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Give us our daily bread

Ad for Japan's Komeito political party, April 12, 2003: click for larger image

Bringing back the advertising theme, the above poster is an ad for Japan’s New Komeito political party, found just around the corner from the house. The copy at the top of the ad reads majime ni hataraku hito ga mukuwareru shakai o, the exact nuance of which escapes me but perhaps something along the lines of “society will reap the benefits of hardworking people.” The tag line overlayed on top of the slice of bread reads seikatsu yotou, koumeito. yotou is the Japanese word for the “ruling government party,” and seikatsu means “life,” as in daily life (koumeito is of course the name of the party). Honestly I’m not sure how that is supposed to be construed (eg. something like “ruling party of everyday life people”), but like all advertisements, I suppose it’s a bit open-ended at any rate.

The origins of the New Komeito party go back to 1964, but in its current form, the party only dates from 1998. Japan’s 3rd largest political party, it has been a member of the ruling coalition goverment since 1999, with currently 54 seats in the Diet. It is led by Chief Representative Takenori Kanzaki, who is pictured in the lower left of the poster. The newly revamped website has a fair amount of information in English about the party’s history and platform. On the surface of it, sounds like a party I’d be interested in supporting. Oh yeah, forgot I had no voting rights in this country.

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Japan blogging continues to get noticed

Poynter Online, the website for the 25-plus year old Poynter Institute and home to a wealth of articles and analysis of media and journalism, has taken notice of the fast-growing blogging trend among both expatriates and Japanese alike here in Japan. The notice was in the form of a post made to E-Media Tidbits, Poynter’s “group weblog by the sharpest minds in online media/journalism/publishing,” so it says. I have to say I feel a bit humbled to find this site mentioned on Poynter.org, like perhaps I should clear away the dirty underwear! (I found Poynter.org in the days after September 11th, and as a one-time journalist wannabee and son of a newspaper reporter, not to mention a media junkie, love the site, especially Romenesko’s column).

I was tipped off about the above piece by the good ol’ referral logs, which indicated quite a spike of traffic on Thursday (with residual hits yesterday). However, the biggest reason for the spike was not the Poynter piece, but that this site was mentioned on the German magazine site published by Heise called Telepolis, which I am not familiar with but appears to be some sort of Wired-style publication (its tagline is “Magazine of Net Culture,” and the first article linked on the English site is an interview with John Perry Barlow). My site was linked in an article I think translates to “Vehement anti-war protests in Japan,” which seems to be about recent protests against the the U.S. invasion of Iraq in Tokyo and other Japan cities, and about the role of the traditional Japanese media outlets in covering these protests (or perhaps, not covering them. (This is all via a threadbare translation of the article by FreeTranslation so take it with a grain of salt. If any of my readers would like to offer a better summary of this article than I’m providing, as well as more background on Telepolis magazine and its publisher Heise, please do so by leaving a comment).

Weblogs are mentioned as part of the alternative means Japanese can use to find out information, but the article takes a critical view of them, claiming that most just publish links to traditional media articles, and positing the interesting question (which forms the subtitle of the piece), “Are Japanese too shy to blog?” Hmmn…

Let me finish up this piece of “meta-blogging” by mentioning the latest additions to my Japan blogroll that seems to be gaining such attention recently (I can only hope folks are actually clicking through to the sites listed on the right when they get here!):

blogMagic
Canadian Expat@Tokyo
economist
fatblueman
Gary’s Boring Blog
Japanamac
Mike’s Meditations
Mint Dandy
oli.boblet.net
Random Rants and Ramblings from Japan

As I mentioned to one of the new bloggers the other day in his comments, welcome to the party guys and gals. ninzuu ga ooi hodo tanoshiku naru! (“the more the merrier”)

UPDATE: Found one more Japan-based blog, courtesy of Gary’s Boring Blog mentioned above:

megaperls

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Shaking one’s booty on a 400-year old street

Nakasendo festival, Warabi, November 3, 2002: click for larger image

In lieu of content, time for which is sorely lacking at the moment, I present you (again) with some pictures of a local Warabi (Saitama) festival that took place last November in celebration of the historic Nakasendo highway which courses through here from Tokyo to Kyoto. We had gotten there a little late in the day, and so only made it in time to see a parade of Japanese samba dancers, which make up the bulk of the photos. The ties between Brazil and Japan are long and deep, and so it shouldn’t be surprising to see this band of Japanese women shaking their booty to the samba beat, dressed in brightly colored costumes (in point of fact, there’s a huge Samba festival in Asakusa every year), but nevertheless it was something of a cultural disconnect to see them gyrating down this old highway with two- and three-hundred-year-old buildings.

(Click on the above photo to be taken to a larger photo. If you click on the right-pointing arrows on that page, you can scroll through the rest.)