Canned Dogs

ITmedia reports that both Yahoo Japan and Google are now investigating their image search servers to try and find out why users are unable to get any relevant hits when searching for Hatsune Miku using their image search engine.

Google believes that there might be a bug in the system, and the same problem might be affecting other keywords too. Yahoo on the other hand, doesn’t give any search results at all, and they’re viewing it as a very serious problem and hope to fix it as fast as possible.

Both companies do not keep any search result logs for image searches, so they don’t know when the problem started happening. Both companies also have their search engine servers based in the US and they have to talk to the programmers in the US to fix this problem, which might take a while.

Excite and Infoseek image search also have the same problem when searching for Hatsune Miku, but Excite is using Yahoo’s engine while Infoseek is using Google’s engine.

I didn’t expect that the companies would actually respond to this…

I don’t really know what’s happening right now, but you can’t find a single image of Hatsune Miku on google images if you try searching. The Japanese wikipedia page for Hatsune Miku has also been deleted for suspected copyright violation.

Hatsune Miku images come up by the truckloads if you use the same search term in other search engines such as Live search, goo image search, or livedoor image search.

If you search Hatsune Miku on Yahoo China, you’d get images of her, but if you search on Yahoo Japan, you get zero hits.

The popular theory is that Dentsuu is trying to remove Hatsune Miku because she’s more popular than their virtual idol Date Kyouko.

Nakayoshi is a monthly comic magazine whose target audience is mainly young girls between the age of 6 to 15, and they had held an event called Nakayoshi Festival 2007 in back in July. However, a photo from the Shugo Chara event shows that their real audience is adult males from 18 and up.

Stop blocking the view for the kids!

Via: GA Graphic

Studio Siesta has announced The TOMBOYISH WITCHES, an English version of their horizontal scrolling shooter Trouble Witches. They’re planning to sell the English version to foreign audiences only and will not be selling it within Japan. I don’t know why they had to change the title but yeah.

I’d thought they wouldn’t have anything happening for a while after that drama with their leader that happened late September, but they don’t seem to be having any problems.

I don’t know what Nintendo was trying to do but the giant Pikachus at Pokemon Festa 2007 was definitely not for children.

Pictures from Ninja hamu no honson and Sokonuke kid! Super blog

Asahi.com reports that chief producer of adult video company Shinkousha, Arigane Jisei, has been arrested along with 3 other people under suspect of having violated child prostitution and child pornography laws with a DVD that they released earlier in the year featuring a 17 year old girl in a swimsuit.

All four suspects currently deny the charge.

There is no nudity in the video, but there are close ups to her private parts, and supposedly you can see the shape of her sexual organs through the swimsuit. The video was filmed in Bali, Indonesia, and was released in April 2007 when it sold a majority of the 5500 print run.

The girl was on contract with the company since April 2006 and is quite popular as a junior idol. She received 50,000 yen (US$430) for the filming of the video.

This is the cover of the DVD in question. It also just sold for 20,000 yen (US$170) on Yahoo auctions.

I’m really against the junior idol industry, but the other part of me feels it’s not right to be charging them if there was no nudity…

Comic Gum has announced that a manga version of online novel Sena★Sena will be starting in their magazine starting from the December issue. The artist for the manga version is by the pixel maritan artist (who also did the art for Fate/Tiger Colosseum)

Sena★Sena was previously introduced here. Also the picture in the post is from the online novel and not the manga, because I like co2a more than I like maritan.

Searchina reports that a woman in her 20s was arrested in China for smashing two ATMs with a brick. The reason? An anime character appears on the screen when you use the ATM, and she thought it was inside the machine, so she smashed it open because she wanted to see the character.

The reason for having smashed two ATMs was because she saw that there was nothing inside when she smashed the first one, so she tried a second one.

There won’t be anybody inside if you cut somebody’s stomach open too

Original Kodomo no Jikan ED, Hanamaru Sensation (youtube) by Little non. Kodomo no Jikan ED with one fine day (youtube) by Offspring. Kodomo no Jikan’s ED song has been stirring up controversy because of how the songs are almost identical. And it’s not a cover, if anyone’s wondering.

Edit: The singer/composer’s blog is now being flooded with comments regarding the matter.

Hatsune Miku was featured on the variety show Akko ni omakase! (Youtube link) on TBS this morning, but it wasn’t exactly featured in a positive light, nor was it even focused on Hatsune Miku. Instead, it was busy with the usual negative portrayal of otaku that the media has always been so good at.

In the video, it features somebody from Crypton(the makers of Hatsune Miku) saying that they developed the software so people can be like Tsunku and produce Hatsune Miku like Morning Musume. Crypton has apologised on their blog (in the comments) for having accepted the interview by TBS in the first place and says that the statement was originally already prepared by TBS and the guy was made to say it.

The two guys featured in the video were told that the feature was going to be about how they use Hatsune Miku to compose songs, and the staff recorded almost 3 hours of them working on the software. But in the end, only the few minutes where they talked about otaku stuff was used on the air and only a few seconds of Hatsune Miku’s singing was featured. The cosplay at the end was insisted upon by the TBS staff because “there wasn’t enough impact”.