The Sea Shepherd Incident

The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is an international organization whose goal is stop whaling. They do this primarily by sinking whaling vessels. In January, their new “stealth” speed-boat, the Ady Gil, was split in two when they parked it in front of a moving whaling ship (the Japanese 第二昭南丸 Shonen Maru 2). A month later, Peter Bethune boarded the Shonen Maru 2, claiming to be making a citizen’s arrest of its crew. Bethune is currently held in a maximum-security prison in Japan. Whether or not you agree with whaling, these guys are more a bunch of eco-terrorists than they are “activists”. Bethune only seemed to forcibly board the Shonen to get revenge after they destroyed his Ady Gil (which was a rather expensive racing boat before being used as a weapon).

The Cove – Controversy in the Theaters

The Cove is a documentary on the killing of dolphins in Japan that has had trouble reaching theaters. The film highlights the atrocities against dolphins in Taiji, Wakayama. Since its release in the United States in 2009, its producers have tried to get it shown in Japan and mostly failed. The controversy concerning the film is not just about where it has (or, as the case may be, hasn’t) been shown. The film’s producers falsely presented its premise to many of the Japanese fishermen that appeared in it. The film will, hopefully, finally be showing in Japan in a few theaters sometime soon. With recent studies showing dangerous levels of mercury in dolphin meat, supporters of the film hope that its message will have a deeper impact.

International Whaling Commission

The IWC is an American organization established by the US Government in 1946. It exists to set international policy and rules on whaling, but has no real power to enforce its rules. The IWC is a bit of mixed bag: it exists to allow whaling to continue, but in a restricted, monitored manner. Through the IWC, Japan has given millions of dollars in support money to developing countries.

The Tokyo 2

Junichi Sato and Toru Suzuki are two anti-whaling activists, who, in June of 2008, intercepted a box of whale meat from a delivery company. Their goal? To expose a massive system of fraud in the Japanese whaling industry. Trouble is, they were arrested and held for 26 days in 2008 and have been facing trial until now. Their verdict is due on September 8th. The two men retrieved the meat samples from a delivery center in Aomori and turned it in to the police. After a short investigation, the meat was found to be “souvenirs” and, purportedly, not meant for sale. The two were then arrested for trespassing and theft and have been awaiting trial for two years.

I realize this post is a bit late, but I was sick yesterday and today and have been spending all of my free time sleeping and taking cold medicine.

Okay, so responses to three of these…

Robby’s can be summed up in one word:

かわいい

Cute stuff is everyone in Japan, from advertisements to clothing to the warnings on the sides of train tracks telling you not to do stupid things on them.

Eun Ki’s was about food. And I’m still hungry from reading it. Eun Ki showed foods from all over Japan, many of which we’ve enjoyed as a group. Seriously, I’m still hungry… where are my hashi…

Andrew presented the cleanliness of Japan… or not. Japan is an urbanized nation with pockets of rural-ness. While clean and sanitary, its cities are still filled with sky scrapers and power lines. Still, you can find peace in gardens and rice fields.

See the article Debate over the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Wikipedia for a background on this assigned posting.
The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been the subject for extensive academic discourse since August of 1945. Both sides of the debate hold have compelling arguments and it seems as if the view of the event will always remain in a moral and logical gray area. » Read more…

Vocaloid is a software voice synthesizer developed by Yamaha. Since the release of Vocaloid2 and the character vocal set (voice set) “Hatsune Miku” 【初音ミク】, Vocaloid has become immensely popular in Japan. From manga doujins to video games to plastic figurines, Miku and her friends have spread far and wide. As an audio engineer and human-computer-interaction junky, I’ve had a thing for Miku and Vocaloid since I first heard about them both in 2008. Since then, I’ve come to own the original Hatsune Miku voice pack, and two weeks ago I bought the new Hatsune Miku: Append set of six voice packs. Since coming to Japan, I’ve seen tons of Miku and Vocaloid merchandise and have catalogued the notable occurances of the product through pictures. I chose to do the photo essay assignment for my Japanese Culture class on Vocaloid because I love the product and its culture and was amazed at how much stuff I found just by walking around in Japan. It’s also the only thing I could find from my pictures that directly related to my general topic of “technology and culture”. Vocaloid, a piece of software, has become a major pop-culture icon in Japan. The pictures that follow are in the order that I took them. They were all take on my phone and not my camera as I found them during random walks and explorations and wasn’t out to take pictures at the time.

My first entry is a drawing by someone who appears to go by “も。” – an ink and colored pencil sketch of Hatsune Miku by a member of the AIC hanging on the fourth floor of Nexus21

Vocaloid doujins in a manga shop (Animate). The two at the bottom left are 4-koma’s about “Hachune Miku”, Hatsune Miku’s stand-in `chibi` character. The ones at the top are unofficial mangas about Hatsune Miku as a singer.

Sonika, Hiyama Kiyoteru, Kaai Yuki, Megpoid and Gackpoid, all sitting next to a copy of AutoTune at a music store. Three different developers are represented here: Zero-G, AH-Software, and INTERNET. Yamaha makes the underlying software and other companies, most notably Crypton Future Media (creators of Miku) create the voice packs.

» Read more…

1. Part I: The Japanese Language and Computers
   1. Early Japanese Computers
      1. How was Japanese rendered?
         1. Katakana
         2. Hiragana
         3. Romaji
      2. How was real Japanese encoded?
   2. The drive for better displays
      1. Kanji
      2. Input methods
2. Part II: Portable Electronics
   1. Language + Portable Electronics
   2. Portability – how the Japanese People liked their Gizmos
      1. Memory cards and Internet access
   3. Why the iPod failed in Japan
      1. Early iPods were tied to computers
      2. No memory card readers (still)
   4. The iPhone – Why Japan loves an American Product
      1. Display → Language
      2. It’s a phone. → Portability
      3. Japanese people open up to “anchored” devices → Computer requirement is OK

• Complexity
  Culture is a complex concept – it covers traditions, language, clothing, foods, behavior, history, and tons of other aspects of societies.
• Viewpoint
  The way a culture is seen varies greatly by the view from which it is observed. Those who have been part of a particular society see their culture in a completely different way from an outside observer.
• “Understanding” Japan
  Japan, like anywhere else, has a complex set of etiquette rules, traditions, foods, etc.
• Reflecting back on your own culture
  Looking at the culture of Japan has brought to light a number of things about the United States: particularly, it has helped us look at where are traditions come from and how our etiquette rules came to be. (And why we’re so rude)
• Looking at culture is inherently comparative
  Culture is comparative in that it is different everywhere and those differences can always be examined?
• Partiality of accounts of culture
  No account of a culture can cover everything about that culture. Culture isn’t something that can be cataloged – it is far too complex [see above] for any one account to tell everything.
• Competing elements in Japanese culture
  A number of competing elements exist in Japanese culture; specifically, the modern, clean, industrial high-tech Japan clashes greatly with the traditional, festive Japan with its tea ceremonies and kimonos.
• What choices do people have?
  Future generations can continue cultures or completely change them. People can choose to continue using the same rules of etiquette, eat the same basic foods, wear the same clothing and celebrate the same traditions, or they can disregard, morph, and meld their existing culture with others and create new traditions.
• Notion that “culture” has no explanatory power
  Culture doesn’t explain things – it is too broad of a subject to be used as a “cause” to any effect, rather the elements that make up a culture may have individual effects and can be used to explain why something is the way it is.
• What about politics?
  Though culture can’t directly be used to explain things, it does have an effect on politics, as seen in Tokugawa-era Japan and the effect of the tea ceremony.
• What about history?
  History is culture, in that the way history is remembered has affected cultural elements and traditions.

Over the past two weeks, we’ve covered a lot of ground in Japanese Culture. We’ve explored, extensively, what culture is and isn’t, how culture is studied, and how all of this applies to Japan. We’ve seen pieces of the established culture of Japan – from modern martial arts to tea ceremonies and histories – and we’ve seen how the Japanese people, and historians abroad, view the uniqueness (or lack of uniqueness) in Japan; from arguments that Japan has a clear, homogeneous culture to claims that traditions and behavior have been segmented and separated from generations.

My presentation this Friday is on the mixture of technology and culture in Japan. Specifically, I’ll be focusing on how the Japanese language has affected technological development.  I was inspired to do my presentation on this from an article I read a few years back on why Japan did not create the iPod.

Tomorrow we are doing short (one-minute) mini-presentations on “nihonjinron”, which is really hard to define but was best summed up to me as “the study of Japanese history and uniqueness”. My presentation will be on Amino Yoshihiko, a Marxist historian. His writings rarely ever made it outside of Japan, and yet he is viewed as one of the most important modern historians in Japan. The lack of internationalization of his works is so notable there is an entire paragraph quote that takes up about a quarter of the article for him on Wikipedia. There’s by far enough information there and in the references linked for me to talk for a good two minutes, but sadly there’s not much more. Basically, Amino opposed the idea of the unique Japanese image after studying the people of the past who were in stark contrast to the image.

Source

Sony recently unveiled a flexible OLED display. It can be rolled up while still displaying full-color video. The total resolution is 432×240. The interesting thing to note: Outside of the linked source above, most other news sources are toting the display as a “video wall scroll”.