Category: Japan – Blogging

The current issue (#478) of the Metropolis, the long-standing resident English town guide for the Tokyo area, has taken notice of the expat-in-Japan blogging craze / explosion / phenomenon / however you’d like to describe it. This site got a mention as “maybe the most detailed Tokyo blog,” (not really quite sure what that means), with an “extensive blogroll.”

So, without further ado, here are sites that have been added to said blogroll in the last week or so:

AMAI
Andrew and Kathleen
brightblack
Cooool! Japan
EFL in Japan
Gusalmighty.com: Bibas ergo Ain’t
Hindsight
Kris Corner
yongfook
Peter Zoon Zenlog

In light of the group blog Tawawa that I mentioned a few days ago, I’ve come across 6 weblogs of students who have been studying in Japan during the Spring semester, housed under the umbrella site the East Asia Center:

Andy Clark: Understanding Japanese Youth Culture Through the Interview
Austin Damiani: Cultivating Interdisciplinary Synthesis
John Grillo: Explorations in Learning Music in Japan
Abi Iverson: Developing My Artistic Self
Jaymie Wisneski: Understanding the Process of Artistic Creation
Rachel Winckler

Welcome to our cooperative blogging project! We are six university students studying abroad in Kyoto, through Friends World Program, an experiential learning center affiliated with Long Island University. This semester, five of us are experimenting with computer supported cooperative learning to carry out action research projects of our own. In combination with weekly face-to-face meetings, we will each be running our own blogs and cooperating with each other’s projects.

Sadly, it looks like I’m too late to this party, as the “The Semester is Over!” posts I found would seem to indicate. I’m not sure where these blogs will go from here, but at the very least, I recommend perusing the archives for each of these blogs, as I found some interesting analyses and takes on Japan and Japanese culture therein.

A few weeks ago I came across Tawawa, a “group weblog” written by English students at Mie University (Mie Prefecture) and the brainchild of Rudolf Ammann, a member of the Faculty of Education there. At the time I discovered it (those good ol’ referrer logs), the site (and class, English Composition III — Writing for the Web) had just launched and Ammann asked that I not link to it at that point.

Actually, the site and class have undergone some “growing pains” and Ammann and I have had a fruitful email discussion about some of the issues that having the class weblog brought up, including how to get Japanese students to express themselves, in a language not their own, rather than simple links with a banal word or two about them. Seeing the site evolve over the last few weeks, I’m not sure exactly what Ammann did but the site has started to come into its own and the entries are much more expansive than when the site launched. The students are also started to contribute comments to each others’ entries. Perhaps in the end, the students just needed to become familiar and comfortable with the weblog format, which I presume they previously had not been aware of.

Having solved some technical issues, they are now also creating a group weblog in Japanese as well.

Being involved in education myself, I’m very keen on how blogging and education will interface in the future. One site in particular that I’ve been reading a lot recently is weblogg-ed, which is subtitled “using web logs in education.” This site also features a long list of “educator blogs” in its left margin.

In addition to Tawawa, here are other sites recently added to the “Other Personal Views from Japan” blogroll:

Andrea in Japan — Rambling Notes
The Blog From Another Dimension
Confessions of a Grade School Role Model
The Flounder
Jax in Japan
Jay’s Japan Journal
joshjacobson.net
Josh’s Japan Log
Life in Japan 2003
My Travels in Japan
On my mind…
Sake-Drenched Postcards
Seiji Does Japan
Sonic in Tokyo
Through Rose Tinted Glasses
Yvonna – Journal of Japan

Also, a blogger named James, who doesn’t live in Japan but who claims to be “hopelessly obsessed with Japan and travel abroad,” has created an Interactive Japan Blogger’s map using Javascript, with 47 of us on there. He’s got a bunch listed in “unknown,” so if you’re in there send him an email with your location.