世論 What Japan Thinks

You may have read the news that the Royal Society of London has made available online its archives from the foundation in 1665 to 1881, so naturally I thought I’d see what people thought of Japan all these years ago. The earliest hit was from 1669 (doi: 10.1098/rstl.1669.0027 Phil. Trans. 1 January 1669 vol. 4 no. 45-56 983-986), in an article entitled “Some Observations Concerning Japan, Made by an Ingenious Person, That Hath Many Years Resided in That Country; as they Were Communicated in French by M. I; Whence they are Thus English’d by the Publisher; Who Some Months Agoe Accasion’d This Accompt by Some Queries, Sent to That Traveller“, which may be read online for free here.

The article title comes from this description of the Japanese:

Another article deals with the poison oak tree, the sap of which is used in Japan and China to make lacquer. Page 869 talks about it being known as Sitz-dsju and page 870 as the Fashi-no-ki. Can anyone decode either name into Japanese or Chinese? The current Japanese name is Urushi, but a relative is Rhus succedanea (or Toxicodendron succedaneum), or Hase-no-ki, which looks like a match.

There’s a search engine there, so have fun!

Just a quick note to say that along with most of the rest of Japan I’m on holiday until next Sunday, so posts may be rather intermittent. I’ve got a number of good surveys that need translating, but whether or not I can find the time…

In the meantime, you can catch me on Google Plus where I am reasonably active. Drop me a note if you want an invite.

Thanks,
Ken

I just noticed that Metropolis magazine wholesale cut-and-paste my recent survey on weird service station food, without even a back-link.

If you’re going to translate goo ranking surveys, please do so in your own words or acknowledge the site you are copying from.

I never thought I’d write such a headline, but the news is that Japan’s most popular jailbait vocal group is donating half a billion yen (over 6 million dollars or just under 4 million pounds) towards earthquake relief:

Donate some cash yourself or I’ll post another video of them!

US Red Cross
UK Red Cross
Japan Red Cross

I’m still not quite in the mood for posting, so instead here’s how to donate to the relief effort through the Red Cross:

US Red Cross
UK Red Cross
Japan Red Cross

ANything you can give will be most welcome by those suffering in the north of Japan.

As most of my readers will have heard about the series of huge earthquakes, I thought I’d better post to say that here at What Japan Thinks I’m well out of the danger zone in Kansai, and well away from the coast so no personal worries about tsunami.

I hope all my readers and their families in Japan are safe too. While I prepare my next post, you may like to read a few surveys on earthquakes.

Update: Google have set up a person finder service and other useful links:

http://www.google.co.jp/intl/en/crisisresponse/japanquake2011.html

Although it’s not my holidays until next Wednesday, many of my readers seem to have already gone on holiday, so I’ll be cutting down my posting frequency, working on other projects (there’s two Facebook things I must do) and posting more goo Ranking nonsense for the next two weeks.

Just a quick note for smartphone owners – I’ve added a mobile-friendly low-bandwidth plugin to the site, so if you visit with your mobile browser the site should look much better than before. I went to a mobile phone shop this evening after work and surfed here on a demo Xperia, and I was very pleasantly surprised at how nice it looked!

The plugin is WPtouch.

I’m not sure how this will appear in my RSS feed, so if it doesn’t, please click through and press the Like button, if you’re on Facebook. And if you like WJT, of course!

The last in this week’s series of introductions to my other web properties is for brainscannr.com, a site I developed after seeing the runaway success of the Japanese site Nonai Maker. Sadly for my wallet, I came nowhere near the 600 million accesses!

My rather happy brain is drawn on a bit of clipart that I actually paid good money (a whole $10!) to licence for the site. I did have plans to make a Facebook app out of it, but I didn’t know how to monetise it. Perhaps I should instead make it into a free Android app and fill it with adverts?

I’ll end my series of web sites here – I’ve not mentioned FAQ Japan as it’s mostly just a search engine trap, and I’ve got another site under development that I had hoped to launch during the recent Japanese election campaign, but I couldn’t solve one critical technical issue. It would have been nice to launch it with a slightly different emphasis tomorrow, but I’m still editing a critical image. By the way, if any of my readers know how to move an image on a web page through CSS and JavaScript, please drop me a line and I’ll link to you from the new site!