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.