Japan Inc. was nice enough to publish an article of mine about the use of net media in Japan in this month’s issue. The main thing I wrote about in the article was the live streaming of the Akihabara knife massacre on June 8th, a topic I’ve written about before for Global Voices and also for NewAssignment.net.

Note: See also the version of this article at Japan Today, which has many more comments.

Here are the first few paragraphs to get you started:

“Do you enjoy shooting videos of people’s misery?”

It was June 8 in Tokyo’s technology mecca, and the words of warning from a police officer fell on deaf ears. Armed with the latest in digital technology and lured by a morbid sense of curiosity, crowds of onlookers converged on to a blood-strewn intersection of Akihabara, amid firetrucks and ambulances, closing in to get a clear shot. Never before had so many eyes and ears shared in such a moment.

“It was really vivid,” one of those behind the cameras would later write in his blog, recalling the scene he had broadcasted to thousands just after 1pm that day. Only half an hour earlier, 25-year-old Tomohiro Kato, in one of the most sensational killing rampages in Japan’s recent history, had plowed a rented truck into busy shoppers along Akihabara’s pedestrian mall on Chuo-dori road. Stabbed with a combat knife in the ensuing rampage, many of those on the streets were in a critical state. “People right next to the camera were so badly wounded they were receiving resuscitation,” the blogger wrote. “There were towels to stop the bleeding all over the place.”

It was a scene the likes of which households across the country, tuning in to live coverage of the massacre, would never see. Broadcast without gatekeepers and shared across mobile networks, the images, video, and words that exploded onto the Japanese cyberspace on June 8 would become one of the most powerful examples to date of the country’s emerging net culture. Emergency workers survey the scene.Emergency workers survey the scene of the stabbing as onlookers watch. Photograph by Kawataso. For the lost generation of twenty- and thirty-somethings, technology had opened a window into the tragedy in Akihabara that went beyond portrayals in newspapers and on TV. If this window was the new face of media, it wasn’t pretty but it was very direct, and very real.

Among other things, I interviewed one of the two people who shot the video (Lyphard), freelance journalist Toshinao Sasaki and also blogger Akihito Kobayashi. It’s the only article of its kind (to my knowledge) on this issue in English.

Here’s the link again if you’d like to read the rest.