What Japan Thinks
April 15, 2008 by maethelwine
This is such a great idea, and it’s turned into an enormously popular blog. After several years of trying to puzzle out what the Japanese actually thought about religion, Ken began to find and translate a variety of surveys and polls. Things quickly got out of hand, and in just the last week, the blog has offered poll results on internet cafe use, where people get their hair cut, hay fever statistics, credit card use and which figure from history people would most like to meet in a seance. Almost unbelievably, Oda Nobunaga comes takes first prize in that last one, in case you’re interested.
Ken is quick to point out that he does none of the research himself. These are professionally conducted polls, drawn from a wide range of sources. Ken is just making them available in English, with the occasional wry comment thrown in to keep readers coming back.
Here or from the sidebar.
Useful but not original, all Ken does is auto translate from another site, really its just plagiarism. Does he share any of his ad revenue with Oricon, I doubt it.
Don’t know whether or not he auto translates, and I don’t think I’d call it plagiarism in any event, particularly given how up front he is about his project. And yes, I agree the blog is useful at times, and funny or oddly illuminating at others.
Gloria, is my writing that bad that you’re mistaking it for machine translation? Everything is translated by hand, and I always link to my sources. Oh, and I have never used Oricon as a source, and only mention them once on my blog where I mention a survey on Japundit that they got off Tokyograph who got it off Oricon! Sorry, I get touchy about this as I put a lot of effort into my almost 100% exclusive in English translation work for peanuts from AdSense, while many of the top Japan blogs just borrow off each other or link to YouTube and rake in the cash through Japan Friends affiliates.
Anyway, according to copyright law, statistics are exempt from copyright, so I can freely use their numbers, although not their text. If I translated the whole of the source article paragraph for paragraph, it might fall under copyright infringement, but I summarise and reinterpret, perfectly acceptable operations whether or not translation is involved.