Ten years after the burst of Japan’s economic bubble, with the erosion of a common sense of values that had been shared for many years through an earlier period of strong economic growth, we face an era of confusion in which it is not even clear what we should believe in.

That’s my rough translation of the first line describing a seminar, held on March 15th by the Institute of Engineering Innovation at the University of Tokyo, entitled “Miete kita mirai” (見えてきた未来/The future that has come into view). (Read more…)

The Japanese language team at Global Voices (myself and my co-editor) were interviewed by Asahi’s new Komimi online news portal, a new site created to “introduce original articles and conversations from across the country”. Both of us are really happy with the way the article turned out in the end, so to “give a little back”, I dug up a couple things about Komimi and also, in the spirit of Global Voices, translated the article back into English. (Read more…)

Here it is a week later, and I can finally sit back for a second and reflect on my first experience attending We Media in Miami. (I’ve also posted a couple live-blogged point form summaries of talks here and here.) (Read more…)

Next session is “Political World - Hype vs. Reality in Campaign ‘08″. Just caught the tail end of this one. (Read more…)

Here I am liveblogging the first sessions at WeMedia. This will be point-form for now, hope to add more later. (Read more…)

I’m off today to We Media 2008 in Miami with many other people from Global Voices (some of whom have already been interviewed), will be liveblogging some of the events there, stay tuned over the next few days.

Two recent seminars on the future of print journalism in Japan to report. One last week held by Japan’s most well-known English newspaper the Japan Times (with the University of Tokyo Inter-faculty Initiative in Information Studies) was publicized as a seminar about the future of English-language journalism in East Asia, but ended up veering pretty far from that theme. The other was held by the country’s third-largest Japanese-language daily Mainichi shimbun and focused on information in a network society and the future of journalism. (Read more…)

Caught a great study group meeting organized by the Agile Media Network last night at the Pasonatech seminar room in Shibuya (here’s the original posting in Japanese). Tokuriki-san, the main person behind the Alpha Blogger Awards, was on the ball as usual moderating the event. (Read more…)