How do you keep up with Japan?

[bill937ca]

How do you keep up with what's going in Japan other than what Kato releases and our alphabet soup of dealers has in stock? For the most part I use RSS for this.

 

Japanese Culture and Society

 

I usually can learn something new from Muza-chan's Gate to Japan.  I just found a captivating flower shop photo today that has lots details calling out to be modeled. I first came across Muza-chan's Gate in late 2009 when it published 7 Reasons Why Japanese Trains are Different

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Another web site in my RSS feed is Shibuya 246 written by an American living in Japan. It has interesting articles including some railway coverage and large, very good photos.

 

News

 

There are various sources for English language news from Japan.

 

Daily Yomiuri Online is published by The Daily Yomiuri, Japan's most influential newspaper and the owner of the Yomiuri Giants.

 

A couple of other online news sources from Japan include:

 

The Mainchi Daily News

Japan Times

 

Tokyo Time

 

Ever wonder what time it is in Tokyo? Timeandddate.com will give you the current date and time in Tokyo along with the weather.  If its 3AM Sunday morning and you send an email to a dealer it may take a little while to get an answer.

[scott]

This is a great thread idea, Bill.

[miyakoji]

 

This is a great thread idea, Bill.

indeed.  Right now I can think of three sources of information for railway news, http://railf.jp/news/ , http://rail-uploader.khz-net.com/ , and a few youtube contributors like aomonoya, karibajct, JRwehksf‬‏, ayokoi, syaso, nimo5, and tobu2181.  I've also been watching quashlo's posts on SSC since Bikkuri mentioned them.  For general information, I check a few major English news sites like Asahi and Mainichi, some boneheaded sites like japantoday, and a few Japanese news sites like Sanyo Shimbun and Ehime Shimbun, although my reading level isn't up to it.

[brill27mcb]

How do you keep up with what's going in Japan other than what Kato releases and our alphabet soup of dealers has in stock?

...

 

 

I just read your postings, Bill! 

 

Rich K.

[bill937ca]

I forgot to mention You Tube.  Nothing like seeing what's happening in a video. I subscribe to 217 You Tube channels and usually look the updates about once a day to see if there is anything I want to watch.  What do I subscribe to?  Basically anything that is completely Japanese trains or Japanese model trains.

[gmat]

Back when I had a full time job, I used to buy all four of the local English language newspapers with an occasional International Herald Tribune as it used to be 440 yen per issue. When I started in 1980,(3 year stay) the Daily Yomiuri was 80 yen, compared with the 100 yen for other newspapers. I enjoyed the Yomuri because it had the Observer supplement on Sundays, but I couldn't get behind a paper that also ran the Giants. Kind of like if Fox had run the Yankees. Then as time went by, the English locals started dropping out. The first was the Mainichi Daily News. I used to like the range of articles. I also used to love reading the Wai Wai and continued reading it online until complaints about some of the posts lead to its banishment. They published underbelly stuff from such rags like Shukan Post that you can't easily find in English. Then the Asahi Evening News piggybacked with the Herald, which had dropped down to a more reasonable 160 yen. The Japan Times had more pages than all of the others save the Herald, which was mostly Euro/America centered. The section on Japan topics in the Japan Times was rather good. But I mostly got it because it had the (at that time) large job section on Mondays. By getting the Asahi (left) and Japan Times,(center right) you got a wider viewpoint of local news but often, the difference wasn't much. Now Asahi has dropped its association with the Herald, which has also slimmed down its pages noticeably. I hardly buy a newspaper anymore and mostly read Japan Today online. I notice that it has a wider range of articles and topics that even the Japan Times doesn't cover. I would see stuff on the Japanese TV news and morning Wide Shows that occasionally would appear first on Japan Today but would't show up on Japan Times online. The Mainich Daily News hardly updates its articles and the Daily Yomiuri wasn't different enough to make me want to bookmark it either. There used to be more bilingual news but over the years, it shrank down to just NHK at 7:00 and 9:00 in the evenings. There is a lot more in Japanese across the channels. But even NHK won't repeat some of the more interesting segments in its bilingual  broadcast. I will sometimes get an interesting comment from my student, but we don't often discuss the news.

One interesting observation, is that as my Japanese is limited, I will often notice nonverbal clues. If you watch the announcers's face, especially after a video bit is aired, you can often get his/her 'honne' feelings, rather than the 'tatemae' that comes out in the segment. You'd be surprised how different it is from the feeling of the segment and how it can also influence the audience's feelings on the news.

 

Best wishes,

Grant

[Kabutoni]

How do you keep up with what's going in Japan other than what Kato releases and our alphabet soup of dealers has in stock? For the most part I use RSS for this.

 

Direct video-calling with my girlfriend at a daily basis :P She shares news with me, mostly about the earthquake and such. Sometimes about trains as well.

[Nick_Burman]

Through this forum , through other J-trains forums and groups in the Internet and also through scraps of news articles posted in said forums and also in this group. Less regularly I read other people's blogs (Kumo's for instance). I also have one friend who has relatives in Kyushu and sometimes I refer questions to him, although I have learnt to be wary of some of his answers - being a nissei he sees Japan through the eyes of a Brazilian so at times his answers seem to be a tad biased.

 

As soon as I get over a Civil Service entry exam I'll see if the Bunkyo (Brazilian Society for Japanese Culture, the body which represents the Japanese community in Brazil) has something in the way of courses about Japanese culture...

 

 

Cheers NB

[bikkuri bahn]

I live in Japan and get most of my info from "native" sources, but hypothetically, if I were abroad,  would look at the usual eiji shimbun (Daily Yomiuri, Japan Times, etc.) but are boring as hell, except for some columns (Kevin Short's nature column in the DY is excellent, he happens to be a California native like me).  Online, I like Japan Probe for the trashy and entertainment stuff, and Ampontan for serious commentary, though I hold different political views from the owner of that site (mainly his U.S. political views, w/ Japan politics I agree more with him, his observations of foreign media reporting on Japan are dead-on).  Japan Today I hate with a passion, but sometimes am forced to resort to that site as they have translated articles from subscriber-only news agencies like Kyodo.