Mieko Kawakami

Sometimes people remain in silence. Perhaps to utter aloud is pointless because nobody listens? I have been in the office and voiced an opinion and nobody listened, I have shouted on the streets of Shibuya-ku and nobody listened. Perhaps when I am home alone and talk to my cat I only think she listens to me but really she is lost in thoughts. I wonder what cats think about?

But what of Blogs and why do people write them?
The picture in this entry is of Mieko Kawakami, a writer who just won this year's Akutagawa Award but she was just an ordinary bar hostess and worked in a book store and loved to sing. Then one day she started blogging.
Here is her site (Japanese) Click!

She had a really cool style and used her site to promote her singing and made recordings to sell and eventually the sites attracted so many hits that her blogs were turned into her first book. This is not new and many writers have gone on to have books when their original intention was to write stories for mobile phone downloads only. Interesting that although she has so many admirers of her work for her blog and now her book, Shintaro Ishihara, the governor of Tokyo, who won the Akutagawa a long time ago in 1955 and sits on the awards committee, made his opinion clearly a negative one!

"The egocentric, self-absorbed rambling of the work is unpleasant and intolerable," he said. But I think this remark is based on the fact that her style is modern Osaka vernacular which is far from the traditional of his day.

Steve Weber, an American who has written about marketing books online, says Japanese writers are far ahead of Americans in making their work available on the Internet and Joichi Ito, a Technorati board member, says Japanese tend to view blogs more as exchanges with friends and a personal outlet than as news sources as Americans do, for discussing politics, technology and other issues."More content in Japan is personal, and more content in the U.S. is media-like". Perhaps unusually for me I have started this entry as a media style and I admit that outside of work it is an alien style to me. But I have read and admire her writings because she has a depth which I often try to find in myself. She has broken the constraint of expectations and talks and writes in a way I would like to emulate to a degree. I do not mean for myself to adopt her style as my own but perhaps more in the daring approach to topics not often spoken of and with such different perspectives. Perhaps my English blog is my way to express myself away from the eyes of people here and throw it to the eyes of the international arena. That seems like an excuse!
However, her wonderful heavy hit blog and my small unnoticed blog brings me to my question of...

Why do people write blogs?

Perhaps it is "en vogue" or a way of expressing ideas or a communication that likes to have blog and comment. Perhaps like Mieko Kawakami it's a way of promoting yourself or simply an online journal. I write my small blog as a form of relaxation and therapy for myself.
My work is writing and producing articles but this is much different and my blog is more of an expression rather than a presentation. In a blog I can release myself and make opinion, wild tangents and say what I want in a more meaningful way, my way! In effect it is a small window on my soul. You get to see inside and my inner self has the way out for expression.

This blog today is not really about a part of me as is my usual pattern. Hopefully you will give me a comment or two because all I ask is why you think people write blogs? It matters not if you write one or not because you are still entitled to an opinion.

Please be brave and comment me your opinion.
Thank you.