It’s finally here! After chinaSMACK launched koreaBANG, the mighty East Asian trio is now complete as koreaBANG’s very own multi-lingual Beth cheats on us and proudly gives birth to japanCRUSH. No it wasn’t going to be called japanWHAM, japanCHOP or japanSMACK.
It goes without saying that there’s a more than complicated relationship between Japan and Korea, following a bit of invasion, a little taste of colonisation, and just a smattering of vicious nationalism. There’s also the nice added spanner of the Dokdo/Takeshima/Lioncourt Rocks/Malvinas dispute that is occasionally thrown in the works, not to mention the ongoing and unresolved issue of comfort women and the legacy of an occupation that strived hard to ‘Japanify‘ Korea.
The Japanese movement of ‘Naisen Ittai’ that tried to emphasise colonial Korea and imperial Japan as being ‘one body’
But it’s by no means all bad – nationalists might hijack things in both countries on occasion but there is still a lot of mutual respect, intrigue and shared history between Seoul, Pyongyang and Tokyo, along with many fond traditional practices that have unmistakable Japanese roots.
There’s an incredible amount one can learn from observing what becomes popular amongst a nation’s netizens and what they say amongst themselves in their own language. Like koreaBANG and chinaSMACK, japanCRUSH is dedicated to just that, using translation to make trending Japanese internet content and discussion accessible to audiences who can’t read Japanese kanji, hiragana, or katakana. For some, the stories, pictures, and videos themselves will be entertaining enough on their own, but for others, it’s the reactions, opinions, and sentiments of Japanese internet users that prove fascinating, enlightening, or just plain amusing. Because of this, we know you’ll soon be addicted to japanCRUSH too.
Anyway, Beth and a rag-tag band of Japanese and non-Japanese men and women have worked long and hard to bring you the following introductory posts currently on japanCRUSH:
- Funny Japanese netizen reactions to survey results indicating that Japanese youth are uninterested in sex.
- Japanese netizens criticize the police for forcing confessions out of innocent suspects while investigating the iesys.exe remote control virus cases.
- A popular Japanese TV personality is embarrassed of being Japanese after seeing a no-entry sign specifically targeting Japanese tourists in the UK.
- Japan’s government wants to congratulate their Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine winner Yamanaka Shinya by giving him a new washing machine.
- Japanese netizens applaud a YouTube algorithm change that knocks Korean viral music video ‘Gangnam Style’ out of the Top 100 rankings.
japanCRUSH will be updated daily, so don’t forget to subscribe to the japanCRUSH RSS feed, get email updates, like them on Facebook, or follow them on Twitter.
Take a moment to go over and give them your support! We’re excited to have finally completed what we internally call the “East Asian Trifecta” or “EAT” for short of China, Korea, and now Japan. We love our Indonesian and Russian sister sites too, but there’s no denying the seemingly uniquely intense dynamic between these East Asian economies and their societies.
koreaBANG fans, go over now and give them some love!
