Due to a sudden surge in real-world work, I don’t have time to post anything.

Please stand by.

Well, as always happens every so often, many of our current team of JAPUNDIT contributors seem to be off doing other things that need to be done, so it has come time to add some new blood to the mix.

If you are living in Japan or if you have some intimate connection with Japan, and if you are able to express yourself reasonably well, you would be welcome.

Rules for contributors are virtually the same as those for contributors; mainly, no U.S. politics or policy debates.

We would prefer to have at least one contribution a week, but we really don’t enforce that rule very strongly.

Please drop us a line at contact[at]japundit.com if you are interested.

Following are some results from a listener survey we conducted for the Japan Talk podcast.

We got more than 400 responses, and I would like to thank everyone who took the time to participate.

Your age:
25-34: 35.08%
35-44: 20.16%
45-54: 16.23%
21-24: 13.61%
18-20: 7.07%
55+: 5.50%
13-17: 2.09%
under 13: 0.26%

What a strange day it has been in Kanto today.

As I mentioned this morning, I was in Tokyo all day (just go back about an hour ago), and the weather was violent throughout the entire day. On the way in on the train, a lightning strike disabled some switches, which caused the train I was on to make an unscheduled stop along the way. We were instructed to get off and take another train along a different line, which worked, but also ended up making me an hour late for my appointments.

After dinner with the Mr. Pink, it was time to head back out to the JAPUNDIT Media Complex, but during the trip back the lightning strikes along the line caused the train to stop three times along the way.

As soon as I got back, I started putting some posts together for the early morning hours,　but was interrupted three times when lightning strikes caused the power to go out.

It is still pretty rough out there, but we hope to have things back to normal on Wednesday (Japan Time).

Due to a hectic schedule that will have be out of the office all day today, posting will most likely be light.

There will be things going on at Japan News Junkie, though.

JAPUNDIT has become quite the talk of the Japanese Internet, which has been boiling over with anger over the now-defunct Mainichi Wai Wai.

It seems that someone has picked up on this JAPUNDIT post that quotes from a Wai Wai column we found particularly amusing because it was so incredibly outlandish. Of course, we intentionally inserted the Wai Wai name into the report as a signal to readers that the information contained in it was at the least sensationalized and the most totally made up.

Most of the comments I have seen seem to take issue with the Mainichi for allowing such things to be published under their name in English. Though Wai Wai sourced much, if not all, of its material from Japanese language weekly magazines, most of the ire seems directed against the fact that it was presented in English for the world to see. I did not see much talk of anyone taking issue with the weekly magazines.

Some are saying that Mainichi should be prosecuted for promoting underage sex.

One comment said that since such information is printed in the newspaper, everyone will believe it.

One girl wrote about how, when she read this report while riding the bus, she burst into tears, and ended up crying herself to sleep that night out of shame.

Another young lady declared that she hated the way “Europeans and Americans” were talking about this story, and then went on to complain that the JAPUNDIT slogan (Japan - A whole lot more than raw fish) made her mad because it is insulting to Japan!?!

Blogging sure is fun, isn’t it?

We recently had a the following question sent in by a listener of our Japan Talk podcast.

I’m going to Japan this August to see my relatives and taking a few friends along with me, the problem is I heard from a couple people that, there’s a chance that if you take your laptop the Japanese border customs will check your laptop, as they’re doing in the US, and if they find any mp3 or movies downloaded they will take action.

Is this true? My relatives seem to know nothing about it and my friends and I wanted to take our laptops to dump our pictures that we take with our cameras, we would greatly appreciate some help from you or from the other listeners if they know something about this, thanks a lot!

Are there any frequent international travelers out there who can provide any information about this?

Are customs officials at Narita checking laptops for illegally downloaded mp3 and movie files?

Mr. Pink writes in to alert us to the following passage over at Investing In Japan.

In “Hollowing Out, Tokyo Style,” FT Alphaville’s Gwen Robinson does a fine job of capturing an ongoing, and now accelerating human resources conundrum. While it seems like there’s no shortage lately of fake Japundits (not to be confused with the real Japundit, who is simply trying to keep it real on the cultural front) saying to go long Japanese stocks, boots-on-the-ground evidence provides further insight into the opaque.

JAPUNDIT reader Brandon Butler sent us a screen shot of an actual play that came up in a recent Scrabulous game.

Looks like a winner to me!

Just a note to let everyone know what I will be out from today until late Friday evening.

I am not taking a computer along with me, so I will not be posting. Because of this, things may be a bit thin for the next few days.

found an interesting article on the wordpress platform. since japundit is a growing site with some past issues involving the site going down i thought it might make an interesting read for both the casual japundit and those who run their own blog/vlog based on the wordpress platform

We’ve just received word that famed JAPUNDIT contributor Marie Mockett has accepted an offer from Graywolf Press to publish her first novel, Picking Bones from Ash, which is scheduled to start hitting bookstores in 2009.

Marie tells us:

I’m so excited to have a home with Graywolf. They are considered a “small big press” and a “large small press” which is the kind of imprecise categorization with which I’m comfortable. This past year, they published Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson, which the New York Times named one of the top ten novels of 2007. Other authors you may have heard of are Charles Baxter, Percival Everett, Benjamin Percy. It’s a great time for me to be part of this particular house, when they are so visible and receiving so much attention. Also, because of the size of the house, I will have (and already feel) tremendous enthusiasm and support for my book, which is enormously important for a first novel. I don’t feel that I am competing with other novelists, or that marketing will suddenly drop my project in favor of someone younger and hotter . . . Graywolf distributes through FSG (Farrar Straus and Giroux) which means that my book will be in all the big stores–chains and all–and that you should be able to find it wherever you are. It’s an interesting partnership–Graywolf and FSG–two little elite companies working together.

What else. Graywolf will seek a UK publisher for me, which means you in the UK might also be able to find the book. We’ll see what else materializes.

I know from what Marie has told me that she has been working extremely hard on this book, first to get it written and then to get it published, and I am sure that she is very pleased to have the “business” part of the writing business behind her.

Please join me in congratulating Marie and wishing her the best of success with her new publisher.

Has something happened recently that we here at JAPUNDIT have missed?

After a long period of visitor numbers holding virtually steady at a certain level, JAPUNDIT has, over the past week, had a precipitous drop in visitors to about half of what we normally get. This all happened over a three or four day period, and we are at a loss to figure out why.

In addition, our comments discussions have become very quiet of late.

I have been extremely busy with real-world work that has kept me from writing as much as I want, but I have had similar periods in the past without seeing a drop like we saw this week.

Our RSS subscriptions remain steady and the podcast continues to grow.

If anyone has any idea about what happened, please let us know.

Be sure to check out Overoften’s Kumamoto Diary for a fabulous account of the life and times of an Englishman residing at the foot of Mt. Aso.

Japan-based online shop J-List is looking to hire a native English speaker who’s already living in Japan, preferably the Tokyo/Kanto area.

If you have useful knowledge of and passion for anime, manga and general “otaku” culture, especially currently popular shows and trends, you may be the type of person we need.

Experience with Photoshop and experience with web design are also plusses.

Click here for more information and an application.

It looks like our good folks who host our site here have done what was required to get us back to normal.

This is the longest that JAPUNDIT has ever been down, and though I enjoyed the break, its time to get the show back on the road.

We’re experiencing some technical hiccups at Japundit, which means that posts may be delayed until we get them sorted out.

Please bear with us for the time being. ‘Normal’ service will be resumed as soon as possible.

Apologies to those who were experiencing trouble accessing JAPUNDIT over the past couple of hours (10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Japan Standard Time).

The site was down because some warped soul decided it would be fun to hack our Word Press system and insert malicious code here and there.

Most of the blame is with me, however, for failing to keep our Word Press version up to date.

All is back to normal, so let’s blog on!

Today is the third birthday of Japundit and the second birthday of the Japan Talk podcast. . .

Thanks to everyone for dropping by, taking part, and listening in!

I recently received an email message from Kaspar Schröder, a filmmaker from Denmark who reads JAPUNDIT regularly.

Kaspar tells me that he planning to make a documentary about Japan, especially some of the interesting things he reads about here on JAPUNDIT. He says. . .

I do have some thoughts on subjects that could make a good documentary, but thought that I might ask you, if you have a subject, story, gadget, group of people or something, that you think “someone should make a documentary about that…”?

Kaspar hastens to add that is project will be a “small” film, because a major work requires too many permissions and applications. He is looking to work with a very small crew, consisting of him, a sound guy, and an interpreter. Something where there is a story within a story, along the lines of Tales of an Osaka Love Thief: Inside a Japanese host club.

So what do you think Japundits and Japundettes?

Any good ideas for Kaspar?