Japan Media Review Update: March 8, 2004

JMR Staff (Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California)

Review
The following reviews are posted at: http://www.japanmediareview.com/japan/digest/digest.php

Download Music, Buy Tickets Through Digital Radio
From Kyodo News via the The Miami Herald: Tokyo FM Broadcasting and mobile phone carrier KDDI Corp. announced that two new services will be tested on the digital radio system that began trial broadcasts in Tokyo and Osaka last October. About 200 listeners will try downloading music and buying tickets using digital radios. Other listeners can also send their opinions about the services to the firms. Publicly available digital broadcasting could be launched by 2011. At that time, listeners should have access to programming lists and music videos through digital radio.
-- By Japan Media Review Associate Editor Keiko Mori

Commentary: Personal Information Leaks, Consumer Habit Tracking a Bad Combination
From The Daily Yomiuri: A recent leak of over 4 million users' personal data from Japanese broadband service Yahoo BB, in which identifying but not monetary information was stolen allegedly by extortionists, led Yomiuri Shimbun staff writer Norimasa Shimada to reflect on how such incidents could impact corporate practices of gathering consumers' personal information. Japan's online ad market has grown to nearly $900 million annually, almost the size of radio advertising, as the Internet has made it possible for companies to target consumers by studying their Internet searching habits. Revealed addresses, names and phone numbers could be used inappropriately by increasingly ambitious Internet ad companies in Japan, Shimada said. The writer also expressed concern over how easily personal information is accumulated by corporations, due to the numerous forms that people fill out on the Net each day.
-- By Japan Media Review Associate Editor Zhen Wang

Japanese Media Blamed for Negative U.S.-Japan Relationship Over Radiation Incident
From Kyodo News via The Japan Times: A recently discovered postwar U.S. government report on the accidental radiation poisoning of Japanese fishermen exposed to a U.S. hydrogen bomb test in 1954 accused the Japanese media of helping to sour relations between the United States and Japan over the accident. During the Fukuryu Maru incident, Americans volunteered to treat the 23 irradiated crew members, but the Japanese rejected the offer. According to the document, written two months after the accident, the Japanese media made the already serious problem worse. The 19-page report stated, "This in no small part was due to the rantings of the hysterical sensation-seeking, irresponsible, sometimes mendacious Japanese press." But University of Pennsylvania sociology and history professor Susan Lindee said the Japanese thought "the Americans had been dishonest and secretive, refusing to share data (on radiation victims from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings.)"
-- By Japan Media Review Contributing Writer Sunny Yu

Fuji TV Claims to Reveal Harsh Life in North Korean Prison Camp
From Reuters: As international negotiations with North Korea on that country's nuclear program continue, Fuji Television Network showed what it said was previously unrevealed video of a North Korean camp for political prisoners. In the footage, prisoners in thin clothes struggle at harsh labor harvesting cabbage on snow-covered ground. Fuji claimed it got the video from a defector who secretly recorded camp life. Despite denials from North Korean government officials about the existence of the camps, a report issued last October by the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea estimated that up to 200,000 political prisoners are kept in camps and forced to work like slaves.
-- By Japan Media Review Associate Editor Keiko Mori