River Akira Davis from The New York Times:
Executives from South Korea’s Naver and Japan’s SoftBank Group said they would jointly own the operator of Line, a South Korean-developed messaging app popularized in Japan. They gave the project a code name that emphasized cooperation: Gaia.
But late last year, cracks started opening in the Naver-Softbank venture.
Paywalled, but a good retelling of a century of strained relations between Japan and South Korea through the tale of a little green app called Line. For me, the cute stickers are the only good part of the Line ecosystem. The messaging portion of the app remains much like it was a decade ago and competitors like WhatsApp and Messages are taking laps around it. But it is still the king of text communication in Japan and no one seems able to topple it.
Yuri Kageyama from The Associated Press:
“In classical music, you play what’s written on the music sheet. Onigiri is the same,” he says. “You don’t try to do something new.”
A delightful read on one of Japan's core food staples.
Shoko Oda from The Japan Times:
The Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant, a sprawling 4.2-million square meter complex by the sea, was once the crown jewel in Japan’s strategy to boost atomic power to 50% of the country’s energy mix by 2030. Inside, a framed certificate from Guinness World Records acknowledges the facility’s potential output of 8.2 gigawatts as the most globally.
Right now that output — which would be enough to power more than 13 million households — is zero. The seven reactors at KK, as the facility is known, were shuttered after the 2011 tsunami and meltdown at the Fukushima No. 1 plant in the Tohoku region that prompted the government to rethink its dependence on nuclear energy.
Fascinating article about this one plant in Niigata but also the general pulse of the population on nuclear energy, the total fecklessness of Tepco, and government officials avoiding being the one in charge of allowing power generation to resume.