Short links about Japan

New book, Tokyo Vice. Boston Globe review: Shining a spotlight on Japan’s dark underside.

Cool set of photos of art exhibit at 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, japan.

Also see: 9 h - nine hours capsule hotel in Kyoto.

One othose goofy random things: Japan creates perfect accessory for female caddies!

The short reading list

Trendy Japanese Flock to Hybrids. New York Times. The third generation Prius was in June the best selling car in Japan.

Japan’s Jobless Rate at Six-Year High, Prices Drop. Bloomberg. Unemployment at 5.4% in Japan, half of the U.S. rate. Deflation continues as well.

'The Cove' movie review: Exposing the cruelty of Japan's dolphin industry. NJ.com. But this film is less a work of journalism than a call to activism, it writes.

Cooking With Rice. New York Times. A blog post by Tara Parker-Pope has some appealing recipes.

Google Book Search worries Japanese authors

Irate Japanese authors see Google Book Search as 'black ships' of digital era -- The Mainichi Daily News.

Interesting piece. The thrust of the argument is that books written in English get higher rankings in Google's Book Search. The article's undercurrent of U.S. cultural hegemony via search engine dominance is balanced and interesting.

Related reading: Japan After Japan: Social and Cultural Life from the Recessionary 1990s to the Present (Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society) by Tomiko Yoda, Harry Harootunian, and Sabu Kosh.

A Posthumous Existence

I just read an article, Keat's Afterlife in the New York Review of Books. It's about his last three months of the poet John Keats before he died at 25.

It is a stirring look about how Keats assembled his words, thoughts and ideas in those final months. It's a review of Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography by Stanley Plumly. Excerpt:

Stanley Plumly's profoundly humane evocation of Keats's life and his immediate afterlife is better than magisterial, for it is masterly. Characteristic of the attentive powers is his pausing upon Keats's word past: "my real life having past." The last word does double duty and more than duty, this having passed into the past

The NYRB reivew probably won't be freely available for too long before it is moved into paid archives.

Asian New York Film Festival

I really love this trailer for the Asian New York Film Festival. It describes itself as hypnotic and, honest, it's point-in-fact true. I don't know how much of this is available via Netflix.

Link to sponsor blog, Subway Cinema.

Google's new translation works for Japanese

I've started using Google's translation capability since my language skills are awful. And so far, I'm impressed.

Here's an example:  Yahoo's Japan portal page  translated:  Look at the results.

Here's a translation of the homepage of a news outlet, Miyanichi Press  The really nice part of the translation is that once you are on a translated page, it will translated a link off that page. The translation isn't perfect but it's very capable and clear.

Imagine the potential and what it might mean for bloggers, in particular, who want to reach out across language barriers.

Toyota Leaders: An Executive Guide

Vertical last month released The Toyota Leaders: An Executive Guide. From the title it sounds as if author Masaaki Satoan has produced an insiders guide, but Vertical's plug about the book is intriguing. The publisher writes that Satoan presents his case that Toyota’s strengths, including efficiency on the floor, cannot be understood or emulated outside the context of tradition—not Japan’s, but Toyota’s own.