, hosts over 3 million 'home pages', attracting 900 million page views a month, largely created and viewed via mobile phones.

So over the next few days I will introduce some Japanese blogs, written in Japanese, by Japanese people, that I have randomly picked up and started reading on a regular basis. I'll translate some of their self description and any entry that catches my eye. Here's the first:

a wild flower. "I am a working woman. A mother. One strike against me [Japanese expression for having one failed marriage]. A woman. As such, here are my various feelings... Being a woman is fun..."
Entry for April 27 "I walked home with my son in a pitch black street. Holding hands. His small round hand was warm. 'A shooting star!' he called out, but Mama didn't see it. 'If you see a shooting star you can make a wish.' 'I didn't know that, so I didn't make a wish.' 'Yes, well...' 'If there hadn't been traffic lights and buildings and cars I could have run and caught it.' He's so sweet! [Japanese emoticon for parent silly with pride which I can't reproduce in MovableType grrr] I hope he can somehow put off becoming a difficult adolescent."
Other postings are on the subject of makeup, the Pill, tomatoes, buying male underwear, semi-naked mannequins and Lush (the UK soap shop now in Japan).

I suppose some might find this saccharine and insubstantial. I rather like it.