Japan often leads the world in technological innovation. Often this gives the rest of the world a chance to see how people there react to new technologies. The Japan Times is carrying coverage of Digital TV restrictions that are confusing...
Co-founder of Jnutella, Yuichi Kawasaki is a young Tokyo technology upstart. Revered by Western reporters for his honest appraisal of subversive technologies, he's been the point-person for peer-to-peer, file sharing and mobile avant garde in Japan. After being quoted and...
The Technology of Difference: ASCII, Hegemony and the Internet , is the beta of a chapter by my partner Jason. It takes up the issue of how Englishness controls how we think and represent ourselves on the Internet....
You look at your DVD player; it's made by Sony. So is your TV; your stereo is only an Aiwa but Sony owns them too. There's a developed/developing media position associating Asianess with technology; how so is this popular culture...
Most Western internet users use sideways punctuation to spell out emotions - :-) Japanese internet users use more complicated, and nuanced emotion icons: (>_<) - ouch! (T_T) - crying (^_^)V - v for victory! This site has compiled Japanese Facemarks...
Rikai.com provides an absolutely amazing, essential service - character by character, word by word translation between Japanese and English on web pages. It works like near-magic; as you hold your mouse cursor over a particular Kanji character, and a floating...
Cars can be integral to national identity. Many countries have their own auto-manufacturers. When a foreign-national auto-maker begins selling cars, or even making notable inroads into domestic markets, it's often cast as a sort of "invasion" in the news. Witness...
For Chanpon.org, we are using some web log publishing software called Moveable Type. We're working with the nice folks that made it to help them develop support for Japanese characters in dates and times. Here's a draft sketch of Japanese...
From Locke, a link to Dynamism - a company that takes ultraportable laptops and devices from Japan and repurposes them for the American market where sleek slight beauties like these aren't sold since everyone has bigg fingers....
