When I was in Japan reporting on the feature about Nico Nico Douga, my friend Ichiroo showed me all these different applications on his laptop. All were immensely popular forms of time-wasting entertainment in Japan. (One of the strangest things I heard that week was that Japanese school girls all have the McDonalds web page saved on their cell phone favorites—and every time they reach a new destination, they download a coupon, stake out the nearest McD's, and buy cheeseburgers.)
I wrote a short article about the quirky world of the Japanese web as an online extra to the Nico Nico piece:
I'm sitting in a smoky room on the second floor of a Tully's Coffee in Western Tokyo, looking over the shoulder of Ichiroo Kiyota as he types on his laptop. Kiyota, an executive at Six Apart Japan, is showing me around some of the most popular — and useless — Web apps in the country.
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