Google's Japanese Problem

Google's Street View can't catch a break these days. First Greece, which is still smarting from memories of its military dictatorships, banned the company from tootling around the country's streets, snapping pics of people and posting them online. Now, thanks to a public outcry in Japan, Google will have to reshoot all photographs of Japanese streets, effectively scrapping all the work it had done for Street View up to now.

What's the problem? It seems that Google's Street View cars, which mount a tripod atop each vehicle and click away, had posted their cameras a little too high. Each subsequent photograph included glimpses of private yards nestled behind fences and closed to the public, violating the privacy of ordinary and now quite irate citizens. Now, PC World reports, Google has promised to start all over again, dumping the old photographs and lowering the tripod sixteen inches before touring the country.

But this may not be Japan's real beef with the company. Earlier this month, Google Maps, of which Street View is a subset, inadvertently heightened a centuries-old racial conflict and dug up painful memories of the country's brutal caste system. In addition to providing maps of modern-day Japan, Google Maps also began posting old maps of Tokyo and other cities during the Shogunate, including maps of ghettos where the country's untouchable caste were forced to live. These untouchables were dubbed "burakumin" and shunned as filth because they worked with dead bodies, in such professions as tanning and grave-digging. Although the caste system has been officially abolished, descendants of the burakumin still face prejudice and hostility in Japan, and the issue remains a sore subject.

Google's medieval maps pointed out the location of these old ghettos, confronting Japanese citizens with both reminders of an ancient injustice and the recognition that some of the old hatreds linger on. The maps even identified the neighborhoods with an ancient slur: "eta," or "filthy mass." Once again, Google is discovering that not everyone wants all the world's information as available as it does.