One thing you can count on is for Internet fans in Japan to diss the mainstream Japanese media, called mass komi in Japanese (from “mass communications”), or mass gomi by online users, which means “trash media.” One reason is that the Japanese media often focuses on topics that otakus take issue with, like whenever a crime is committed by a person who has a manga collection or who plays video games and the media points at these things as the probable cause.
Recently the Japanese interwebs were reacting to reporting about Ichiro Kojima, age 22, who is accused of stabbing and killing a random passenger and wounding two others inside a Shinkansen near Osaka with a traditional nata saw, which most of us would recognize is “that really scary spiked saw Reina used in Higurashi When They Cry.” Asahi News Network reported that the suspect “had an interest in reading” which set off some fans, who pointed out that almost everyone like reading. The above reading books include Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky and histories by Julius Caeser.
The media in Japan is also regularly criticized for self-censoring topics it doesn’t want to report on, like the scale of anti-nuclear demonstrations in the aftermath of the 3.11.11 earthquake and tsunamis resulting in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Often Japanese net users will turn to Japanese translations of English news stories by Yahoo News to get the news they feel is less bias.
Source: Hamsoku
