世論 What Japan Thinks

Watching television last night, one quiz program featured a question about someone who kept a garden specialising in one single genus. One member of the genus is called 姑のざぶとん, shutome no zabuton, mother-in-law cushion, so what is the genus. I laughed out loud at such an obvious and easy question and at the image of this cushion, but my Japanese wife looked blank, and even after explaining the answer to her she just didn’t get it. Back in the studio, just one out of the six celebrities on the panel got the right answer, the sweet and innocent 乙葉, Otoha, but she had to suffer the disapproval of the other guests, and apologised to the question-master and the audience at home for casting such aspersions on mother-in-laws everywhere.

I thought the mother-in-law as the butt of jokes was a universal theme. Is this just a British thing, or do my readers from other countries also find the name “mother-in-law cushion” hilarious?

I’m just wondering if any of my readers are heading to the RSA Conference Tokyo 2007 on the 25th and 26th of April in the Prince Park Tower Tokyo? I’m heading up on the 25th for the meeting, so I’m curious if any of my readers might be heading there too. Drop me a mail if you are. Note that the exhibition is free if you download the application from the web site, so if you’re an impoverished student or English teacher (or software engineer…) you may wish to pop along and pick up some of the freebies that hopefully may be on offer.

Not that this has anything in particular to do with Japan, but since I wrote my Wikipedia NoFollow plugin for WordPress there’s been quite a bit of action.

First, Andy Beard was good enough to write it up and promote it around a few websites. In addition, he also pointed out I had a bug in my comment script, whcih I’ve hopefully now fixed.

Next, there’s a Drupal plugin written by greggles that does the same thing for that platform.

Paul Montgomery at Tinfinger makes a case for dropping Wikipedia from Google and Andy Beal at Marketing Pilgrim is whipping up support for cutting off Wikipedia. Google Blogoscoped describes how they prevent spam links and many others discuss the topic in many languages. Track the nofollow tag at del.icio.us for the latest news.

From this website’s perspective, looking at my top 10 search phrases there is just one that is in direct competition with Wikipedia, and if anything I stand to gain by the addition of rel=”nofollow” as the two above the Wikipedia entry, both linked from Wikipedia, seem to be more poorly linked to other sites, so I perhaps could very well stand to gain from them losing their Wikipedia links.

A quick note that I’ve just hacked up a plugin that you may like to use in response to this news.

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He sent me a trackback on teeth, but due to something a bit funny at my end, Chase the Gaijin’s trackback ended up in a totally wrong post so I had to delete it, so to make up for it I thought I’d make this post.

NOTE: The results of the 2008 New Year Postcard lottery are now available.

If you haven’t thrown away all your New Year postcards from this year, dig them out and check the serial number on the bottom right of the cards.

If the six digits are 157788 or 457190, then you’ve won top prize, and can choose from a holiday in Hawai’i, a holiday within Japan, notebook personal computer, DVD recorder and home theatre kit, or a digital SLR camera.

If the last four digits are 5161, 7093, 7485, or 9614, then you’ve won second prize, a choice of local delicacies.

If the last two digits are either 64 or 79, you’ve won the third prize, two inoshishi (wild boar)-themed stamps, which can be picked up by presenting your winning postcards at any post office.

I seem to have won nothing.

Who ate all the mince pies? Certainly not this poor chappie snapped outside an osteopath (or chiropracter or something) near to my place of work.

Just another day at the office in Japan, but an evening off in my blogging world.

For the benefit of all readers residents of Japan, just in case you’ve failed to notice it, the norovirus is currently doing the rounds; not a computer-borne one, but a real life food poisoning-related disease. Japundit has some advice on preventative methods, and although I’ve got no hard statistics on it, I remember hearing that at the start of the month cases were at roughly four times the usual rate, and since then there seems to have been many, many more cases. It’s possibly fatal to children and aged people, and with no current vaccine, please take care out there! One of the tabloids was suggesting that up to 10 million in Japan, or almost one in ten, could succumb over the winter.

MutantFrog Travelogue has another great story, this time on how advertising agency Dentsu set up the whole Town Meeting business (allegedly). I”ve just added them to my Blog Roll – I should have done it ages ago as they’ve been publishing some pretty good and juicy news from Japan that usually doesn’t get aired in the English language.

Not that this has anything to do with surveys, but I saw that the BBC is starting a monthly photo competition with the topic for this month being a good one for Japan, one’s journey to work. This might be a good excuse to get your mobile’s camera out and snap away inside or outside the train. Perhaps I can ride the Thomas the Tank Engine train again and take a snap of it?