世論 What Japan Thinks

Inspired by Japan Probe’s many posts on Nocchi and other bad Obama lookalikes, and with a large bit of help from Shane at Nihon Sun with the logo, I proudly present Obama or Not.

Have fun!

emoji, literaly “picture characters”, are the small graphical icons that fill (or litter, depending on your point of view!) many Japanese mobile phone email messages, but within Japan the three main mobile phone service providers have all got different encoding representations for them and support different sets of emoji, meaning that although they all perform encoding translation when exchanging emails, it can be a bit hit-or-miss as to whether or not the message gets through. Next, add into the mix the iPhone with support for at least four different kinds of mail (SMS, SoftBank’s own iPhone-specific mailbox, webmail, and third-party POP3-based mailboxes), and even within the one device a lot of trickery needs to take place to make the experience consistent for the user.

Google have recently been ramping up their advertising of Gmail in Japan as they currently languish with the also-rans in the popularity stakes. One aspect of their advertising has been to highlight their support of emoji, but the lack of a standard encoding method makes everything a bit more complicated than it need be.

Thus, engineers from Google and Apple have got together to try to propose an encoding for these emoji (they have identified 674 of them!) that can be added to the official standard ISO/IEC 10646, as can be seen in this document, Proposal for Encoding Emoji Symbols. The proposal uses a few of my translations as reference documents, which is nice.

First, Deas over at Rocking in Hakata has an epic edition of the Japan Blog Matsuri, with a pretty massive set of 26 entries to the Foreigh Food Matsuri. Enjoy!

Second, I’ve signed up for Google Friends Connect for some reason:

Feel free to add yourself to the list and… I’m not really sure what happens after the and, but there must be some good reason why everyone at JapanSoc.org is signing up!

Just a little bit of news about a project that’s underway here on WJT and one that might never finish… I’m developing a FAQ (Frequently Asked (unAsked?) Questions) by pulling out interesting facts from each survey I’ve posted. With this blog coming close to 1,500 posts and with a target of three questions per post, it’s obviously a major undertaking, so I’ll be progressing slowly, but hopefully faster than my posting pace so I can one day get up to date!

I’ve linked the project off from the sidebar, and it can be found (for now?) at http://faq.whatjapanthinks.com/.

I hope that it will be loved by the search engines, so if you see it suddenly going advert-heavy you’ll know it’s getting popular!

I get a lot of people searching for Japanese emoticons on this blog (well, I used to until my previous hosting blew up and I got relegated to page two), and although there are a few collections of Japanese smilies out there, they are very poorly presented, just a number of pages with tens or hundreds of lines to wade though.

So, I got thinking and got working and produced evoticon.net. If you like it, please submit it to any social media sites you may use.

I’ve taken the plunge and moved WJT up to WordPress 2.7. Hopefully everything is OK, but if you notice anything funny, please shout!

As an aside from my usual surveys, here is a short commercial message!

I’ve added a new advertiser to my blog, Mellow Monk’s Green Teas, a reseller of finest Japanese green tea to primarily the American market (shipping back to Japan is a bit coals-to-Newcastle-ish!), selected from family-run farms in not the famous tea growing districts of Shizuoka or Uji, but on the southern Kyushu island. All their teas are shipped vacuum-sealed, which means you drink it just as fresh as I can here in Japan.

Mellow Monk’s range includes not just green teas, but also genmaicha, green tea with toasted rice, a wonderfully nutty flavour that I find really warming on cold days, and houjicha, roasted (thus lower in caffeine) tea. Their houjicha is interesting in that they only lightly roast, thus retaining a lot of the colour in the brew, rather than the brown shades that I am familiar with. Typing that description has made me want to order some now!

Green tea has lots of claimed health benefits; it’s rich in anti-oxidants which has been shown to be beneficial in protecting against many lifestyle diseases. Japan has a very high male smoking rate, but a lower incidence of lung cancer than other countries. However, as green tea drinking rates drop, faster than the smoking rates, deaths from lung cancer are increasing. One wonders if there is any connection. The distinctive astringent flavour of green tea comes from catechin, the particular anti-oxidant green tea is rich in, a substance that gets heavily promoted in Japan as an aid to weight loss and combating the dreaded “metabo“, metabolic syndrome.

Regardless of any of these real or alleged health benefits, green tea is a lovely drink that goes very well with food; every night at home we always have either green tea or houjicha with our dinner, whether it be a Japanese or Western menu. It’s also a very sensible drink in the current economic climate; I find that just one heaped small teaspoon suffices for a pot for two (even using decent-sized mugs) and a refill brews just as nice a second or even third cup each. That’s about 20 cents per litre of Mellow Monk’s standard leaf.

Green tea is perhaps a flavour that takes a little getting used to, so if you’re new to it, I would recommend either Mellow Monk’s‘s houjicha or genmaicha as milder drinks, or just use less leaves or more water when brewing!

As promised, here is an epic tale of website death, starring yours truly as the hero who rescued this fair maiden blog from the big bad ogre BlueHost…

Once upon a time, Little Red Riding-WJT was skipping through the Information Super-Forest, guarded by the benign beast of BlueHost, plucking fragrant bouquets of mysquil for delivery via tubes to Granny Firefox’s Chromium Opera of Exploration. She made this trip trouble-free hundreds, if not thousands, of times a day, until one fateful day when BlueHost came across her in the flower beds and unceremoniously plucked her up and threw her into his second-deepest dungeon.

Shortly Sir Kenyn noticed Granny was not getting her usual deliveries, so mounting his trusty steed Skype he rushed from the far-off Orient to investigate where the maiden had gone. The ogre said she’d been dallying over the flowers for too long, in particular in the eyepiadder beds, so after the noble Knight promised he would instruct his charge to stay away from there, and indeed he would concrete over the eyepiadders just to make sure, BlueHost graciously released his captive.

Next day Little Red Riding-WJT was again skipping through the forest, plucking her eyepiadder-free mysquil bouquets when the ogre snuck up again and threw her into the deepest dungeon. Another IP-telephony metaphor later BlueHost claimed her mysquil-plucking was still excessive despite the knight’s insistance that there had been no negative plucking change. Sir Kenyn meekly agreed that he’d investigate her plucking habits, despite being convinced that the ogre has made a plucking mistake. BlueHost said he’d let her resume her plucking activities one more time, but if he caught her dilly-dallying in the mysquils again he’d have to eat her.

After a severe plucking pruning from the knight, once again she skipped forth through the enchanted forest. Just in case, Sir Kenyn requested from the ogre a survey of all the mysquil plantings in the forest, and he set about finding a new, safer forest to let Little Red Riding-WJT play in, as although BlueHost had a most polite and efficient exterior, inside lay a heart of stone.

As Sir Kenyn prepared the new forest, he discovered the survey from the ogre was riddled with traps, but consultation with the Grand Wizards of Perl brought him ever-closer to his Dr Frankenstein-like goal. However, this took his eye off the girl, so despite Little Red Riding-WJT having a quiet feast day, BlueHost unceremoniously added the fair maiden to his feast menu.

Regardless of this unfortunate development, one dark stormy night Little Red Riding-WJT and her flower beds were finally cloned! Sir Kenyn asked the ogre to tell DeNiSe, the ogre’s sidekick in charge of tube management, to ensure the requests for deliveries were redirected to the new forest, and They All Lived Happily Ever After.

Well, They All Lived Happily Until The Next Day. While everyone slept the nasty ogre had pointed the tubes back to the old barren forest, so the knight again asked DeNiSe, who swore he was still telling everyone to go to the new forest. After a prodding with the business end of a lance, the mysquil posy deliveries to Granny restarted, but then the next day and the day after that the ogre repeatedly reset the tubes back to the pluckerless woods, despite the knight’s repeated instructions to DeNiSe. Having had enough for about the tenth time that week, Sir Kenyn ran to his GoDaddy to get him to order DeNiSe around instead.

In the meantime, the Lord Protector of the tubes did sense this struggle, and in His infinite wisdom, the Almighty G did smite the innocent little girl from His lists of preferred suppliers to Granny Firefox and her friends.

And They Finally All Lived Happily Ever After.

THE END (I hope)

Hi everyone, my apologies for a second time for the interruption to What Japan Thinks, thanks to a sequence of events that I’ll blog about in detail later.

In the meantime, all comments seem to have evaporated into the ether. I will try tonight to reinstate them, but they may not return…

Hopefully WJT will be self-destruct free for 2009!

Happy New Year and あけましておめでとうございます for the Year of the Ox.

PS: Let me know if you find anything funny, and if one or two of you could try a comment on this thread I would be most grateful!

Just a quick note that the editors of the online magazine Tokyo × Work × Life have decided to choose me as their very own Blog of the Week for this week. Just in case you’ve never heard of it before, the website describes itself thus:

Tokyo × Work × Life aims to help foreigners living in Japan (Tokyo) to learn more deeply about it, supplying information from various angles to make possible a more comfortable lifestyle.

It’s a nicely-done web site, but still a bit new, so I’m looking forward to seeing lots of useful content for living in Japan, Tokyo in particular.