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.” Con­tinue read­ing →