Not every popular story is necessarily hot off the digital presses. The most blogged story on The Japan Times Online in 2007 was originally published in 2003. After four years of idling in the archives, it was resurrected on social news/bookmarking Web sites such as Digg and Reddit, which brought an avalanche of curious readers. "Seven riddles suggest a secret city beneath Tokyo" was the story of journalist Shun Akiba's quest to convince the public that a hidden network of tunnels still exists beneath the world's biggest metropolis. Akiba had vintage maps and eyewitness testimony telling of a subterranean complex, but neither media nor government would talk to him. Despite this, his story captured the imaginations of online readers last summer, and the article exploded across the blogging world.
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Second on the list was a more contemporary report about rice paddy art. "By precisely planting four varieties of rice with differently colored leaves in fields their ancestors have farmed for centuries, the people of Inakadate Village have this year grown remarkable reproductions of famous woodblock prints by Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849)." The Socko in Japan blog was first to flag the story, but the stunning images went on to grace virtually every blog with an interest in Japan, art or creativity. (For the record, bloggers had already taken a liking to this crop of organic art a few months before this story appeared in The Japan Times.)
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Last year saw the passing of numerous political and entertainment heavyweights, from Boris Yeltsin to Anna Nicole Smith, but the obituary that made our top 10 list was for a marine mammal from Enoshima Aquarium in Kanagawa Prefecture. Minazo the seal died in 2005, but news of his passing continues to draw attention, thanks to his role in one of the biggest Net memes of recent years: the "LOLrus". Pictures of Minazo, captioned with jokes in the broken syntax and typos of text messaging and online bulletin boards, became an unlikely Net icon. As Minazo's digital fame spread, so too did news of his death, and the report became our fourth most blogged article of 2007.
Elsewhere, major news stories became predictable blog fodder, with the demise of language school chain Nova and the introduction of fingerprinting for foreign visitors to Japan both breaking into the top 10. Geek interests were well represented, with Akihabara's awful truths, an article on the fading popularity of Akihabara among the geek community taking the 10th spot on the most blogged list, and a feature on the use of robotics in nursing occupied the No. 3 slot.
Quirky Japan was represented by "SDF deploys perky mascot to boast cuddly image", the story of the Self Defense Force's cuddly mascot Prince Pickles. In the land of wide-eyed characters, even the military has a cute face now. "The cutesy icon hardly calls to mind the Japanese military that conquered and pillaged its way across Asia in the first half of the 20th century, and that is just the way the country's leaders want it," said the report.
The darker chapters of the nation's history did however surface in the word-war about the "comfort women" of World War II. The eighth most blogged article, "Gov. Sonomanma: What sex slaves?," reported on a contentious statement made by politician Hideo Higashikokubaru at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan: "It is very difficult to confirm as a historical fact that the 'comfort women' actually existed," he said. Unsurprisingly, most bloggers didn't find anything funny about this former comedian's comment.
Perhaps the most unexpected blogger target of the year was "Wood carriers allegedly hid 1.1 billion yen income." The story of a lumber shipping company failing to report its full income was hardly the sexiest scandal of the year, but it got plenty of attention in Malaysia, where bloggers zeroed in on the suggestion of corruption by a Malaysian minister.
