Tabloid Tokyo Storm Warning*

Ryann Con­nell is big in Japan. He is co-author of the series, Tabloid Tokyo: 101 Tales of Sex, Crime and the Bizarre from Japan’s Wild Weeklies — here’s a review:

[Con­nell] and his col­leagues have done us all a big favour in trans­lat­ing dozens of these funny, sexy, tra­gic and some­times down­right bizarre art­icles and give us won­der­ful snap­shots of an unfa­mil­iar world.

The Japan­ese PR machine, which tries so hard to pre­serve the mys­tical images of Mt Fuji, cherry blos­soms and geisha will be furi­ous at this book…

But that’s not why he’s big in Japan. Con­nell got his book mater­ial from his day job as a staff writer on the Eng­lish web­site of one of the world’s biggest selling news­pa­pers, Maini­chi Shim­bun. And pre­sum­ably his bosses never read his book reviews. His job involved sum­mar­iz­ing and trans­lat­ing mater­ial from other pub­lic­a­tions. And Japan­ese blog­gers took excep­tion to one of them.

As his employ­ers note in the embar­rassed apo­logy that now sits on the site:

Issues relat­ing to the trans­la­tion and sum­mar­iz­a­tion of copy­righted mater­ial are being dis­cussed with the pub­lish­ers of the source magazines.

Ryann was also help­ing Maini­chi with thought­ful use of SEO:

On every page of the Maini­chi Daily News site, there were 41 keywords used as “meta tags,” which were embed­ded into pages to make it easier for them to be picked up by search engines. Among these keywords were the words “hen­tai,” “geisha,” and “japan­ese girls.”

But actu­ally, it wasn’t his search engine optim­isa­tion skills or being employed to pla­gi­ar­ise via trans­la­tion that got him into trouble, it was the col­our he put into his re-writes.

The lead para­graph of a story about a manga intro­du­cing the Defense Ministry’s policies, which fea­tures a young girl char­ac­ter, adds a descrip­tion of the min­istry not found in the ori­ginal art­icle, claim­ing it is “the suc­cessor of the gov­ern­ment min­istry that gave the world Pearl Har­bor and the Rape of Nanking.”

The explan­a­tion given by the column editor for this addi­tion was that it served to accen­tu­ate the gap between the min­istry and the manga character.

And here is the story (cached off-site):

Defense Min­istry turns to ‘Lol­ita’ manga char­ac­ter to reveal inner self

From the suc­cessor of the gov­ern­ment min­istry that gave the world Pearl Har­bor and the Rape of Nank­ing now comes a cutesy little girl car­toon char­ac­ter dressed as a maid with a hawk­ish stuffed teddy bear to give a simple explan­a­tion of Japan’s defense policies, accord­ing to Cyzo (August).

Grow­ing num­bers of gov­ern­ment agen­cies have used bor­der­line pedo­phile manga char­ac­ters to pro­mote their activ­it­ies in recent years, but it’s the Defense Ministry’s little girl char­ac­ter that is attract­ing atten­tion among Japan’s otaku, the monthly says.

In the “Manga de Yomu Boeisho Hak­usho (Defense Min­istry White Papers in Manga)” series prin­ted in 2005, a little girl wear­ing “Lol­ita” fash­ions and an apron is involved in exchanges — some­times viol­ently — with a hawk­ish stuffed teddy bear as they rumble over the way Japan should defend itself.

Pretty icky stuff — you won­der whether the Japan­ese Defence Min­istry bothered to check what was writ­ten about it. But accord­ing to Truth About Japan:

The edit­ors of Cyzo pro­tested to the Maini­chi that the ori­ginal art­icle didn’t include such phrases as “the suc­cessor of the gov­ern­ment min­istry that gave the world Pearl Har­bor and the Rape of Nank­ing” (in Japanese).

But then as The Age writes:

Connell’s troubles began in May with one of his now infam­ous “WaiWai” columns, which cited a Japan­ese magazine art­icle about a res­taur­ant where pat­rons allegedly have sex with anim­als before eat­ing them.

The piece caught the atten­tion of a blog­ger called “mozu”, whose angry post was soon picked up by 2channel, a huge, frac­tious web forum pop­u­lar with Japan’s hot-headed con­ser­vat­ive element.

A post on Néo­ja­pon­isme — How The World Learns About Japan — tells it rather better:

Step 1: A writer at Jit­suwa Knuckles [a Japan­ese super­mar­ket tabloid] satires the ennui-driven sexual indul­gence of the Japan­ese wealthy class by writ­ing up an ima­gin­ary story about a spe­cial res­taur­ant deep within the bowels of Rop­pongi where pat­rons have sex with anim­als before eat­ing them. (You know a magazine is always telling you the truth when they put the word “true story” [実話] into the title.)

Step 2: Ryann Con­nell at Maini­chi Daily News selects this sen­sa­tional story out of dozens and trans­lates it into Eng­lish sprinkled with Irish-colloquialisms. Con­nell takes a neut­ral stance towards its trust­wor­thi­ness, not ques­tion­ing why the art­icle never gives any names nor cor­rob­or­at­ing evid­ence for this fant­ast­ical restaurant’s existence.

Step 3: Lots of guys with com­puters and key­boards offer links to the Maini­chi art­icle, adding com­ment­ary that ques­tions the san­ity of the Japan­ese people.

Step 4: The chat­ter around Connell’s WaiWai piece leads to an entry on BuzzFeed entitled “Bes­ti­al­ity Res­taur­ants,” as if there were more than one and it was a new trend in Japan.

Step 5: Per­haps there will be debunk­ing in the near future, but we can sleep safe in the com­fort that Japan is the cra­zi­est coun­try in the entire world, where rich people pay top yen to eat and rav­ish the same animal.

Connell’s pun­ish­ment to date? A three month sus­pen­sion. And the solu­tion to frat house humour?

We will appoint a female employee as the new chief editor, based on our real­iz­a­tion that the lack of a woman’s point of view, in addi­tion to the lack of a check­ing sys­tem, helped to cre­ate a situ­ation in which inap­pro­pri­ate art­icles con­tin­ued to be pub­lished in the column.

There’s a lot more to this story than simple journ­al­istic inven­tion — fol­low some of the links and you’ll see.
[HT: Craig Sil­ver­man]

*Not used: Lost in Trans­la­tion; Turn­ing Japan­ese; etc., etc.

Tagged as: Craig Silverman, Cyzo, Japan, Japanese Defence Ministry, Jitsuwa Knuckles, Mainichi Daily News, Ryann Connell, search engine optimisation, seo