Freyburg

According to an article in the Independent, maybe. Recent losses posted by economic powerhouses like Sony and Panasonic bring the point home. And Apple is upending practically all of the rules with products like the iPhone (which isn’t popular in Japan, but changed the landscape everywhere else.), and many of Japan’s neighbours are catching up with better and cheaper hardware.

With the economic crisis hitting Japan at an even more torrid pace than the rest of the world, many former high flyers are now moving into “net rooms,” which are essentially closets with an internet connection so you can look for a job. And when you think about it, what more do you need? What you might want is another story, but if things get worse here, we might see more net rooms in North America.

Japan, it has been noted time and again, is a weird place. One of the stranger aspects of their culture is the quasi-legitimacy of the organized crime organization known as the Yakuza. Reporter Jake Adelstein, who was the first gaijin to work at the Yomuiri Shinbun’s Japanese edition, covered the Yakuza for more than a decade and is now under constant threat from the shadowy villains of Japan’s underworld. But that hasn’t stopped him from telling the Washington Post about the unique relationship between the Yakuza and the Japanese government, or how deep into Japanese society the mob’s tendrils go.

Joi Ito, who was recently named as the head of Creative Commons and with whom I once had the pleasure of drinking a few beers with, recently explained from Cannes how the world of Creative Commons and the traditional media are at odds, and how “big media” misses the point that user generated content is all about authenticity and connections between people. Watch his impromptu talk below:

Although it hasn’t been widely reported in Western media, the fact that novels for mobile phones outsold print books in Japan in the past year did briefly hit the news this past summer… the fact that people in Japan regularly read books on their cell phones is a story in itself though.

After Wired (still the usual outlet for tech stories to break into the mainstream) wrote it up early in 2007, there was a similar story a few months later in the Economist, and finally just a month or two ago, The Wall Street Journal did a small piece on it. However, surely the fact that the country showing us where mobile technology is headed shunning print books for e-books deserves a bit more media attention.

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