Are the Japanese culturaly isolated online?

[The Viceroy]

Many of the major cities in India were named by the British (or as Bombay was, were anglisized versions of Portugese). Bombay simply means Good Bay (Bom bai) ..
After independace, some in the political establishment took to re-naming everything. Personally, id always seen this as an attempt to deny the imperial past, but you could also see it as an attempt to simply make India Indian again (even though India never actuall existed pre imperialism as a single state). Many of the roads in Bombay are still refered to by the original English names, even though they have had an Indian name for many years.

The final part in this was changing the names of Madras, Calcutta, Bombay. There is currently a move to change the name of Delhi to Dilhi because that was the original name (or so I am informed).

Many complain that road names etc have been simply named after corrupt officials, or as ways of buying support from influential individuals .. and its for that reason that you still find many children of the generation that achieved independance believe India was better under the British.

The youth today though find the whole thing a little odd, they do not carry the concerns of the older generation, and see themselves very much as equals with the west, although American and British culture has become increasingly taken up, which I know worry's the older generation a lot. I think the youth of India are much more confident than the last generation.

[Space05us]

so solly ^^;;

they all play Ultima Online, heres the proof.
http://www.spleens.net/

And I'd place money on the rest of them playing the Sims online or marathon games of Pokemon! Gotta catch them all! (how many are they up to now anyway?)

[Q Classic]

Isn't Yin Korean?

iirc, he's white, with a korean wife, living in seoul.

Apparently Japanese tend to add even more vowels at the end of works and to break up English clusters of consonants than Koreans do, which is saying a lot (ie my kids mock their public school english teacher for saying noh-tu-bu-ku for notebook).

whereas in korean, it would end up being noh.t.buk.

[LDiCesare]

I know from work experience that many japanese don't speak English at all, or even worse than us Frenchmen. Note that I'm talking about engineers, so you might expect them to know English. This may account for the low amount of Japanese around here.
Now here's ab hypothesis about the lack of Japanese at 'Poly: Civ games could be renamed 'Western civ' in the sense the civs, tech tree, units, mostly relate to Europe, North Africa and Middle East. Knights, monotheism, are things that don't make much sense in the Far East, so there is probably much less interest in Japan for a history based game which so poorly describes their own history.

[VetLegion]

Interesting hypothesis. I am less then sure that I would have played a game about shoguns and samurais as extensively as I have played Civ, even it had the same replayability.

The argument to counter that is: what about SMAC, MoO and similar? They are also "civ" in a way and don't come with a "background culture" attached to them.

[SnowFire]

I don't play it, but apperantly FFXI has unified servers- they don't have an American server and a Japanese server and a European server. (I wonder how they cope with lag?) This means that the Americans & the Japanese are in one big pot, and get to use the auto-translate buttons in order to talk to each other.

I post at Final Fantasy forum as well, and there's a pretty reasonable number of Asians there, although more general Asians than Japanese. Not entirely sure as to the reason of that, either.

[DanS]

According to Google's Oct/Nov Zeigeist, German language searches are more than double that of Japanese language searches. This despite the Japanese having 1.5x the population of Germany, and being very well wired.

http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist_nov03.html

Of course, there are caveats to this, such as that the Japanese may have their own preferred search engine, while the Germans don't.

Here's the complete '03 Zeitgeist. Interesting most popular search terms for Japan. Much different than most western popular searches and rather refreshing in comparison. Maybe it's all for the better that they're isolated.

http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html

opular Queries
2003

1. gundam
2. hanshin tigers
3. matrix
4. trivia's spring
5. panawave laboratory
6. soccer
7. auction
8. high school baseball
9. psychological test
10. cherry blossoms

I would have thought that the Tokyo Giants would have been above the Hanshin Tigers, but who knew? I had to do a search for panawave laboratories to make a connection.

[Provost Harrison]

Yes, we certainly seem to have far more French posters compared to a few years ago which I think is good news (I am sure you must remember my threads of days gone by wondering why we have such a low proportion of French posters, which is slowly being redressed for a country that is quite populous and well wired - you'd think there'd be a similar proportion to the British all things being equal). But Japanese definitely seem to be underrepresented considering how well wired they are and their population...

[Ben Kenobi]

BK.....

I may write some french, but I'm certainly not french Canadian like Spec. Just a plain ol' English Canadian from BC.

[Drake Tungsten]

I would have thought that the Tokyo Giants would have been above the Hanshin Tigers, but who knew?

Yomiuri Giants, and they can burn in hell.



Han-Shin Tigers! Hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray!

[TCO]

Originally posted by Spiffor

I must admit, I cannot break away from 'Poly to join a French or German forum too

Why not?

[TCO]

Originally posted by Provost Harrison
Yes, we certainly seem to have far more French posters compared to a few years ago which I think is good news (I am sure you must remember my threads of days gone by wondering why we have such a low proportion of French posters, which is slowly being redressed for a country that is quite populous and well wired - you'd think there'd be a similar proportion to the British all things being equal). But Japanese definitely seem to be underrepresented considering how well wired they are and their population...

yeah, what happened?

[Spiffor]

Originally posted by TCO
Why not?

I just can't make it. The OT is much more active and interesting, and it has the added value to feel like the audience in a zoo

[TCO]

Or like being in the cage with the loin...

[TCO]

Well...Poly does rock. used to be even more fun though.

[VJ]

Well...Poly does rock. used to be even more fun though.

When'n'how?

[Zero]

Originally posted by SnowFire
I don't play it, but apperantly FFXI has unified servers

no it doesnt. My friend was talking about how he can raise money (not usd.. ingame money) to move his character into a nother server where his friends play..

[Odin]

I am sure I have seen some non-Israeli middle-easterners on the board. Irman is Arab-American, right?

[The Mad Monk]

Pakistani-American, I believe.

[DanS]

Yomiuri Giants, and they can burn in hell.

What is Yomiuri? Is it part of Tokyo? A company?

[Drake Tungsten]

Yomiuri is a media company that runs a TV station and one of the bigger papers in Japan, the Yomiuri Shimbun. Lots of baseball teams here are named after the companies that own them. In my area, we have the Kintetsu Buffaloes and Hanshin Tigers, both owned by train companies.

[Q Classic]

most athletic teams in asia are named for their sponsoring company rather than the city they play in.