Looking for Japanese written political blogs

February 5, 2007 2:20 PM

Help me find Japanese political blogs...

I am currently writing my senior thesis on the Yasukuni Shrine problem, and, more specifically, how the controversy is being viewed by/effecting the political attitudes of Japanese youth. A large hunk of the paper will deal with the effect that new, 'outsider' mass-media (specifically manga and the internet) has had on shaping the political debate within Japan. I've been scouring 2-chan, which has been (mostly) fantastic, but I'm finding the board to be a little too unwieldy to get a real picture of the whole political sphere. So I would like to read a few single-author blogs. My Japanese is pretty decent, and I can slog through most anything with rikai, so anything you can point me too would be fantastic.

And, hey, if you have any other tips, leads, whatever, feel free to post 'em. At this point anything will help.

Thanks!

posted by MostHolyPorcine to education (5 comments total)

lots of stuff seem to come up just googling; just don't forget to start searching from Google Japan, so that you don't hit Chinese sites with some similar characters involved.

If you don't have the said comics (I assume you're talking about anything recent by Yoshinori Kobayashi, or something similar to that 嫌韓流 thing that seems to have gotten publicity just for its controversial content), you can have it snail-mailed from Amazon.co.jp or Junkudo. The latter ships by weight so it might end up being cheaper.

I don't know if there's anything related to your topic, but if you can get a Mixi (Japanese SNS) account you might be able to find something useful in there. There's a whole lot less anonymity involved there compared to 2ch, so it'll be interesting to see what kind of difference in opinions comes out as a result.

Sorry I can't be any more specific, never even heard of the issue you're researching til today.
posted by Muu at 4:25 PM on February 5, 2007

I highly recommend Kikko-san. Incredibly outspoken, very good stuff.

Kikko's Blog

Kikko's Diary

The former is the backup of the latter, which means that her Diary is more current, but I find it kind of hard to read, so I tend to visit her Blog.
posted by misozaki at 4:58 PM on February 5, 2007

Marxy is always good. He's bound to have at least one Yasukuni related post.
posted by ejoey at 8:48 PM on February 5, 2007

I also work across the street from Yasukuni. The war museum is insane. You can PM me if you want some Yasukuni schwag.
posted by ejoey at 8:50 PM on February 5, 2007

Not in Japanese, but I think Marmot's Hole (Korean-centered actually) has followed and analyzed quite a bit the blog-and-popculture reaction in Japan/Korea/China concerning political topics like Yasukuni and Dokdo/Takeshima and the crazy racist manga thing last year.
posted by SenshiNeko at 4:24 PM on February 7, 2007