News in Japan? Nahh, we're just a newspaper

Our Man gets the feeling that newspapers don't want to survive. What with putting silly barcodes on their pages that you are supposed to hold up to your web cam (so absurd, Our Man forgot where he read this) methinks they've forgotten the basics.

You know, news - stuff that happens to folk, er, recently.

Case in point - the unofficial Halloween party ghost trains that run every year in Tokyo on the Yamanote Line. Only this year, a bunch of right wing nationalist praise-the-emperor-down-with-whitey protesters broke the wa of JR by shouting stuff at foreigners. Hmmm. Stuff that happens to folk, recently. Yep, that's newsworthy. The kind of news that would be of interest to Japan Times readers (foreigners and foreigner-sympathisers).

Er, nothing in Our Man's JT yesterday or today. If Our Man knows about the story (and he lives in semi-splendid isolation in the buttfuckegypt-ville of Abiko) then you'd think the big city media types would know about it. Wait! The Gomiuri had a piece about Halloween trains... er, oh it was a fluff feature piece probably written a week ago (secret handshake to James at Japan Probe).

Maybe the good folk at the JT just missed the story (but your star columnist didn't). Hey, it happens, Lord Buddha knows Our Man has made a career of missing the big one, but a word of advice dear sub-editors of the dead tree press: When you are checking the AP, AFP, Kyodo and Reuters wires, even if you don't know your RSS feed from your bird feed, just spend a minute to check in with Japan Probe. In amongst the monkey-on-the-loose stories are some real good 'uns that you might have missed. Like the Halloween train story here.

Back to the crossword folks. Pic lifted from here.