I guess the important thing to keep in mind is that this poll was completed on the internet by a company called COBS. COBS is a data collection agency with members who answer polls and post reviews in return for points. This also explains the number one answer… Here are the result of the poll in reverse order:

5. 6.2% of respondents (124 votes) kiss for the first time on the fifth date.
4. 10.2% (212 votes) kiss on the second date.
3. 16% (320 votes) kiss on the third date.

2. 19% (votes) kiss on the first date.

… and the surprise (?) answer…

… the #1 vote getting option…

1. 39.5% (790 votes) answered… “I have never been on a date.”

Thanks to all who participated in the study, now get out into the real world and get yourselves some dates! Almost a fifth of you stand a chance of getting a kiss on the first date, especially if you date each other!

I don’t know how popular Moyasimon is in the West, but it is another highly regarded manga/anime that Japan is planning to make into a live action movie.

It’s starting to seem like Japanese filmmakers are trying to beat American film makers to the punch. Astro Boy came out in 2009, and there was also a Hollywood version of Speed Racer just to name two. They’ve also been busy in Japan making a live action version of Space Battleship Yamato, and the upcoming Tomorrow’s Joe live action movie.

Japan’s latest entry is Moyasimon: Tales of Agriculture and stars Nishida of the manzai team “Waraimeshi” who just happens to look exactly like Kaoru Misato, one of the main characters in the story.

For those of you unfamiliar, the story follows the adventures of a first year college student at an agricultural university. The student’s name is Tadayasu Sawaki, and he happens to be able to talk to microorganisms.

Fresh off the heels of making a live version of Space Battleship Yamato, TBS is going to work on one of the most beloved manga and anime works in history. Ashita no Joe (Tomorrow’s Joe) is the timeless story of the life of a boxer named Joe Yabuta.

Many anime fans are concerned again about the choices movie makers are making to play the lead characters in some of these films. Althought it still remains to be seen whether Takuya Kimura will cut the mustard in Space Battleship Yamato, people are even more vehemently decrying the selection of Tomohisa Yamashita of the pop group NEWS to play the lead character in the film.

Many fans want a professional actor, boxer, or a newcomer to play the role. Personally, I think that Yamashita looks enough like Joe, and has the acting skills to pull it off. I have seen him in tv dramas and on variety shows in Japan, and I think he can do a good job if he’s directed well.

Here is a little video of Tomohisa Yamashita in the movie “Kurosagi” in which he plays a tough, young con-man. I think he’ll be good in this if the writers, directors, and producers do their jobs.

The Japanese media tried to make a big story bigger this weekend by complaining about the way Maki Goto wore her hair to her mother’s funeral. Her mother died this week in a fall from her apartment balcony in a suspected suicide.

Maki Goto showed up with her hair brown. The media responded with outrage. Cooler heads on the internet bulletin boards however, pointed out that it would be even stranger if Goto, who most often wears her hair dyed, had immediately taken a trip to the beautician upon hearing of her mother’s death.

More of a funeral fashion faux-pas was committed by former Morning Musume member Nozomi Tsuji who seemed to be thinking a little more about fashion and the photo-op than her grieving bandmate.

Tsuji wore a pronounced black bow on top of her head and a very short skirt as can be seen in the video below.

The video below is a long news report describing the events and location of the death. Including a woman who reported hearing Tokiko Goto speak of wanting to die. Much of the footage is repeated over the 10 minute recording (including several showings of Maki Goto’s arrival at the funeral). Former Morning Musume members Nozomi Tsuji, Natsumi Abe, Yuko Nakazawa, Kaori Iida, and Kei Yasuda can be seen arriving after the 7 minute mark in the video below.

Here are the winners of the 2009 YouTube Japan Video Awards. There are 7 categories, and the winning videos can be found below.

In the MUSIC Category:

This is a very cool video, definitely worth watching and definitely deserving of the award. An amazing amount of planning and preparation must have gone into this.

SOUR – HIBI NO NEIRO:

The winner for the anime category is also very professionally done.
FUMIKO’S CONFESSION:

This video won for best documentary/live action video. Also a fascinating video with humor and sensitivity.
I AM ROBOT:

In the Blog and How To Division, we have the video
HAIR TUTORIAL RIBBON WITH LITTLE HAIR:

Next up is a crazy cat starring in the animal division.
OKINA HAKO TO NEKO (THE BIG BOX AND THE CAT):

Next up is the technology division with this video. At the end of a hard day, a construction worker washes his machine.
ATAMA ARAEYO! (WASH YOUR HEAD!):

In the nature, scenery, landscape division we have another winner making good use of the score in this very professionally done video.
miniature city 2 -featuring vividblaze “tight rope (floor mix)”:

I love the fact that we live in this era when people can share things like this with other people all over the world. Art is unstoppable.

This is one of a series of videos by the comedy group “Ramens”. It endeavors to poke fun at a lot of the “how to eat sushi”, “sushi etiquette”, and Japanese culture videos that abound.

Some of it’s a bit too true, and some of it is just crazy. I like the part about the geta.

This video was made years ago, but is still both awesome and appropriate:

I previously wrote about the cast of the new Space Battleship Yamato (Star Blazers) movie. Well, the trailer is now available and you can judge for yourself whether to see this one or wait for the inevitable Hollywood remake. This trailer doesn’t show how the story will change with Reiko Takashima as the ship’s doctor, and model and actress Maiko as Homer, the communications expert. Both of those characters were male in the original tv series.

Other casting decisions, such as Yuki Mori (pictured to the left) as Nova, and veteran actor Tsutomu Yamasaki (known in the West for his work in Juzo Itami’s films) as Captain Avatar seem right on.

The trailer prominently features Takuya Kimura (Kimu-Taku) of SMAP, and some pretty weak looking special effects. I hope that they just rushed this trailer for New Year’s TV in Japan, and the movie’s final FX are going to be better.

It’s not a very good sign that Kimu-Taku is the lead because it could mean they are counting on his popularity and the popularity of the original series to get viewers to come – a sign that corners might be cut on the special effects and storytelling.

I still have high hopes, being someone who watched this series as a kid… anyway here’s the first teaser to be released.

Susan Boyle appeared on the annual Red and White Song Battle providing SMAP’s Takuya Kimura a chance to whip out some of the English language skills he and his wife, Shizuka Kudo have been working on.

I provide the link below for as long as it lasts on YouTube so you can see it go down…

Look for it about 1 minute and 20 seconds in:

Yeah, he spoke English and Susan Boyle went right for the interpreter to figure out what he was trying to say.

Actually his pronunciation doesn’t sound that bad. She may have understood him better if he had spoken a little more clearly and not taken her off-guard. (Naturally with an interpreter on duty next to her she would be expecting the interpreter to be used.)

I actually like SMAP, and feel they add something positive to Japanese pop culture, but I don’t like the attempt to create an unreal mythology around Kimu-Taku… that he’s fluent English, stories put out by his agency about how Beyonce was flirting with him while filming a commercial, the platform shoes and camera tricks during press conferences with other performers, and the show they made once at a Native American reservation at which he was declared a spiritual chief and member of the tribe. That was a weird show, and I believe there was an interpreter there who was kept off-camera so as not to destroy the image of him as bilingual.

As you know if you live in Japan, NHK demands payment for its services. In fact, they say that “if you own a tv” you are required to pay. Many non-Japanese people living in Japan think that pretending not to understand Japanese will save you, but they will come back with a vengence, or an English language pamphlet, or an English speaking rep. Many people Japanese and non-Japanese alike decide to just pretend not to be home.

They don’t seem to realize, however, that despite how wonderful NHK kids shows are, people paying mandatory fees to watch them (or not) on tv, are not going to pay even more on top of that to watch them on the computer.

The NHK On Demand service will be a year old this December. Some free programs also exist, but the majority of programs cost between 105 yen and 315 yen.

NHK On Demand was 1,300,000,000 yen in the red last year and is projected to surpass that this year. The service is obviously failing financially. I think they could really help themselves out by finding a way to market Japanese people living abroad. I would happily pay to be able to access NHK kids shows from abroad. I’m sure students of Japanese in high schools and college would also love to be able to watch NHK shows on demand to perfect their comprehension skills.

I think NHK can be a big success if they team it up with services like KeyholeTV, or compete with Keyhole TV. Japan currently has no service like Hulu or tv online so maybe this is NHK’s chance to take all that they’ve invested in their On Demand service and make it profitable. They have the technology in place. Now it’s just a matter of offering content people want with a viable plan for monetizing it.

I’d pay, or happily watch commercials if it meant access to kids shows from outside of Japan. The service needs some better marketing and a more aggressive plan for getting people outside of Japan in on the action.

For now, I’ll be content to enjoy some of the free content offered and keep an eye on the development of this promising yet underdeveloped service.

Twitter Japan was rumored to be starting up premium accounts for which users would have to pay to read. This has since been described to be a “misunderstanding” by someone at Digital Garage Mobile who did a presentation in Japan talking about subscription services. He laid out a plan which may have been just a proposal by which one would have to pay to read celebrity tweets.

In Japan, celebrity blogging is huge. Celebrities, idols, singers, gravure idols can all make a lot of money just by writing blogs (or having blogs written for them). These blogs are often the source of embarrassing or gossip-worthy comments. It gives net bullies the opportunity to pick on personalities. I even know of online bullying which led to the suicide of an adult video star who commented about her relationships with famous Japanese comedians. Fans of the comedians bashed her in comments, demanding that she commit suicide. Sadly, she complied.

Twitter would do well to follow the model of Ameblo and other major blogging giants in Japan and pay celebrities to tweet, then simply put some ads in among the tweets. The same people who read celebrity blogs in Japan and allow Ameblo to make a profit on them would certainly read very short, pithy tweets from their favorite actors, comedians, and “joshi-ana” (female tv announcers). Mix in an ad every third to fifth tweet and I doubt that anyone in Japan would complain. Access could easily remain free and still be profitable.

In a nutshell, I would sell some adtweets to be placed among the tweets of celebrities in Japan. Allow it to be free, and pay the celebrities. The model is no different from that currently done for the “celebrity bloggers” in Japan and would provide Twitter Japan with a nice bit of profit. The celebrities themselves could also use the opportunity to plug whatever book, magazine, tv show, movie, or song they are currently working on.

There is a lot of room for making a profit off of the internet in Japan but it requires embracing the model of providing services for free which Japanese companies do not seem ready to do… as in the case with NHK On Demand. (NHK’s plan to offer their tv shows online for a fee seems to be failing.)