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Japan Times
WORLD
Mar 2, 2013

Remembering the day Napster set music free

In the first weeks of 2000 the founders of Napster were in their office above a bank in San Mateo, California, considering dizzying numbers. Figures scrawled on a whiteboard told how many people around the world had installed their file-sharing application and were using it to download music from each...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music / STRANGE BOUTIQUE
Jan 31, 2013

Diamond cries 'murder' on the dancefloor

In its Jan. 12 edition, the Japanese business magazine Diamond Weekly decided to ring in the new year with a 10-page feature titled, "Who's Killing Music?" It was the topic of much discussion and reaction in the music business, and the article even made the agenda during a meeting of the Japanese music...
COMMENTARY / World
Dec 27, 2012

The rise of the attention economy

I was recently posed the following question: "The most important way in which the Internet and online social media are changing our world is [fill in the blank]."
Japan Times
LIFE / Style & Design / ON: FASHION
Oct 9, 2012

Parco puts the spotlight on Shibuya's evolving youth culture

Department store Parco is aiming to fill the vacuum created by the rapidly declining gyaru (gal) culture that used to define the Shibuya area of Tokyo. By taking aspects of the otaku (geek) culture of Akihabara and re-imagining them through art and fashion in the context of a popular shopping district,...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music / STRANGE BOUTIQUE
Mar 29, 2012

A tale of two paths to indie success

Tokyo postpunk quartet Otori is an archetypal product of the city's underground live-music scene. The band's sets feature a machine-gun rattle of drums, slashes of guitar that explode in fierce climaxes, and bursts of scattershot vocals that teeter on the brink of hysteria — the kind of music that...
Japan Times
LIFE / Lifestyle
Nov 29, 2011

Make it home for the holidays ... or at least as close as possible

Yes, the Christmas season is supposed to be about intangibles like gratitude, giving, and joyful time shared with family and friends. But one must eat, too. Foreigners in Japan who aren't used to feasting on fast-food fried chicken and fancy cakes as key parts of the holiday might find themselves craving...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Nov 27, 2011

Viral entertainment at full throttle

REAMDE, by Neal Stephenson. William Morrow, 2011, 1042 pp., $35 (paperback). Neal Stephenson's novels can be counted upon to offer two things: a lot of information and a lot of pages.
BUSINESS
May 12, 2011

Hackers disrupt PlayStation blog

Sony Corp., struggling to restore online entertainment services after a record theft of customer data, said Wednesday its PlayStation blog has been partially disrupted after the website was attacked by hackers.
COMMENTARY / World
Feb 20, 2011

Flights of fancy: making sense of airfares and ancillary charges

HONG KONG — The dogfight between American Airlines and the online travel agencies that used to be its business partners has important global implications for online ways of doing business. Unfortunately, the real loser will be the person that both sides say they are scrapping for, the airline passenger....
LIFE / Digital
Dec 1, 2010

Amazon, Apple kick-start Japan's digital content-delivery business

Remember CCCD? Probably not, unless you collect outdated acronyms.
LIFE / Digital / TECH_JAPAN
Nov 24, 2010

Apple TV, iTunes movie rentals come to Japan

The second-generation Apple TV that Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced back in September has finally hit the shelves here in Japan. Despite the fact that it looks like little more than a hockey puck, the new digital-media receiver from the folks at Cupertino should satisfy users who consume most of their...
LIFE / Digital
Aug 25, 2010

Twitter delivers creative way for ad agencies to play

While Twitter itself is still struggling to find a profitable business plan, Japanese ad agencies have quickly embraced the micro-blogging service to create innovative campaigns.
JAPAN
May 5, 2010

Secondhand market grows

When Chie Matsumoto buys anything — from a DVD player to golf goods to a telephone — she now chooses secondhand goods because brand-new items aren't necessarily what she needs.
LIFE / Digital
Apr 14, 2010

Tech pushes Japan's music scene; industry won't budge

The music business reinvents itself every 20 years or so — basically every time a new format comes down the pike. But the industry has never faced the kind of fundamental challenge presented by the digital file-sharing revolution.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Issues / THE ZEIT GIST
Apr 13, 2010

'Sambo' racism row reignites over kids' play

"Little Black Sambo, Sambo, Sambo/His face and hands are completely black/Even his butt is completely black."
JAPAN
Jan 15, 2010

Tokyo library reaching out to foreign community

Whether to read a Pulitzer Prize-winning author in English, flick through global editions of Vogue magazine or delve into foreign encyclopedias, the Tokyo Metropolitan Library wants more foreigners to visit and take advantage of its free multilingual resources.
LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL: KEYES' POINT
Sep 2, 2009

Conservativism: hoshushugisha or hankakumeisha

"Professor Keyes, you're drunk (yopparatta, 酔っ払った)! Ha ha!"
LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL
Apr 22, 2009

An era of translation by everybody, for everybody

The Internet has brought us closer together than ever before, or so the cliche goes. But has it really?
Japan Times
JAPAN
Sep 12, 2008

Can YouTube cure political apathy?

Thanks to video-sharing Web sites like YouTube, it has become easier to broadcast and share video clips with the world, whether it's a short film shot with a cell phone or an elaborately choreographed movie.
Japan Times
LIFE / Digital
Dec 26, 2007

The biggest Internet-related stories of 2007

As we wind down on 2007, it's a good time to look back and see how much the Internet landscape has changed in the last year.
LIFE / Language / KANJI CLINIC
Oct 16, 2007

Self-study sites welcome you to the world of kanji

When I first suggested in this column using Internet resources for learning kanji in 2001, a Yahoo search yielded 12,700 hits for "kanji learning." That number has now reached a staggering 1.4 million. New, sophisticated online kanji self-study resources are increasingly enabling foreign kanji learners...
Japan Times
LIFE / Style & Design / ON: DESIGN
Dec 26, 2006

Easy Desk Aluminum, Waste Me Not Calendars, Plusminuszero's Humidifer, Metaphys' celtis game

The new year brings with it a perfect opportunity to make life improvements, or at least pretend to do so. This month's column, therefore, is about making you more productive, better organized (with a touch of eco-related ingenuity), enhancing the air around you -- as well as adding a bit of fun to our...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Nov 24, 2006

Watch this MySpace

W ith sites already running in Europe and Australia, U.S. social networking site MySpace finally landed in Japan last week, squaring up against the all-conquering homegrown service Mixi.
JAPAN
Feb 24, 2006

OhmyNews to hit Japan through Softbank tieup

Softbank Corp. has announced it will contribute 693 million yen to form a joint venture with South Korea's OhmyNews Co. in Tokyo in March to publish a Japanese edition of the online news service.
EDITORIALS
Dec 25, 2004

The year of the blog

Whether you're sick to death of the word "blog" or have no idea what it means, you are equally abreast of the times, linguistically speaking. Merriam-Webster, the U.S. dictionary publisher, recently declared it the most looked-up term on its Internet site this year, not counting profanities and perennial...

Longform

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