Saki Kumagai, the Japan defender most World Cup fans will remember as being just a moment late on Alex Morgan’s goal in the World Cup final game this year, has been warned by the Japan Football Association. All of her pending media appearances have also been put on hold.

The player attended a celebration party with friends from her days at Hosei University, and after having a bit to drink, began to make inappropriate comments about the team. One person at the party decided to relay her comments on twitter, including photos of him and other members holding and biting the gold medal she received.

She was reported to have:

• made disparaging comments about the coach of the team
• said that bullying was rampant and the hierarchical relationships were very strict. She also said that Mana Iwabuchi, being one of the youngest and cutest members of the team was especially troubled by bullying.
• showed, or (allowed to be seen, if the phone was taken without her permission) a locker room photo taken on her iPhone showing teammate Karina Maruyama naked from the waist up
• said that she didn’t even want the gold medal and offered it to anyone who wanted it.
• offered to invite Aya Sameshima to the next party.
• commented that despite being “ugly” Aya Miyama wore perfume on the field.

UPDATE: No surprise here that the Hatoyama Twitter Acct is a fake. Just one of those things campy enough that you wish they were true. I’ll leave the link and my initial article as it was.

OK, I’m going to say first of all that it’s possible this is a fake account, but all I’ve read so far seems to indicate that it is real. I’ll update immediately if I hear that Hatoyama’s twitter account is fake.

The tweets are all in Japanese so far, but if you want a little look inside the mind of the current Japanese Prime Minister (a colorful character to say the least)\, please help yourself to an earful of his tweets at his twitter account:

http://twitter.com/nihonwokaeyou/

If you don’t read Japanese, you’ve always got a million options and Firefox addons to get an English approximation…

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.)

This story is an interesting one because it is a modern view of what’s going on in Japan. If you are already confused about fashion in Japan, school rules about hair coloring, and what people think of all the bleached blonde boys and girls running around the streets here, this story is not going to help you understand anything.

The following tweet on Twitter caused a stir in Japan:

A concise translation is that “motyli” the author of the tweet was riding the train and a very cute young girl was standing in front of motyli. The girl was telling her friend that her mother had said, “These days girls with black hair are being targeted by strange men. Just go bleach your hair,” and handed her some money.

If you come to visit Japan, especially during the summer time, you’ll see a lot of girls with bleached hair, or at least highlights in their hair. Some will even have this unnatural orange color. However the Japanese idols that seem the most popular with men are ones with straight black hair. As the schools tell the girls not to color their hair, often claiming that girls with their hair colored are more likely victims of assault (I don’t know how common this claim is, but I’ve heard it on more than one occasion), this mother is using the same logic as a reason for her daughter to color her hair.

The idea behind the hair bleaching seems two-fold. One is that she won’t seem so innocent and attractive to the “otaku” types or the older men who lust after the young teen idols. (I am referring to the kind of guys that say they are going to kill themselves or someone else when a manga character they like gets a boyfriend, or it’s implied that she’s not a virgin… god forbid an actual human teen idol singer gets a boyfriend or is seen smoking.) The bleached hair sort of destroys the image of innocence. Another reason this mother may think her daughter should bleach her hair for her own protection is that mom may think it’ll make her daughter look like a tough girl.

My opinion is that in a country with a NEED for women’s only cars on trains, hair color is not going to be a big preventative weapon in the battle against sexual harassment and “chikan” or gropers. I think, as I’ve mentioned on this blog before, that the problems need to be dragged out into the open. The girl with black hair being stalked for looking pure and classically Japanese is only going to be changing the demographic of her stalker when she changes her hair color.

What we need is for Japanese men AND women to start educating Japanese boys and girls about being proud of themselves, loving themselves, and protecting themselves. Maybe Twitter and blogging and the like are the kind of anonymous places that can kick start a revolution of openness in Japan, or maybe I’m too optimistic as usual.