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Google News is a depressing read for a journalist. It shows you how many news outlets depend on copy-and-paste reporting, regurgitating the same press releases and quotes in an infinite loop. Who needs all these clones of the same story, with the same basic facts and sources?

This occurred to me a few weeks ago when I was sent to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) to cover it for an IT magazine in Finland. The story assignment was the typical “go around, see what the trends are, find a couple of non-mainstream gadgets.”

Events like CES used to be fun for gadget-loving journalists. You walked around, talked to people and filed a story once a night or at the end of the show. But in 2013, everything is different.

It is almost impossible to break any news at the event, because there are tens or hundreds of journalists covering the same press events, tweeting or live-blogging them with video. Speed is everything. How could I write anything significant for a monthly IT magazine that comes out two weeks after the show?

For PR departments in technology companies, this is a dream come true. Your press releases are not buried somewhere in the “news” section of your company web site, which has probably three unique visitors a week. Instead, your products get instant publicity in Gizmodo, Engadget, The Verge or CNET. Tech enthusiasts share those stories in social media. Eventually they are translated and copied to smaller tech websites around the world.

During the CES, I followed the most hyped topics on news.google.com. It was somewhat heartbreaking to see how many almost identical copies all the journalists covering CES produced. A search for “LG OLED CES” produced 1,307 sources. “Self-driving car CES” — 1,247 sources. “Lego EV3 CES” — 234 sources. This is just the English-language media.

There is nothing inherently wrong with having 1,307 LG OLED stories to choose from. However, when they all look the same, we have a problem — hundreds of copies of the same press release, slightly tweaked. And the more you have copies, the less value a single copy has. In the old days, when all the publications had their own, small print market, readers did not realize they were reading copies. Neither did advertisers.

But the Internet made all this transparent, and this is the main reason why traditional publishers are losing audiences, especially paying ones. Readers will not pay for stories they have already read elsewhere. It does not matter if your brand is 100 years old or you used to be the IT or business publication for the decision makers. A copy is a copy, even behind a paywall.

What is even worse, advertisers realize this as well. They are not willing to pay a premium for a product that is a duplicate, no matter if it is a digital or a print copy.

From a journalistic perspective, this is both good news and bad. The bad news is that fewer stories are needed overall as more and more people cut out the middleman and go straight to the source. This means fewer jobs in traditional media. So if you notice yourself writing the same stories as everyone else, or even worse, using copy-paste more than before, run. Your job will become extinct.

However, there is some good news, too. The abundance of copies forces journalists to find their own voice, niche and style. This is why opinion pieces and columns are doing pretty well on the “most-read” story lists. A personality, at least for now, cannot be broken down to zeroes and ones and copied to hundreds of other sites. It is no coincidence that in the exclusive story of Google Glass in The Verge, there were more pictures of the editor-in-chief, Joshua Topolsky, than there were pictures of Google Glass.

The new idea of “more personal” journalism is a challenge, not just for newsrooms but for journalism schools, as well. When I was in journalism school at the end of last century, I learned that journalists create similar stories when they are based on pure facts. You put 10 journalists in a room, give them the same information, and get 10 identical stories.

Nevertheless, as we are moving from an industrial age to a digital one, this notion of a journalist as a kind of “fact mechanic” is slowly transforming. The Internet still needs a few good, solid news pieces about CES that are based on facts. But we don’t need the massive overflow of copies or near-duplicate stories. A computer already does that faster and better with some of the business and sports news.

With computer-generated journalism, the old quote “information wants to be free” is becoming a reality. And it is happening exactly the way Stewart Brand predicted: “the cost of getting it (information) out is getting lower and lower all the time.”

Luckily for journalists, the free part is only half of the quote. It actually begins with “information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable.” As Brand points out, some of the things you read or see can literally change your life.

Finding life-changing stories every day might be an impossible task. So start from the other end of the quote, by dumping the low-cost stories. Stop making copies – unless they are produced by a computer.

Start to look around in your organization for things that cannot be copied to zeroes and ones. Humans with personal style are a good start: who is the Andrew Sullivan or Kara Swisher of your newsroom? Or think about adopting a voice or style that is distinctive just for your publication. If you are a local newspaper, be fiercely local. Passionate about food, a sports team or cars? Let it show.

If nobody in the newsroom is wasting time making copies, journalists have more time to dig deeper, make that extra phone call and find another source. That is when you start producing the expensive information. As Brand would say: information so valuable that it might change lives.

Japan has one of the fastest aging populations in the world and one of the lowest fertility rates (fewer than 1.3 children per woman). Much of Japanese industry is now realigning to face the demographically inevitable, and the computer and Internet industries are no exception. If UN Population Division predictions are correct, by 2050 more than 40 percent of Japanese could be over 60. Next year the first of seven million baby boomers, born in the early post-war years, will reach the Japanese retirement age of 60. With time and money on their hands, they are predicted to go online in droves. In Japan, the new generation of Internet users could well be the older generation.

There are already signs of a shift. The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications’ 2005 white paper reports that 26 percent of people over 60 were using the Internet in 2005, up from 10 percent in 2001. Along with an increase in the number of children going online, it’s a sign that surfers have become a more diverse group than the men in their 20s, 30s and 40s who caught the first Internet wave.

In particular, the Internet is attracting men in their 50s and older, says Souichiro Nishimura, marketing vice president of market research company Net Ratings. “It’s not just that the number of men over 50 using the Internet has increased… the amount of time the group spends online has increased greatly, too.” He points to a survey last year by the Japan Advertisers Association which found that, for the first time, 50-something and older men made up the largest segment of net users in the mid-morning and mid-afternoon.

Perhaps some of those middle-aged Internet users have been attracted by Japan’s active and growing blogging community. As of April 2006, there were more than 8.7 million blogs in Japan, almost twice as many as just six months before, according to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications. Providers have been quick to accommodate older bloggers. Nifty, one of Japan’s largest Internet providers, has set up a special blog service for seniors, called Golog. It is a counterpart to their popular Cocolog service. Sixty percent of Golog’s users are men; 22 percent in their 50s and almost 10 percent in their 60s. “Blogs are popular with middle-aged and older people,” says Hajime Inoue of Nifty’s Promotion Department. “The reason is that they are easier to set up and update than HTML webpages. If someone explains how to do it carefully, it’s easy for users to start on their blog.”

Printing company Toppan has also set up a blogging service for seniors, called Re:log. The site’s top page reads: “Of middle-aged men, by middle-aged men, for middle-aged men. A hobby-orientated blog community.” Below are links to featured blogs on photography, travel and food. Re:log Product Manager Hidetaka Yazawa explains that they have “narrowed down” the service’s functions to make it easier for older readers to use. Most users are in their 50s and the oldest in their 80s. The site provides a pared-down selection of blog templates and concentrates on the core functions of posting text and photos. Toppan is also cooperating with Mamion, a chain of computer schools, to produce manuals for senior citizens explaining how to set up blogs.

Ninety-five percent of Re:log’s users are men. “We started with the assumption that men don’t have much of a social network compared to women,” says Yazawa. “Especially in Japan, when men leave their company they don’t have anyone to socialize with.” The blogs provide an opportunity for retirees to make friends online. Eventually, Toppan plans to fund the service with advertisements targeted at their middle-aged and elderly male users, probably for photography, travel, adult learning or financial services.

Japanese providers have also set up general portal sites for senior surfers. One, NEC’s Station 50 includes news, travel and financial information. In mid May one front page item was a nostalgic feature article on the events of 1974. Another portal site, Yahoo Japan’s Yahoo Second Life, had articles on baby boomer retirement, on how to use Internet search engines and on shopping for fishing equipment.

But market research company Net Ratings’s Nishimura points out that such sites have not been particularly successful so far. “Users have become much more Internet-literate recently. A single portal site with all the information assembled in one place isn’t necessarily what’s needed.” He argues that it is more important to provide content in a friendly way for senior citizens, such as using larger fonts.

Computer helplines also find themselves affected by the changing demographic of users. DIS Technical Service Co.Ltd says that they are getting more calls from senior citizens in the past couple of years. They now provide special training to their operators. “Older customers aren’t used to explaining precisely what they want to do with the computer,” says Manager Takeshi Fujioka. “[We train employees to] listen carefully to the customer and ask questions to find out what the problem is.”

For those senior citizens completely new to the keyboard and monitor, a large number of computer classrooms have popped up in Japan in the last decade. They have followed the first Internet wave, then the recent increase in broadband connection rates. (Japan now has one of the highest broadband penetration rates in the world at 16.4 percent). Home Computing Network (HCN) has opened more than 300 schools since 1996. The average age of their students is 60, and about three quarters are women, mostly housewives.

It was HCN that decided to open “Sereno Saloon,” the experimental school that aims to reach out to a different group than the chain’s regular customers. The students are in their 70s and 80s, rather than 50s and 60s, and in addition to learning basic computer skills, they use special “brain training” software developed by Kanji Akahori, a professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. The software is similar to popular software sweeping Japan at the moment, particularly software available for the Nintendo DS hand-held console.

The school also uses more analogue “anti-brain aging techniques.” In a small classroom with a semicircle of desks laid out in front of a digital whiteboard, students begin each class with finger exercises and performing tasks such as counting from 1 to 120 as fast as they can. One special class called “face exercise English” uses English pronunciation practice to rejuvenate facial muscles. The school also has a relaxation room with a massage chair and a virtual reality boxing game for light exercise.

“Normally, at a computer school you try and learn the skill as soon as possible,” says Nagatomi. Although students at HCN’s other schools typically progress though six-month beginner, regular and advanced courses then leave, HCN hopes that students at the brain training school will stay longer.

“Basically we want students to keep coming. There is no graduation,” says Nagatomi. They hope that students will see the classes more as a hobby or social activity than as goal-based study. The school is also more expensive than HCN’s other schools. A year’s worth of classes (about 70 to 80) starts from 220,000 yen [a little under $2,000]. HCN plans to introduce brain-training classes to other schools in their chain, too.

In Japan, where some older people have been enthusiastic technological early adopters, maybe it’s not so surprising that senior surfers are catching up with their juniors. “It’s a practical thing, that you can use in your daily life,” says Michiyo Onouchi, a 55-year-old housewife who has been studying computing in a small private class with a group of friends for a year. “I couldn’t do anything at first, I hadn’t touched a computer. We began from learning how to switch it on.” Now she couldn’t do without it. Among other things, she has learned how to surf the Internet, check the weather forecast and train timetables and make Japanese New Year’s greeting postcards. “My son lives in Germany, so the most useful has been learning to send e-mails and use chat programs like Skype,” says Onouchi cheerfully.

Softbank Corp. will help OhmyNews establish its Japanese branch, as Masayoshi Son, CEO and president of the Japanese Internet services company, and Oh Yeon Ho, founder and CEO of the Korean Internet newspaper, agreed to form a strategic partnership with the former promising to invest $11 million for a 12 percent stake.

The two companies jointly embarked on OhmyNews International Co. Ltd. to spread participatory journalism worldwide, and the Japanese edition is its first venture, according to OhmyNews. With the investment from Softbank, OhmyNews will also expand its Internet television channel OhmyTV, according to a company statement.

OhmyNews draws more than 700,000 repeat visitors daily, and once exceeded 25 million page views per day in a country of about 48 million, the company said. The site has been especially popular among young people, who elected progressive lawyer Roh Moo Hyun president in 2002.

The online news site started with 727 citizen reporters but could not afford to publicize its embryonic venture then, said Jean K. Min, communications director at OhmyNews International. The number of citizen reporters has grown to more than 41,000, including more than 700 overseas who report in English for its international page.

“It just grew. That’s the nature of the Web,” Min said. “Once we make superb news contents, that will be enough to draw many people’s attention.”

With its “guerrilla strategy” and concept that “every citizen is a reporter,” OhmyNews dealt a severe blow to the conservative mainstream media in South Korea. Its Japanese edition, however, will not compete with mainstream media such as Yomiuri Shimbun or the Asahi Shimbun, Min said. “We are creating a totally different news model. We do not necessarily follow the formula developed by media professionals.”

The announcement of the launch of OhmyNews Japan touched off blogosphere discussion about whether the Japanese edition of the Korean online newspaper could take hold in Japan, provoking some harsh responses from naysayers.

Tsuruaki Yukawa, a member of the editorial board at Jiji Press and author of “Will the Internet Kill Newspapers?” said in his blog that OhmyNews “flourished under certain conditions unique to South Korea. It is extremely difficult to replicate that success in another country.” But, “depending on how, it is not impossible to do,” he added. “OhmyNews Japan needs a lot of money to recruit good writers and draw many people.”

Yukawa, however, said he could not understand why Softbank would invest that much capital into citizen journalism.

Yoshio Kisa, a former Yomiuri Shimbun reporter who until recently was the editor of Tsukasa Internet News Site, pointed out that the number of those who visit the Web site of the OhmyNews has dwindled compared with its peak three years ago. He said he believes the company might have financial problems.

“First and foremost, they need financial support from Softbank and the launch of its Japanese edition seems to just come along,” Kisa told the audience at a symposium held on March 11, organized by Japan Alternative News for Justice and New Culture (JANJAN).

Takeaki Nukii, a Softbank spokesman flatly denied Kisa’s assertion. He said the company is providing indirect support for OhmyNews to launch its Japanese edition, but will not be involved in editorial management.

Unlike in South Korea, citizen journalism has not gathered steam in Japan. Some attribute it to a lack of involvement of professional journalists while others point out that many Japanese tend not to express themselves.

Ken Takeuchi, president of JANJAN, agreed Japanese national character plays a large role.

“This is a society in which it is hard to demonstrate one’s individuality,” said Takeuchi. “When one says something different from what many say, one feels isolated. One is also reluctant to do what others don’t do.”

Channel 2 provides a telling example of this. It is one of Japan’s most popular online destinations, its largest Internet bulletin board, and is almost completely anonymous. Every day about 2 million messages are posted to the virtually taboo-free discussion board, including anonymous grievances about company problems, leaked information and slanderous comments.

With the number of bloggers increasing exponentially, however, Takeuchi has seen a big change in the national character.

“We used to think that we never let anyone see our own diary, but bring it to the graveyard. However, more and more people want to show theirs to the public. The time has changed,” Takeuchi explained. “Simply put, the Internet has been changing the national character.”

Koichiro Nakamura, a citizen reporter who formerly wrote for the Livedoor portal also says he believes participatory journalism will take root in Japan. However, he said, one of the problems is that those currently involved in citizen journalism dwell on what the mainstream media should or should not do.

“They have yet to define what participatory journalism means,” Nakamura said. “They should strain their ears to catch citizens’ opinions. It is not until you pull together citizens’ voice[s] that participatory journalism comes into power.”

OhmyNews Japan seeks cooperation from citizen reporters, freelance writers, as well as major media. In addition, the company will also pay attention to the growth of civic groups and non-profit organizations.

Since the 1995 Kobe earthquake, which killed more than 6,400 people, grassroots activism has established itself in a society accustomed to government initiatives in solving social problems.

Spurred by delays in government relief operations following the 7.3 magnitude temblor a decade ago, Japanese citizens flocked to help out. Soon after the tragedy, volunteer groups and non-profit organizations began to spring up across the country. Since then, such groups have gradually played an important role in society although the mainstream media as well as political leaders appear to keep them on the margins.

“People are waiting for a chance to speak out,” said Min of OhmyNews International. “I don’t think there has been any practical platform [in Japan] which enables them to speak out. Once we give them the chance, you’ll see what happens.”

Kenichi Asano, a journalist and journalism professor at Doshisha University in Kyoto, said those who have negative views of the launch of OhmyNews Japan don’t want citizen journalism to flourish and civic society to grow.

Asano described the Japanese media industry as “the last bastion protected by the so-called convoy system.”

Many critics have long criticized the mainstream media for avoiding controversial topics and maintaining their symbiotic relationship with authority figures through the entrenched press club system.

However, the mainstream media rarely respond to such criticism, and there is virtually no self-examination.

In the past, some have attempted to crack the monolithic walls, but have not been successful, Asano said. What OhmyNews Japan “could do is to cover their taboo topics and criticize those in power.”

However, “it is not easy for OhmyNews to really take hold in Japan,” he said. Although they have been successful in South Korea, “they have to start from scratch in Japan. But they must flourish because this is probably the last chance to get Japanese journalism out of its moribund state.”

But those who crave more turn to 2-Channel (pronounced ni-channeru), a hugely popular Internet bulletin board where even facts that cannot legally be reported, such as the names of youth offenders, are posted.

Launched in 1999, 2-Channel now has some 2.5 million posts daily, ranging from messages about suicidal desires to celebrity gossip to advice on love, and is likely the largest online forum in the world. But its policy of allowing anonymous posts has drawn criticism that it facilitates the spread of false, libelous and private information. In response, founder Hiroyuki Nishimura said in a 2003 JMR interview: “Delivering news without taking any risk is very important to us. There is a lot of information disclosure or secret news gathered on Channel 2. Few people would post that kind of information by taking a risk. Moreover, people can only truly discuss something when they don’t know each other.”

Debito Arudou learned about 2-Channel’s laissez faire editorial policy the hard way. As a foreigner rights activist based in Hokkaido, Arudou is no stranger to controversy. He has sued a bathhouse in Otaru for barring foreigners and worked to convince other leisure establishments in the country to remove their “Japanese Only” signs. His work has raised hackles and earned him regular hate mail. But when he saw 2-Channel posts alleging he was a white supremacist and an advocate of racial discrimination, he demanded they be deleted. When that didn’t happen, in 2005 he sued 2-Channel for defamation of character and won 1.1 million yen ($9,280).

Japan Media Review: What is 2-Channel all about, and why is it popular?

Debito Arudou: 2-Channel is an Internet bulletin board where people can post on everything from the latest news to their favorite way of eating hakusai. It’s a great place to share views. Readers say you can always find a topic that interests you there. I’m not an aficionado of the place myself, as I’ve got enough to read every day, but I can see why it exists.  I have gotten tips in the past from the Hokkaido version of the BBS and found great hole-in-the wall hobbyist bread shops open only a few days of the week … but I digress.

JMR: How did you find out about the message on 2-Channel?

DA: I didn’t exactly go looking for it! (laughs) I get enough of this sort of hate mail sent directly to me in two languages every week.  The difference is, other people can read this hate mail too, and it stays up there acidifying the atmosphere.  It wasn’t hard to find, really. A friend notified me first in mid-2004, and asked what the hell I had said to incite such hatred in somebody else! I said I had said nothing of the sort and ignored it, which is the standard response. Then later on a couple of colleagues in the human rights community said the same, and I realized that this person or persons were carpet-bombing the lists hundreds of times with the same post.

The post, by the way, among other things called me a white supremacist, attributed quotes to me by name saying I believed Japan was a subordinate race and that racial discrimination was justified as long as it favored white people, especially when killing Iraqis. … You can see what I’m talking about at www.debito.org. I realized that I couldn’t leave this alone, especially since I had obviously never said any such things.  So I asked 2-Channel to take the posts down.

JMR: Ironically, 2-Channel has in-house rules (that are posted) against causing meiwaku to others and defamation. Why do you think someone would call you a white supremacist?

DA: I’ve been called everything under the sun, believe me.  Goes with the territory.  I just think some people get their jollies by tearing people down for sport, as any cursory read of Japan’s wild weeklies will demonstrate.  But I think that like spreading rumors around that somebody is a communist, a rapist, a racist, whatever, people are more likely to jump to negative conclusions than just calling me a four-eyed, fleshy-headed mutant who eats clover for breakfast. That’s how the comment I believed was gauged — to try and damage my character and my standing as an advocate for racial equality in Japan.

JMR: Why did you decide to sue 2-Channel?

DA: I can probably guess many readers see me as a “lawsuiter-at-the-drop-of-a-hat” type, but believe me, as in every other case I’ve undertaken, I’ve tried all other means.  In December 2004 through February 2005, I notified 2-Channel by e-mail at their designated address where you request deletions. They never answered. Nor did the defamatory posts come down.  So my lawyers contacted the owner, a Mr. Nishimura, by registered snail mail, several times. Returned by the post office unopened. We did check to make sure Mr. Nishimura was residing there, of course. So we sued. And believe it or not, Mr. Nishimura never answered any court communiques, never appeared in court, never offered any acknowledgment whatsoever. That’s irresponsible on all counts.

JMR: How does Japan’s Provider Responsibility Guidelines Law, which regulates ISP responsibility in and handling of Internet libel claims, guard against defamation in online speech?

DA: That’s something a specialist could better answer than I could. I basically just took the quotes to my lawyers, and they said I had a case. The posts were saying that I had said things which I had never said, and, most importantly, were attributed to me specifically by name. That seems to have been grounds enough. It was for the court to decide whether I had actually been damaged.

The Hokkaido BBS for 2-Channel has moderators, which remove posts that mention anyone by name. Any personal names, zap! But that doesn’t seem to follow for the national version, which would have saved everyone a lot of bother in this case.

JMR: What was your reaction to the judgment by the Iwamizawa District Court?

DA: I was quite pleased, of course. Just about everything we asked for was granted. Most important to me, however, was the vindication that I had in fact been defamed. It wasn’t just me being oversensitive. Those posts hurt, not the least because I am quite careful about what I say, and I maintain a Web site quite assiduously to make sure people can keep my quotes straight. If people want to criticize me for what [I] say or do, ah well. That’s their prerogative.  But when that happens for things I didn’t say or do, then there’s nothing I can do except demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt to a credible third party that I’ve been misportrayed. That’s what the Iwamizawa District Court did, and I’m thankful.

JMR: 2-Channel’s Hiroyuki Nishimura has been sued for defamation by many others. Is your case any different? Has it set any precedent?

DA: According to my lawyers, the other cases involved concrete examples of financial damage inflicted on businesses which got slimed on the lists. They could actually show a monetary drop in business after a post. In my case, I am arguably a public figure whose reputation is getting damaged in less quantifiable ways. I mean, it’s hard for me to show a cash flow loss. The precedent set is that money doesn’t necessarily matter — it’s the goal of the defamatory post and the possibility for it to affect my “life’s work,” as I put it before the judge, of getting a law established against racial discrimination in Japan. The judge, thanks very much, ruled I had a case, and awarded me generously by Japanese standards. Appreciate it. Hopefully that will act as a deterrent to slimers and their media in future.

JMR: You have described 2-Channel as a “valuable forum for news, gossip, and information you cannot find in any of the established press.” But it is also rife with infringements of privacy (for instance, the identification of people in criminal cases who cannot be named legally) and, of course, defamation. On balance, how would you characterize its role as a part of the media world — specifically new media — in Japan?

DA: I think it’s a great place, despite all the hiccups, and I hope it continues as such. But it’s gotta figure out how to balance the public’s need to know with the Internet trolls and slimers who just want to hurt people. The freedom of speech does not cover a person’s right to lie, in a malicious attempt to hurt other people in public. Sorry, but that’s why there are guidelines against defamation in any developed media. That’s why other media have licenses, editors, fact verification, and credibility to maintain. Transgress that, there’s hell to pay. Information is great, but within a media it has to be kept responsible.

JMR: With no public assets and offering the cover of anonymity for posters, 2-Channel is apparently an ideal forum for smearing people. What can be done to prevent further abuse? Has 2-Channel responded to your demands since the judgment? Do you expect the message to be removed, or to see any of the damages award?

DA: Keep IP addresses up with posts so posters can be held responsible for what they say. Respond faster, or at all, to requests to remove nasty posts. Have 2-Channel formally register its assets like any other media. One of the problems here is that 2-Channel has apparently lost several libel court cases before mine, but has refused to pay any plaintiffs their damages. That’s illegal. And the court has ruled that by law the IP addresses behind the defamatory posts must be revealed and the posts themselves deleted. I have doubts that will happen. We still have heard nothing from 2-Channel. And the posts are still up. Google my former last name in katakana, “arudouinkuru” — with a small ‘i’ — and ”iraku” in katakana, and see what you get. Last I checked, I got 512 hits, up from 462 on the day my court decision came down a week ago.

Thus it goes for anything like this. You leave socially damaging things like defamatory posts and “Japanese Only” signs up for public view, it encourages copycats. Nastiness, especially when self-justified by group activity, knows no bounds except those mandated by law. Which is why these things are, or should be, illegal.

Among the ongoing discussion threads is one headed “Why can’t I die?” “When I think about it, I could die at any time, but why don’t I die? I can go so far, but why can’t I take the last step?” Another is titled: “Please teach me about suicide.” The poster writes that he or she is a university student studying suicide. Elsewhere on the list of threads: “Everyone in my class hates me,” writes a young poster. “They talk about me behind my back and ignore me . . . after all, perhaps I should kill myself like they say I should.” One reply further down the thread reads: “It’s the fault of the bullying, not yours. Don’t think about suicide.”

The suicide rate in Japan has long been one of the highest in the world. In 2004, 32,325 people committed suicide — about 20 times the number of people murdered. And in the last few years, there has been a frightening increase in the number of group suicides arranged over the Internet through chat rooms dedicated to discussing suicide.

This April, Kyodo newswire reported a grimly typical case of suspected Internet suicide in which two men and a woman who were found dead in a car in Chichibu, a town in the Tokyo commuter belt. The windows of the car had been sealed from the inside with adhesive tape and three charcoal stoves were found in the car — the victims had died from carbon monoxide poisoning. There have been a series of similar cases. Japan’s National Police Agency reported 75 deaths in suspected Internet-arranged suicides from January to August this year compared with 55 deaths during the whole of 2004.

Dr. Tadashi Takeshima of the National Institute of Mental Health, who helped compile an institute report on Internet-arranged suicide, believes that the Web sites are dangerous because they enable suicide pacts between individuals who might never commit suicide on their own. Once caught up in a group pact, they find they cannot turn back. He says that often the members of the suicide pacts are in their teens or 20s and strangers except for contact through the sites. In other group suicides the victims are normally lovers, friends or at least known to each other, but in these cases police only find a connection when they check the victims’ computers or mobile phones.

Dr. Takeshima’s study group looked at a number of sites to decide whether action against them was needed, but despite their concerns, they stopped short of recommending that sites be shut down. “It’s very difficult to conclude that any one site is harmful,” he said.

Apart from the cathartic benefit for some users in discussing their depression, there are also people who log onto the sites to try and help those considering suicide. Yukiko Nishihara, founder of the Tokyo Branch of Befrienders Worldwide, a suicide prevention organization, says that some of their 60 volunteers monitor the chat rooms, chat with users and post the numbers of the NGO’s suicide helplines.

In mid-2004, Internet providers, police, academics and NGOs began meeting to discuss what action to take about suicide chat rooms and how to prevent suicide pacts. Four groups covering 80 to 90 percent of providers issued guidelines in October 2005 specifying how police and Internet companies will cooperate.

Hiroyuki Kuwako of the Japan Telecom Services Association, one of the groups, says that before the guidelines were set, it was difficult for providers to pass on personal information about suicide chat room users. If a crime is being committed, providers are obliged to hand over information. But even faced with an imminent suicide attempt they feared breaking the law if they passed on names and addresses. “Because suicide isn’t a crime, it’s down to the providers’ judgment whether or not to give out the personal information,” says Kuwako. Even in urgent cases sometimes the providers had to consult with lawyers before notifying the police.

The new guidelines mean that providers can pass on information without fear of violating rules on freedom of expression and privacy, says Yoshikuni Masuyama, deputy director of the National Police Agency Cyber-Crime Division. “I think the guidelines are most useful for the providers,” he says. “Before, because the providers didn’t give out the information, it was said that people were dying needlessly.”

The guidelines use an existing law that lets police request personal information if someone’s life is in danger (for example finding out the address of someone involved in a car accident through their mobile phone company). According to new rules, if the police believe that a Web site user’s life is in danger they will submit a form to the person’s provider. The Internet provider will look at the form and decide whether or not to cooperate with the request.

Kuwako stressed, however, that “providers don’t check the messages. If we did that, it would be a kind of censorship.” Tipping off the police is instead left to chat room users. If anyone believes that a poster is seriously intending to kill themselves they can notify the police who may contact the provider. The system could also used in other situations, say if someone receives an e-mail from an Internet friend, which leads them to believe that person may be about to kill themselves. According to Kuwako, the guidelines were put into action at least twice in the first month.

As well as the guidelines, a suicide-prevention Web site has also been set up by the National Institute of Mental Health. The Web site is called “ikiru” (to live).

Dr. Takeshima says that they began by looking at material on suicide on the Internet. “As we thought, there was a lot of harmful information,” he says. Some sites give detailed instructions about how to commit suicide. “We thought we should use the Internet to try and prevent suicide too,” he said. The NIMH site publishes suicide research, coordinates suicide prevention efforts and gets around 250 hits per day. Although the site monitors do not correspond directly with depressed individuals, some enquiries are directed to telephone help lines and mental health centers.

Another outcome of the study was that media organizations were asked not to publish detailed information about actual sites and methods of suicide – although their advice generally has not been followed so far, said Takeshima. He does not want to give his opinion on whether the media have made the problem worse by publicizing it, though he notes that few cases have been reported in the media recently. “Has the number of Internet suicide cases reduced, or are they continuing but have lost their freshness for the media?” he asked.

In fact, according to the National Police Agency, the number of cases of Internet-arranged suicide has decreased since the guidelines were introduced in October. Takeshima speculates that that may be because Web site users know that their personal information may be passed to the police if they attempt to carry out a suicide pact.

But despite the intense media attention that Internet-arranged suicides have received, the number of such cases is still tiny compared to the number of overall suicides in Japan. In 2004, 6.1 percent fewer people committed suicide than in the previous year but that was still an increase of 50 percent since 1994.The sharpest jump occurred at the end of the 1990s, near the peak of Japan’s recent economic down-turn. Seventy-two percent of people who commit suicide in Japan are men, most of who are in their 50s or 60s – the group hit hardest by the recession.

“The government needs to recognize that suicide is not a personal problem, it is a social problem,” said Yukiko Nishihara of suicide helpline Befrienders Worldwide. “They are good at setting up academic studies of suicide, but [the government] need[s] to cooperate with NGOs.”

And while every effort should be made to prevent Internet-arranged suicide pacts, people should remember that the technology is just a tool, Takeshima said. “In Tokyo, there are a lot of tall buildings, so that is a means of suicide [there]. In the countryside, people use agricultural chemicals . . . The simple reason [why young people arrange group suicide through the Internet] is that young people use the Internet.”

Now, thanks to a single e-mail he sent to Livedoor Co. this spring, Fujio Tamura is at the front of the nascent podcast movement in Japan, and his audience is changing from local to global.

“I’m thinking of doing programs on how Japanese expats see Japan,” he said in a telephone interview with JMR. “A lot of people in Japan will look at the Yasukuni Shrine issue and think, ‘What’s wrong with the prime minister paying a visit? Why does China get so upset?’ A lot of Japanese just don’t understand how the rest of the world thinks. We can investigate, look at Japan from the outside and tell the stories that don’t get told by big media companies. I want to let the truth leak out.”

These are heady words for a radio pioneer who was scanning the local Vancouver scene for stories just months ago. But his new focus seems justified considering that CZoom is one of six podcasts being promoted heavily through Livedoor’s Web site. CZoom’s audience has been “rising rapidly” since Livedoor listed it in its recommended podcasts section, Tamura said, and the new listeners are coming from Japan as well as other parts of the world.

“We can’t just put the same shows for the local community on Net radio,” Tamura said. “Podcasting changes the focus. We need to make programs that are different from our previous local programs and that both locals and listeners overseas will find interesting.”

Podcasting remains a little known entity in Japan, but Livedoor’s backing of the format has helped create a buzz with the Net-savvy crowd. One sign of how quickly Livedoor jumped on the bandwagon is the headline blaring across the top of the Web site announcing the arrival of “Livedoor Internet Ladio.” Apparently, there hasn’t been time for proofreading.

Tamura’s experience with Livedoor is emblematic of the frenetic pace at which the company moves. Tamura said he sent an e-mail to Livedoor to promote his Net radio station. “I got an answer right away,” he recalled. Livedoor asked him if he could provide podcasts, he said he could, and less than two months after launching CZoom, Tamura had positioned his Net radio station prominently on Livedoor’s homepage.

Livedoor features its own podcasts, business news from Nikkei Radio and other music and entertainment channels. But on the Japanese Web, there are few places offering news via podcasts. “There is little recognition of podcasts in Japan,” Tamura said. “And there isn’t enough content.”

Some analysts doubt whether podcasts will catch on in Japan like they have in the U.S. “I think that most of the success will come from the music scene, but personally I doubt (that there will be much),” said Sven Kilian-Nakamura, the Japan “scout” for Germany-based market research firm CScout. “If you think about the popularity of P2P file-sharing systems … Japan is far from being avant-garde and only the real techies use them … I think podcasting is similar. As the Japanese Net is completely separated from the (Internet worlds) of the U.S. or Europe, things that are popular in the U.S. do not really find their way to Japan, or if they do, it’s under a different name and maybe under a big company like Yahoo.”

While podcasting is still in its early stages in Japan, there are some sites beyond Livedoor that are trying to build their offerings and attract more listeners. Kilian-Nakamura recommended Dedio, which features a wide offering of mostly entertainment-oriented podcasts. Tokyo Calling is an occasional English broadcast in Japan that claims to be Japan’s first podcast. For Japanese wanting to learn how to podcast, Seesaa.net is a popular site. Podcast Now offers an overview of the podcast scene in Japanese, but the many references to podcasts coming from the U.S. and other countries is another indication that the format has yet to find its place in Japan.

Japanese expats, especially young expats, are still a largely overlooked market when it comes to Japanese Net radio. While Tamura builds CZoom in Japan and Livedoor broadcasts Nikkei Radio news stories, there are few other choices outside of the news updates of Japan Broadcasting Corp., or , the nation’s public broadcasting giant. NHK regularly broadcasts news updates that some expats listen to for a taste of home.

“Internet radio isn’t promoted much in Japan,” said Yasuhiro Muraki, formerly an employee at an Osaka radio station and now assistant editor for Japanese lifestyle magazine Youmaga in Seattle. Young Japanese expats “don’t really feel the need to listen to Net radio either. NHK’s broadcasts are for older people. And (Japanese living overseas) tend to be leaning the other way, trying to learn more about the culture we’re living in, anyway.”

Yet perhaps the biggest reason for the lack of hard news podcasts is the general status of Internet radio in Japan. Even NHK doesn’t have a 24-hour news stream like its counterparts the BBC and National Public Radio. Local broadcasters in Japan have so far successfully opposed plans by NHK to create such a stream, saying that it would take away their audience at a time when many of the local stations are struggling to get by.

Large radio stations in Tokyo and Osaka have also hesitated to promote Net radio because of concerns raised by smaller stations. This has led to fewer online broadcasts and less content to build podcasts from. Net radio remains underdeveloped in Japan.

This puts Tamura in an interesting position broadcasting from North America where podcasts are catching on at lightning speed. He plans to use the Internet telephone software Skype to expand the range of his interviews without expanding his very small budget too much. “It’s very tough right now,” he said. “There used to be three or four Japanese radio stations in Canada. Now there’s only one.”

Tamura has tried in the past to get local FM stations in Japan to work together. He has also worked on early versions of Net radio, participating with a dozen other companies and Microsoft Corp. to showcase the format’s possibilities with the release of Explorer 5.1 four years ago. But in both cases, the timing was off. “It was too early,” he said. As for his attempts to form a community of FM stations, “They are either in too dangerous of a financial position to try new things or they are comfortable and they find community building to be too much work.”

Still, Tamura sees a window of opportunity with the advent of podcasting and the launch of CZoom. “In the Net world, you have to move fast to capitalize on an opportunity,” he said. “The biggest problem is there isn’t enough content. Someone has to show the attractiveness of podcasting to listeners.”

For now, those examples tend to be popping up in the U.S. and Canada, not Japan. Will podcasting be to Japan what i-mode is to the U.S. — a non-starter? Or will Japanese expats like Tamura add an interesting wrinkle to the podcast’s development? Tamura said that podcasts could help bring together an increasingly fragmented expat community. “The expat Japanese community is weakening,” he said. “I’d like to invigorate it again.”

Tamura also pointed out that the fate of podcasting could change if just one big financial backer stepped forward. “We could use some money from Livedoor,” he suggested.

Not only have real-world diplomatic frictions been mirrored online, Web technology has been at the core of the escalating frictions. In China, protestors used mobile phones and the Internet to organize widespread and sometimes violent protests against Japanese diplomatic missions and businesses. In South Korea, citizens arranged protests and debated the row through weblogs and bulletin boards. In Japan, irate bulletin board users have reacted with jingoistic attacks on their country’s neighbors.

A series of disputes between the Asian neighbors brought online tensions to a peak this past spring. In March, Japan’s Shimane Prefectural Assembly voted to devote a special day to a set of South Korea-controlled islands (Dokto in Korea and Takeshima in Japan) positioned between the two countries. The action reignited a long-standing dispute on the 0.09 square mile islands’ sovereignty.

South Korea was irritated again in early April when the Japanese government authorized eight controversial school textbooks that state a Japanese claim to the Dokto islands. China too was upset by the textbooks’ description of the Japan-controlled Senkaku islands (Diaoyu in China) as Japanese territory. China disputes the sovereignty of the East China Sea chain of islets, and the gas fields surrounding them.

Most significantly, China and South Korea accuse the textbooks’ authors of glossing over Japan’s actions during World War II. The junior high school texts refer to the Nanjing massacre, in which up to 300,000 Chinese soldiers and civilians died, as an “incident.” The schoolbooks also neglect to mention the use of “comfort women” — women from Asian countries forced to serve Japanese forces as sex slaves.

Although the textbooks have only been adopted by a tiny fraction of Japanese schools, the controversy riled those in East Asia who believe that Japan has not shown sufficient repentance for World War II. China in particular has been infuriated by Prime Minister Koizumu’s annual visits to the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. The Shrine honors Japan’s war dead, including 14 Class A war criminals. A museum there presents what critics say is a revisionist history that tries to justify Japan’s invasion of her neighbors.

Perhaps then it is no surprise that the shrine’s Web site was one of many in Japan to suffer a barrage of cyber attacks this spring. According to a notice posted on the shrine’s site, at times as many as 15,000 DOS (denial of service) attacks per second have been launched against the homepage. Shrine officials also claim that messages inciting hackers to target the Web site were posted on a Chinese bulletin board. The attacks are described as a “malice-filled provocation against the country of Japan” and “a base act … terrorism that is a fundamental negation of Internet law and order.”

By April, the offensive had spread to Japanese government Web sites, even provincial universities and local governments. According to Japanese newswires, the Prime Minister’s Office and Cabinet offices were attacked at the end of February. On March 17, the Foreign Office Web site was targeted, a Korean Web site claiming responsibility. In mid-April, a message in Chinese, “You can forget the past, but you can’t deny history,” was inserted on the front page of the Kumamoto University Web site. On April 19, the Mainichi Shimbun reported, the Fujieda municipal office Web site (a town of 131,000 people) unwillingly featured a message that said “Return the Diaoyu Islands (Senkaku islands).” The Japanese Defense Agency and Police Agency Web sites were also attacked.

Until recently, Japan’s digital security had lagged behind other countries, said Naoki Miyagi of the National Information Security Center, a 26-person department set up this April to help protect government Web sites. Without a coordinated policy, individual ministries and agencies were left to sort out their own security themselves. “Government Web sites were vulnerable, not properly managed. [But] recently we’ve been taking aggressive measures,” said Miyagi. Yet, the department noted that even a planned July expansion to 37 employees will fall short of the 100-member governmental cyber-security staff in France, or the 800 employed in the United States.

Despite the widespread assumption that hackers in South Korea and China have been responsible for the cyber attacks, few believe they were government-sanctioned. And no one, it seemed, was more surprised about the role that the Internet has played in the recent frictions than the Chinese government. Authorities appear to have been caught off-guard by how easily demonstrations against Japanese businesses and diplomatic missions were organized. Protesters made use of a panoply of Internet and mobile communications technology. Information was exchanged through text messages, blogs, Web sites and online messaging systems. “If it wasn’t for the Internet then such large and widespread demonstrations wouldn’t have taken place,” said Qi Jing Ying, a researcher studying the Chinese Web at the University of Tokyo.

She doubts whether Chinese authorities could have prevented the demonstrations, even if they had wanted to. When they did finally clamp down, it was by detaining protestors and sending out threatening text messages. Beijing citizens were warned: “Express patriotism rationally. Don’t take part in illegal protests. Don’t make trouble.”

Chinese Internet users have become increasing adept at breaching the so-called “Great Firewall of China” – elaborate systems set up by the government to try and control access to the Internet. “My friends and teachers in China can use proxy servers instead to access banned sites,” says Qi Jing Ying. Denied many other democratic freedoms, the Chinese have thrown themselves into political debate regarding the Internet, says Qi. Even some criticism of the authorities is allowed. Qi contrasts the tone of the Chinese Internet to its counterpart in Japan, where bulletin boards like the popular 2 Channel are often dismissed as trivial and shallow. “You can’t compare 2 Channel and Chinese political sites,” she argued. “Even Chinese foreign office officials and political leaders look at Chinese political Web sites. I doubt that Koizumi (Japan’s Prime Minister) is watching 2 Channel.”

Meanwhile, in South Korea the World Wide Web has similarly helped host public reaction to the territorial and textbook disputes. Bloggers, bulletin board users and hackers alike have been quick to protest against Japan. That’s no surprise considering the number of people online in Korea, said Isa Ducke, a political scientist at the German Institute of Japan Studies in Tokyo. South Korea has the highest broadband penetration rate in the world.

Sites like the popular Daum Web portal and its Daum Café bulletin boards are a venue for debate and protest. South Korea’s ubiquitous Internet culture is worlds away from the otaku underground culture of Japan’s bulletin boards. “There can’t be many Koreans who have never sent a message to a Daum Café,” said Ducke. Even the American Embassy has set up a page on Daum to provide information about visa applications.

In the past, South Korean Web surfers and hackers have been quick to make their feelings known. In 2002, they protested the disqualification of South Korean skater Kim Dong-Sung from that year’s Winter Olympics. Sixteen thousand e-mails sent to the United States Olympic Committee within five hours of the event crashed the organization’s Web server. During a previous Japanese textbook controversy in 2001, three South Korean high school students known on the Net as “anti-Japan” attacked the server of the right-wing revisionist tsukurukai textbook association, disabling it for several days. On another occasion the same trio crashed the Warner Brothers Web site in protest against a program on dog-meat eating in Korea.

Hacking attacks on Japan and other countries are well-publicized in Korea, unlike the efforts of hackers in Japan. “I guess it is partly because in Korea these people are heroes,” said Ducke. “They are just doing something weird, or blocking a Web site that no one is interested in anyway.”

In any case, the difference in tone between mainstream media commentary on the tensions with China and South Korea, and discussion on the Japanese Internet couldn’t be starker. In one article on rising nationalism in Japan, Aera magazine recently described the situation as “The Net world that can’t say ‘no’ to lip-service nationalism.” In contrast to the mainstream media, the Internet – or Internet discussion at least – is dominated in Japan by right-wing opinion. The recent disputes with South Korea and China have prompted a heap of aggressive, jingoistic commentary online.

Kenichi Asano, a professor of journalism and mass communications at Doshisha University in Kyoto, estimates that 80 to 90 percent of comments on 2 Channel are “rightist.” “Many people are disappointed by the discussions on 2 Channel,” Asano said. “They are irresponsible and arrogant, not based on facts.” He himself has found his political views attacked on the bulletin boards, and threats made on members of his family.

But do Japanese people really mean what they say on the Internet? “Not necessarily,” according to Kaoru Endo, a professor of political studies at Gakushuin University in Tokyo, and a researcher into the Japanese Internet. “It doesn’t necessarily mean that they really dislike Korea or China.” Extreme comments about China and Korea could just be an outlet for general frustration. She pointed out that Japan’s conformist society leaves people few chances to express their frustrations or opinions in everyday life. “Things that they can’t say in normal life, they become directed against foreigners,” Endo said. The anonymity of the bulletin boards gives users an unaccustomed freedom. She noted that personal blogs in Japan tend to be more restrained.

More so than the Internet in China and Korea, the Japanese Web has often been characterized as the playground of otaku hobbyists – with little relation to real Japanese society. But that may be changing now, said Endo. The number of requests to interview her has increased tenfold in the last year. “The mainstream media’s treatment of the Internet has changed a little recently,” Endo said. Yet a year ago those same mainstream journalists were still telling her; “It’s nothing to do with us.”

This year also saw the publication in book form of a thread from the 2 Channel bulletin board. “Densha Otoko (train man)” began with a request for love advice from a self-confessed computer geek as he pursued a woman he met on a commuter train. What started as an apparently real-life discussion among the Internet community has permeated the mainstream media in comic form, as a book, and will soon be released as a film. The book alone has sold more than 615,000 copies.

The Japanese media is finally waking up to the Internet, it seems, but time will tell whether the Japanese Web develops as a space for real political discussion as it has in South Korea, or even in China. And that may depend as much on Japan’s domestic politics as on any Internet technology. Certainly, the influence of the Net on the economy media and politics of all three countries is expected to increase. The Chinese Internet alone is growing at an astonishing rate. The China Internet Network Information Center reports that there were 94 million Web users on the mainland in 2004, 18.2 percent more than the year before.

Many commentators also expect tensions to continue to grow in the region. The Japanese government’s slow drift to the political right has already antagonized its neighbors. Disputes over World War II are still festering, and Japan has unresolved disputes with China and South Korea about territory and energy resources. Future clashes on the Internet can be expected. East Asia will be watching the Web.