Business daily The Nikkei says it learned that Amazon Japan, the country's second-biggest e-commerce company, is planning to finally offer its e-book reader Kindle to Japanese customers.

According to the paper, Amazon is expected to launch Kindle devices in April this year "for less than 20,000 yen" (US$257). Apparently, the Kindle Touch will be positioned as the flagship model, while there is no word on how or if the Kindle Fire will be introduced, too.

For the 3G connection, Amazon has chosen mobile carrier NTT Docomo as its partner. Just like in other markets, Japanese Kindle owners will be able to download books over 3G for free, provided they decide to go for Kindles offering both 3G and Wi-Fi connectivity.

Rumors about Amazon Japan entering the domestic e-book market have been circulating for a long time. In November/December 2011, for example, The Nikkei speculated that the company was ready to start offering e-books by the end of 2011 (which obviously didn't happen).

In an interview with the paper from November 2011, Yoshinobu Noma, president of major publisher Kodansha, said that he estimates Japan's e-book market to be worth 65 billion yen (US$837 million). Noma also said that 90% of sales in this segment come from content distributed to cell phones - a number that will surely change when the Kindle becomes a hit in Japan, too.

In Japan, the Amazon device will go head-to-head with other e-readers and tablet hybrids like Sharp's Galapagos, Sony's E-Reader, Toshiba's BookPlace, Panasonic's Raboo, or Fujitsu's Flepia.

Report: Amazon To Bring Kindle To Japan In April

Mangajet [J] is a new Japanese service which let you make a Japanese manga-comic style illustration with provided characters, background images, baloons with your text.

The generated comic strip can be saved and shared on Twitter.

Following to the Japanese manga standard, text will be written in top-to-bottom direction so Western languages won't fit well, unfortunately.

The service was released as a promotion of a free digital manga material directory Manga Sozai Jiten, which is run by Datacraft.

There is Feel on!, a web service to comicalize your Twitter timeline as well (and that one now supports English).

via INTERNET Watch

Mangajet Makes Your Tweet Into A Comic-style Illustration

Japan's largest mobile marketing and advertising firm, D2 Communications (D2C), has acquired a 0.9% stake in Tokyo-based Ubiqituous Entertainment (UEI). D2C acquired a total of 400 UEI shares - other financial details of the deal, which was officially announced [JP] today, weren't disclosed.

In April last year, the two companies started a program called 9leap [JP] for young game smartphone game designers (our previous coverage).

With the capital partnership, D2C and UEI plan to continue the program, co-develop HTML5-based web services and mobile ad solutions, and use the latter company's knowhow in the gaming field to create new applications and content.

Founded in 2000, D2C is said to be not only Japan's largest but also oldest mobile advertising company. D2C's parent company is the country's biggest mobile carrier NTT Docomo - other shareholders are Dentsu, Dentsu Digital, and NTT Advertsing.

D2 Communications Acquires 0.9% Stake In Tokyo-Based Ubiqituous Entertainment

The smartphone location sharing service Foursquare has added the “Sakura Badge,” limited to the Tokyo area.  This is the first appearance of a limited badge from Foursquare in Japan.

The conditions for opening a “Sakura Badge” are to follow the “Sakura Badge List” [J] with 62 spots carefully selected by Foursquare within the capital, and then check in to 5 of these 62 spots.  By the way, last year Shibuya Station and Shinjuku Station were popular spots, ranking 2nd and 3rd in the world respectively for Foursquare check-ins.

Translation authorized by VSmedia

Let’s Get a Foursquare Limited Tokyo Badge!

Twitter added more choices of cities on its trending keywords in Japan on February 2. There were only all-Japan and Tokyo rankings before.

6 cities, Osaka, Nagoya, Sapporo, Kyoto, Fukuoka and Sendai are the new ones.

View Twitter Trends On New Japanese Cities in a full screen map

There are many bigger cities than Sendai, but most of them are satellite cities of the largest ones (Yokohama, Kawasaki, Saitama, Chiba for Tokyo, Kobe for Osaka) so they were probably selected to make geographic balance. Hiroshima, which has slightly more population than Sendai, could have been chosen though.

I am unsure if different cities will make much difference on trends. We will report if there are anything interesting observed.

Not Only Tokyo – Twitter Japan Adds 6 More Japanese Cities On Trending Topics

BitWallet, who runs one of Japan's most successful e-money service Edy since 2011, who joined the Japan's largest e-mall group Rakuten in January 2010, 2 years ago, announced [J] that the e-money brand Edy will be changed to "Rakuten Edy" from June 1, 2012.

Rakuten did similar renaming on companies they bought, like DLJdirect SFG Securities to Rakuten Securities, Aozora Card to Rakuten Card, E-bank Bank to Rakuten Bank, etc.

e-Money Service Edy Rebrands Itself As Rakuten Edy

(@cosme's tag line on the logo is "site of everyone's word of mouth")

Istyle [J], who runs Japan's top cosmetic products review site @Cosme, announced [J] on February 3, 2012, that they will be listed on Tokyo Stock Exchange Mothers (Tosho Mothers) planned on March 8, 2012.

The company was established in 1999, and its service @Cosme became the leading beauty information service in Japan. 6.2 million monthly visitors exchange makeup products reviews.

Along with electric appliance review Kakaku.com and restaurant review Tabelog, @Cosme is thought as one of the most successful user generated review service in Japan.

As the reviews on @Cosme sometimes highly influences the sales of cosmetic products, there were rumors that some sellers' review manipulation existed. Last month, after the buzz of Tabelog review manipulation news, one third party agent was reported [J] to ask @Cosme users to post positive mark with rewards. IPO must have been prepared before the Tabelog incident for long, so it is unfortunate for them if their IPO price will be affected by this word-of-mouth reputation troubles.

Istyle(@cosme) Goes IPO On TSE Mothers

This week's Japanese Web/IT related news which we did not write as a dedicated article.

Referred pages are all in Japanese, unless otherwise stated.

• Docomo Announces To Take Over Online Grocery Service Radishbo-ya. Radishbo-ya's release
• Smartphone Time-recorder Solution Driven By Virtual High-school Girl
• Government Bond Recommended To Prepare For Possible Crash Of Government Bond!! - on Weekly Toyo Kezai flyer in train
• Japanese Geek Icon Tatsuhiko Miyagawa Joins Cookpad [En] - he keeps staying in San Francisco. as no Cookpad office is there (as far as I know), he should be working remotely.
• Gree's Third Party Callenges Nintendo With Pokedan Monsters - reactions on Twitter, Kotaku [En]
• Disney Mobile Comes To Docomo
• Google Japan's Google+ Page Opens via Official Blog
• Chocolate QR Code via ITMedia
• Reseach: Japanese Social Game Players Spend 43.1-65.9 Mins Every Day
• Ring it! - MTI Enters Smartphone Free Call App
• NTT East Decides To Open Its Paid WiFi Networks For Free When Disasters Happen In Tokyo
• AirReply - Inform Twitter Message Without Mention To The Targeted User via Internet Watch

If you want to know any specific news more, but unable to find them in other English blog/media, please let us know.

Japan’s Web News Week 5

Popular human voice synthesizer Vocaloid Hatsune Miku are getting known oversea as a Japanese web phenomenon. Like the global company Google picked it up as a "singer" for Chrome promotion in Japan, where they chose Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga for US.

As the Chrome video shows, there are massive number of generated songs and videos are created, uploaded on Nico Nico Douga and YouTube.

On YouTube, some Miku fans started noticing that some of the Hatsune Miku videos were removed with "copyright violation" recently. Many of the banned videos are English and other subtitled ones made from the original Japanese versions.

Nico Nico Pedia has a detailed history of the issue started in last November [J]. According to it, the users who reported the copyright violation all have a name Junichi Sasa, or slightly modified of it, who are unlikely own the copyright of the removed videos.

Fans made a video to inform this issue. The English subbed one is here,

Chinese,

French,

The copyright holder of the Hatsune Miku's video is each creator, so, on regular copyright report, the original creators are encouraged to claim YouTube to get it back. However, making things difficult is that many of Hatsune Miku videos are re-uploaded from Nico Nico Douga to YouTube by non-authors, and foreign language subtitled versions are usually made another users. In that meaning, those removed videos are not really by the original copyright holder.

Even when the author does not care, or is pleased that their videos are distributed across the web services and the languages, not many of them notice and take countermeasure on those distributed versions.

Many Hatsune Miku Videos Being Removed From YouTube By Invalid Copyright Report

CyberAgent [J] has announced that they will transfer their iPhone camera social network app “My365” over to Sirok, a subsidiary company they set up for developing smartphone applications.  From now on this new company will manage the service.

“My365” is an iPhone camera app that was released on October 26th of 2011.  Based on the concept of “When you look back at every casual day, lovely memories are made,” each day you store a photo of what you feel is an impressive moment  and upload it into your calendar.  By word of mouth, downloads have spread out to reach 300,000 at present.  Not only in Japan but also in Thai, Hong Kong and elsewhere it has ranked among the highest for free apps in the App Store photo category, and currently about 30% of access is from overseas users centered in the Asian continent.  This time Sirok, established as a subsidiary company, will take over as developing team for “My365” and continue to manage the service.  From here on they are plotting to expand “My365” functions and will proceed to develop an Android version.

Translation authorized by VSmedia

CyberAgent Establishes Subsidiary Company For iPhone Camera App “My365″