
The Japanese Fear of the Internet - genieyclo
http://neojaponisme.com/2009/05/19/the-fear-of-the-internet/
======
patio11
Imagine walking into your office to find six of your coworkers crowded around
a laptop reading your personal blog.

That was a fun morning. I have a Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card: "Everyone knows
Americans are weird."

Some friends of mine:

\+ Works for the national tax office. Has to be the very model of Appropriate
Japanese Male Professional. Raps on the weekends and goes snowboarding in the
winter. Japanese male professionals do not dress in bling or like gangsta rap.
Skiing is a borderline appropriate hobby for people in our social class --
snowboarding is not.

\+ Teacher at an elementary school. Dating an American. What would the parents
think, right?

\+ Is really Korean. She swore me to secrecy about that because she has the
sincere fear that if her best friends since childhood found out about it she
would _never_ get her old life back.

\+ Does not want to be a salaryman forever.

\+ Belongs to a weird religious cult. Like, _really_ weird. They all get
together on Sundays and drink the blood of this dead Middle Eastern-looking
guy.

\+ Has spent seven years in Australia.

\+ Drop-dead fluent at English. _Too_ good. Pretends to be less good around
her coworkers but if they ever found out how good she actually was she'd be
ribbed for it. One genre of that ribbing would be that she's angling to get an
American husband, which -- as we've established -- is not generally something
a proper Japanese woman wants said about her.

------
gwern
> A lack of user generated media — YouTube clips, in particular — featuring
> Japanese faces and real names. Many performers, despite virtuoso-level
> skills, wear masks or otherwise obscure faces in their video content.

This is very true. I had noticed there were a number of performers with masks,
but it didn't really sink in until I saw an _entire masked orchestra_ :
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1KgDz_An2s>

(The newspaper thing is true as well. I once got burned by the Mainichi
Shimbun taking down its entire site; no problem, right, I'd just check the
Internet Archive? Blocked in the IA. And no robots.txt on either domain, which
implies they were so paranoid that they privately contacted the Archive to
block all access!)

