Word: japanned
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...Japan, not only are people reading novels on their cell phones; they're also writing novels with them - uploading SMS-length installments to specialist websites where they are in turn downloaded to the phones of millions of readers. The most popular are printed as books and sell in the hundreds of thousands. Okiyama's first keitai shosetsu or "cell-phone novel," K, was written on her 3G Sharp handset and finished with a speed that would have left Barbara Cartland eating her literary dust. In book form, it is 235 pages long. "I think I was writing 20 pages...
...Internet has been formative in the evolution of Japan's latest literary genre. As early as 2000, keitai shosetsu were appearing on the website Maho i-Rando, which offered MySpace-style homepages, to which readers posted diary entries via their cell phones. But "people wrote in asking for a place where they could be expressive and creative," says Akira Tanii, the site's founder. "We gave them a tool that allowed them to publish novels, short stories and poems, chapter by chapter, just like a real book." Many of the early titles were collaborative products: site members would post reactions...
...product of a quick-thinking writer-entrepreneur. But Maho i-Rando members soon began pleading with the site's owners to see their favorite stories in hard copy, too, and its first books debuted in 2005. "Mobile novels are created and consumed by a generation of young people in Japan that demands to be heard," says John Possman, former head of Tokyo entertainment consultancy Dragonfly Revolution. "It is truly pop culture." It has also become big business. In major book wholesaler Tohan's 2007 best-seller list, five out of the top 10 books in the fiction category are keitai...
...often told in first-person narrative and lack diversity," agrees Matsuda. But that hasn't been a problem with consumers yet. "Why don't you write a novel and move me?" read one angry schoolgirl's recent online post, in response to a vehement keitai shosetsu detractor. So far, Japan's literary establishment hasn't come up with an answer...
...once been laughable. After all, North and South Korea are still technically at war, and in the autumn of 2006 Pyongyang's insular regime defied the world by testing a nuclear bomb. But since February 2007, when North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il struck a deal with the U.S., Japan, Russia, China and South Korea to begin dismantling his nuclear program in exchange for aid and normalized relations with Washington, there has been a burst of cooperation between the two Koreas. In mid-December, a direct rail link opened between Seoul and the Kaesong Industrial Complex across...