Subject
Technology
The question is seldom the tool itself. It is whether the people handing it out are trusted — and these threads are unusually good at telling the difference.
- Driverless taxis are to start carrying passengers in Tokyo in 2027. I counted 990 comments: 74 to 26. The top comment came from a man who drives a taxi in central Tokyo for a living, and it said that obeying the road traffic law to the letter is not enough to get through this city, so try the countryside first At 09:00 on Tuesday 15 September 2026, Impress Watch published a story on Yahoo! Read →
- Japan's Ministry of Justice plans to start a trial next year in which sex offenders out on parole are given GPS devices to carry. I counted 2,189 comments: 96 to 4, and 305 of them, 47 percent of the vote, said consent should not come into it at all. First place took 7,810 presses, 30 percent of the vote. That a device you carry can simply be left at home was said by 261 comments, 16 percent; implant it in the body was said by 462, one comment in five, but took only 3 percent of the vote On the morning of 12 September 2026, Bengoshi.com News published a story on Yahoo! Read →
- From 2031 a camera will watch your eyes. I counted 2,857 comments, and the thing Japan most wanted detected next was drink-driving — 793 comments. Illegal parking got 7 comments and zero votes. Japan's transport ministry has decided to make driver monitoring systems compulsory — an in-car camera that watches your gaze, your eyelids and your steering, and warns you when you look away from the road or start to nod off. Read →
- Japan's most-read tech story today drew 16 comments. Everyone was busy using the map. The morning after record rain hit Chiba, Toyota switched its free "roads that worked" map to show the flooded prefecture — every road its connected cars actually got through in the last three hours. Read →
- The dancers show their faces. The men calling their videos "art" hide their names. At Awa Odori, Japan's four-century-old dance festival in Tokushima, videos zooming in on female dancers' hips and chests are spreading online — and when the festival committee confronted one uploader, his answer was "that was art." I counted the comment section 92 minutes after the article went up, 302 parent comments in a room still being born. Read →
- He deleted the video. The comment section's 38-to-1 verdict is still up. A streamer popular with Japanese teenagers filmed himself outside a famous Harajuku crepe shop, was told to stop, and called the shop kissho — "gross" — on camera, telling it to "move to a back alley." The video was gone by the next evening. Read →
- Rakuten is giving every shop an AI manager. Nobody asked. An AI store manager in every Rakuten shop, 24/7, plus a "super agent" that books and pays for you. Read →