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I wrote an article covering some of the options available to those hoping to set up an online store or web shop here in Japan. Comments/feedback welcome. Setting Up an Online Store in Japan: Some Options

Here we go again. Just when I thought I was enjoying affordable, high-speed Internet access, along comes yet another new technology that makes my once-fat data pipe look like a swizzle stick. I’m talking fiber. Fiber-optic Internet access (known as Fiber-to-the-Home, or FTTH) has been around since early 2001, when Usen Broad Networks launched its [...]

Like me, you may have noticed a recent noisy addition to Tokyo’s otherwise drab urban landscape. Clad in garish red or brilliant white, teams of Yahoo BB “parasol troopers” have suddenly landed everywhere, and trying to locate a station exit or street corner free of their hawking antics is like trying to find a product [...]

It’s been just over a year since my personal e-mail account started getting upwards of 20 junk mails a day and I ditched it for a new, spam-free one. I created another — simple enough when you have your own domain — but found in mere months that I was right back where I started. [...]

I’m sitting with my ThinkPad in a Starbucks near Akasaka. The cafe isn’t advertised as a WLAN hot spot, so I’m pleasantly surprised to find myself enjoying high-speed Internet access courtesy of some nearby wireless network. I open up the WLAN properties on my XP-equipped notebook and have a look. The network name that appears [...]

After enjoying the speed and always-on convenience of broadband Internet for about a year, I was surprised one afternoon to feel an odd pang of disconnectedness when staying at a friend’s cottage in Izu. With nary a phone line or fiber-optic cable for miles around, I briefly found myself wishing my friend had instead revealed [...]

Just a few years ago, I was certain I could never get by without Kenkyusha’s New Japanese-English Dictionary and the venerable Nelson close at hand. Today, however, these and other weighty tomes gather dust on a nearby bookshelf, banished to obsolescence by my favorite desktop reference, the Web. In this column I’m going to introduce [...]

It’s a simple matter these days to build and host a Web site. What’s less simple is getting others — potential customers, readers and other users — to find your site among the millions of others already out there. In this column I’ll discuss Japanese search engines, particularly how best to use Japanese and other [...]

Just about everyone uses e-mail today, and many of us in Japan do so in English, Japanese, and other languages as well. But anyone who corresponds in Japanese via e-mail knows that we still have a long way to go in terms of ensuring that our e-mail reaches the intended recipient both intact and readable. [...]

It was 1975 when University of North Carolina graduate student Steve Bellovin developed a handful of short programs to facilitate communication via UUCP (Unix-to-Unix Copy) between the University of North Carolina and Duke University. The scripts were later rewritten in the computer language “C” and extended, later becoming the basis for Usenet. Hiroyuki Nishimura, operator [...]