2ch: Japanese Web Forum As Social Vent

News for nerds writes "This NY times article (reg blah blah) sheds the light on Japan's largest Internet bulletin board - 2ch. About 5.4 million people come to this "Channel 2" each month, many of them several times a day (just like you nerds making beowulf cluster of alphabets all the day!). Founded in 1999, "ni-channeru," as it is called there, has become part of Japan's everyday culture as no other Web site has. While you can also find useful info such as dinner recipes there, it's almost like Battle Royale came into life as a web site, filled with verbal and physical violence backed by pseudo anonymity."

Comments

Physical violence?

[aidfarh]

First I asked myself, "How could a web site be filled with physical violence?". Then I RTFA and became more confused, as there was no mention of any physical violence.

Then I realised it was just an attempt by the poster to get more hype for the post by inserting illogical statements in the desciption.

Re:moderation?

[Hobobo]

RTFA - They don't.

Registration Free Link

[karmatic]

Reg Free Link here .

They are making this harder to do...

Slashdot japan

[dncsky1530]

Slashdot has a japanese counterpart, The stories get lots of comments almost as many as this slashdot.

"Although about 20 Web sites attract more users than Channel 2, based on March ratings from NetRatings Japan, most of the others are portal or retail sites; and while Yahoo Japan also runs a bulletin board, it is not considered as influential as Channel 2"

I should think Slashdot would be pretty influential, especially in such a tech heavy society.

Re:Tried to read it

[L7_]

i think he just hasn't installed the asian font sets, so all the characters show up as rectangles.

*whoosh*

Re:Sounds Like...

[Snowy_loves_you]

Ofcourse you know, There are a nerd-less-less version of 2ch, in Japan, The Slashdot Japan !

Wikipeda article

[Kusunose]

2ch

Re:Battle Royale

[Hittite Creosote]

Or, if you're in the UK, watch Channel 4 at 11pm tonight (Monday 10th). They're showing it.

Re:Tried to read it

[Hatta]

The large number of people who don't have oriental language sets installed on their browser is a bit sad.

If you don't speak any asian languages, what's the point? It's like locales. Just sitting on my disk, wasting space. Apt-got localepurge and haven't noticed a single change. Except several dozen megabytes more HD space, that is.

Or perhaps you mean that I should want to have such things. Because languages are good for me or some such. Sorry, but I have way too much to learn already, that'll have to wait for another lifetime.

Re:Never heard of it....

[Anonymous Coward]

Must not spend any time around the Japanese workers then. 2chan is the place. File Sharing with "Winny" would never have been the same without it either. It's also especially useful if you are thinking of moving to a new (tech) company to find the latest dirt on them and has been since before I started using it in 2001. Of course, filtering out Japanese posts can be a pain, but that's the price you pay for info unavilible anywhere else.

Show me, show you!

[djshiawase]

2ch is, of course, where Kikkoman was invented.

It's been a great source of material for Japanese assignments over the years, a place where youth vent about society over there.

Slashdot is big, but it's not on the scale of 2ch. It's a pity it's so poorly organised. Trying to find information without using a search engine is practically useless at 2ch.

But as long as they keep creating things like Kikkoman, 2ch will keep popping up here in the west!

quentin tarantino certainly saw battle royale

[circletimessquare]

and he liked it so much that he cast Chiaki Kuriyama from Battle Royale as Gogo Yubari in Kill Bill Vol. 1

and she's also basically the same character in both movies

tarantino is on record saying he loves Kinji Fukasaku, and both kill bill movies were really nothing more than tarantino's tribute to the film makers and films he's always loved (and well done, i might add)

here's more:

TM: The scene where Go Go Yubari (Chiaki Kuriyama) stabs a guy who approaches her for sex...was this from Battle Royale (Kinji Fukasaku, 2000, Japan)?

QT: I went out to dinner with Kinji Fuaksaku and Kenta (Kinji's son) and I was going "man, I love this movie! It is just so fantastic!" And I said, "I love the scene where the girls are shooting are shooting each other." And then Kenta starts laughing. So I ask, "why are you laughing?" He goes, "the author of the original Battle Royale novel would be very happy to hear that you liked that scene." And I go "why?" And he says, "well, because it's from Reservoir Dogs!" Even when I was watching it I was thinking "God, these 14 year old girls are shooting each other just like in Reservoir Dogs!" And Kenta said, "he took that from Reservoir Dogs, so he'll be very proud that you like that!"

Re:Tried to read it

[cozziewozzie]

You make learning languages sound so difficult and horrible, and it's actually fun and interesting. Most of the world learns English as a second language, so it can't be that hard.

If you're only interested in increasing value to your company, then you would probably think that learning languages is only for the elitists (no cash? useless!). You can never learn everything in the field of engineering either, but that doesn't mean you should stop bothering to learn anything outside the narrow scope of your field.

Languages are the way people communicate and anything that increases your ability to communicate and understand other people and cultures improves you as a person. You might not sorely need it, but if you're not at all interested, that's tragic.

Re:Japanese Layout

[BJH]

Er... no.
Japanese is laid out in browsers in the same way English is - left to right, top to bottom.

2ch's layout may look like crap, but nobody uses the top page anyway - anybody serious about it would have installed a specialised 2ch browser that permits easy switching between threads and boards.