Archive for August 2003
Channel 2
I've just stumbled across Hideki Furukawa's Q&A With the Founder of Channel 2 on the Japan Media Review. So Channel 2 is a big talk shop; according to Furukawa they get 600 million page views a month. That makes Slashdot, which gets 110 million page views per month (source) small by comparison and Metafilter, which gets 6 million page views per month (source), tiny; never mind how inaccurate these figures probably are.
Are there any Channel 2 users in the house? I'm particularly interested in the oft-repeated claim that the web is going to change the face of public discourse in Japan, which has a press that is often accused of succumbing to self-censorship and doing nothing beyond rehashing the media releases issued by corporations and government bodies. Does Channel 2 give the people the voice that the press denies them?
Also, does the completely anonymous format really help? According to Ishimura it prevents flames and keeps long-time users from wielding authority over others. The former point goes against my experience with English-speaking online communities, none of which, as far as I'm aware, insist on absolute anonymity: I find that people get more comfortable with each other the better they know who they are interacting with. The second point I find particularly astounding: if you want a successful online community, you have to introduce anonymity as a safeguard against the seniority principle, one of the most deeply entrenched traditions in Japanese society?
Any thoughts?
Kazu-san
Kazuaki, called Kazu by most people, does not study at the English Department but at the Human Development Department, and he studies English together with us.
When I first met him, he looked very businesslike because he wore a suit for the part time job he was doing at the time. He was teaching at a cram school, was very busy, and seemed to be tired. But now he sometimes wears a T-shirt with a cartoon character so he comes across as far more casual.
He is a very good English speaker. I'm always amazed when I hear him speak English because I cannot express my thoughts in English very well, so sometimes I wish I could speak English like him. Sometimes he is like an actor because he is very expressive and he talks with lots of gestures. Some time ago in an English class we had a role-play in which Kazu and I were sisters and we had to persuade other students to become vegetarians. I could not express my thoughts as I expected, but Kazu played a good sister promoting vegetarianism; he explained his thoughts well and he helped me. I was thankful for his help and listened closely to him without playing my role because I was just thinking about how fluently he spoke.
In your self-introduction you said you were very talkative, but I don't think so. I like watching you talking because you talk in a very lively way with many kinds of gestures. You often move your arms, and especially your hands. When you talk in class, you always create a sociable atmosphere, so please talk more -- I want to know more about you.
What happens twice happens three times
I went to Kyoto with my friend. Kyoto reminds you of temples and other tourist attractions, I suppose. However, that is not the only thing you can choose. I visited the northern part of Kyoto, the Tango peninsula. The seafood was really nice and I enjoyed the hot spring, or onsen, there, too. The next day we went to Ishizu city, which is famous for soba, buckwheat noodles. And then to Kobe.
Well, I enjoyed this trip very much, but I experienced some awful things. First, on our way to the hotel I saw a man lying on the street. He was hit by a car while he was riding his motor scooter. When we were passing by, we wanted to help, but other people were already there and helping him. So we kept on driving. Soon after this, a heavy rain set in and suddenly there was lots of lightning. All the traffic lights were off and we were at a loss. A few minutes later the lights came back.
The next day, though the weather forecast said it would be rainy, it was fine and we were happy. However, when we were in Kobe it started raining again and there was lightning and thunder again, too. On the highway lightning came down thick and fast and then we saw another accident: multiple collisions. There were three cars that crashed into each other and behind them two more cars piled up.
I hope an old proverb won't come true this time.
Editorial
So, what's going on? And where is it all headed? I wish I knew. I was taking a couple of photographs on Saturday morning, then edited them and bunched them into a gallery; when I was finished rather late in the evening and wanted to post the link to Tawawa, the site was gone.
Things went downhill from there.
I didn't immediately contact the host, but when the site still hadn't returned on Sunday morning, I sent a message to them. They had been talking about a "server move" for weeks on end; some things had been a bit wonky during that period, some things had actually improved, but an actual outage hadn't occurred yet -- until then. They never got back to me, but on Monday a message appeared on the host's front page saying that "several issues have been sorted out, some are still being worked on" and that "everything should be sorted out in a matter of days".
People were getting impatient on the host's support forum, particularly since nobody replied to the questions, neither in e-mail nor on the message board itself.
At some point some of the site came back, and it can be accessed at Tawawa's tilde address: Group Weblog, Zemi Note; both of these weblogs have lost all updates since mid-June, however, and the whole content management system has disappeared, along with a couple of other things. They may come back, they may not. If anyone knows, they're not telling.
Yesterday I lost patience waiting and set up the present Contingency Edition on the creative-writing.ch server which Franz Andres Morrissey kindly allowed me to use for this transition period. I also used the domain name registrar's DNS server to redirect incoming Tawawa.org traffic to the the current location. So here we are. How you doing?
If the host manages to sort out their difficulties "in a matter of days", we'll simply move back to the old place, hoping anything like this is not going to happen again; whether or not they'll be able to restore the data that has gone missing, I'd hate having to move the whole show to a new place, with or without the missing data.
What now, apart from the technical problems? Tawawa.org got started as a composition course in early April -- it ended with the final course session on 28 July, and the two remaining student portraits were scheduled to come in by Sunday, 10 August. It may continue outside the course framework: I offered assistance to anyone of the students who wanted to go on contributing to the site, and I was hoping other students, both graduate and undergraduate, would join the project and participate, much as they'd participate in some of the other extra-curricular activities offered here at the university.
I set up a mailing list on the old server, which was going to serve as the equivalent of the physical classroom in which we discussed the site and the writing, and I was just about to send out invitations to sign up for the list when down it went with everything else. It may come back if and when the other stuff comes back, or it may not, in which case I'll set up something else.
The iffy point is simply that I have never managed to assess the level of interest there is among students in continuing. Everyone who was involved in the project has been given a login to the new server, so, folks: if you're still game, post away! We may or may not have lost the contributions since mid-June, but I'm fairly sure we'll be able to move to the other server all contributions you make here.
And I'll be backing stuff up in the future. Promise.
Hoisting the Net
Back on Friday, Typhoon Etau swept through town.
Ahead of the storm, the golf range in front of Mie University took down its netting to prevent it from getting damaged. They rigged it back up on Saturday morning; here are a few photos I took.