Some Forum members will be interested in the new internet journalism on Japan site, Tokyo Kaleidoscope. Its World Wide Web address is:

http://www.smn.co.jp/

The site is bilingual, the Japanese version being SJIS and the translations being generally well-done. As with most free information on the Internet, the quality of the articles is rather uneven, but there are some interesting contributions on various aspects of contemporary Japanese politics and the economy. I have copied a portion of Kaleidoscoop's "Greetings" page and attached it below.
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Greetings from Tokyo KaleidoScoop

This is Japan's first genuine independent online weekly magazine based on the networking of more than a hundred Japanese journalists, artists and scholars in various fields as well as a lot of foreign specialists in and abroad who are intereted in and/or fond of Japan.

Tokyo KaleidoScoop, having been called Shima Media Network (SMN) through the six-month experimenatal period since its establishment last October, is provided by Shima Media Network, Inc., which was founded in April, 1994, as a joint venture of Shima Media Institute, headed by Keiji Shima, former NHK (Japan Broadcasting Association, the huge semi-staterun TV & Radio station) chaiman, and INSIDER, Inc., led by Hajime Takano, journalist and editor of the INSIDER (a small independent politico-ekonomic newsletter), as well as some other independent shareholders.

As the supervisers, three prominent journalists are at the core of the widespread network of contribution and cooperation: Takao Iwami, political columnist and special adviser to the Mainichi Shimbun, Yoshimi Ishikawa, novelist and critic on current affairs, and Takano. While they are not only writing by themselves but also coordinating the network to pump fellow writers' concerns and issues up to the WWW pages of the magazine, they don't force any opinion or special editing policy on the writers who are therefore responsible what they analyze and insist by their names.

Tokyo KaleidoScoop has diversified sections. Among them, This Week , written by Takano, is the preview on what is coming in following seven days in and around Japan. As the contents of the magazine is renewed every Monday morning at U.S. EST, the cycle is Monday to Sunday. Opinion and Forum are mainly for sending messages from Tokyo to the world, while Keyword is for helping deeper understanding of Japan which may be sometimes "mysterious" for foreigners. In addition to those signed articles, there are News, Gallery, Hot Asia and some others. In Gallery, some good works by leading photo journalists are introduced.
Hot Asia is really cool, we believe. There you can warp into every exiting WWW server in Asian countries which we selected from a journalistic point of view.