Via Stowe Boyd, I came across this article in the WSJ which Stowe noted suggests that blogs are a bigger cultural phenomenon in in Japan than the US:

Six years ago, a Japanese businessman went online to vent about his domineering wife. Blogging daily under the pen name “Kazuma,” he detailed how she grabbed food from his plate, sent him shopping in a typhoon, and made him sleep in the living room when he caught a cold.

Now, his terrifying spouse is famous as Oni-yome, or “demon wife,” the star of a book, a television drama, a comic-book serialization, a videogame and, coming soon, a movie.

I am in Japan right now, and just got back from a bookstore, and was amazed at the number of magazines and mooks (see second definition on Wikipedia) on blogging… I’ll have to take a picture next time so you can see how many ブロッグ books are on display.

By the way, oni does mean devil and yome is one of the words for wife. It’s said, though I don’t know if it’s true, that the sterotypical oni in Japanese folklore is patterned after a foreigner or gaijin. It was our big noses that were so frightening…