Fujio Tamura has spent years trying to keep Japanese community radio alive in Japan and Canada. He’s tried unsuccessfully to unite community FM stations in Japan, hosted a popular daily Japanese program in Vancouver, Canada, on AM 1320, and this March, he started an Internet radio station in Vancouver called CZoom.

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.

Yasuko and Bob Garlick of Vancouver listen to the NHK broadcasts regularly. For Yasuko, a mother of two and a housewife, it’s a way to catch up on her homeland. “She has the computer in the kitchen and has the news reports automatically downloaded so she can listen to them at any time,” according to her husband, Bob. “It’s a valuable resource.”

But Japanese 20-something expats tend to have a different take on NHK.

“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.

If comments on Internet bulletin boards were bullets and computer hacking attacks military sorties then East Asia would be a war zone now. In the last few months, a bitter controversy over Japanese history textbooks, which China and South Korea say gloss over Japan’s actions in World War II, has had Internet users in the region revisiting hostilities of 60 years ago. As well as mauling each other online, the two sides have been directing determined cyber attacks against each other’s Internets.

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.