“On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog.” — The words of a well-known adage dating back to a New Yorker cartoon from 1993 have been interpreted and re-interpreted, acting over the years as a starting point for debates on privacy and online anonymity. In Japan, a country wit...

Japanese blogger id:eliya, who is doing economics research abroad, writes that he is often asked by colleagues why Japanese work so hard [ja]. Referring to economics professor Masami Nomura's book, “Employment Instability” (雇用ä¸�安) [ja], he explains that Japanese work hard basi...

What happens when you put laptops, digital cameras, high-speed wireless cards, and Ustream accounts into the hands of two curious young net users in the technology mecca of the world, just as one of the most sensational global news stories of the year erupts around the corner? That’s what happ...

The earthquake in China's Sichuan province, besides taking its toll on tens of thousands of Chinese citizens, has also had reverberations far away in the Japanese blogosphere, where the topic ranked top among blogging keyword lists [ja] and sparked conversations in forums [ja] over the past few ...

The idea that a country boasting one of the world's most active net cultures, with possibly the world's largest blogosphere and almost certainly its largest online forum, would attempt to regulate online content within its borders may appear to some not only far-fetched, but infeasible. Plan...