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Japan: Letter to Google about Street View

One year after its debut in the United States, Google’s Street View has arrived in Japan, where it is already drawing criticism. Despite the company’s generally positive image in this country, bulletin board threads [ja] and blogs [ja] are filled with comments questioning the way Google has rolled out its latest service. In the past few days, the CEO of a major Internet services company has spotted his own wife [ja], others have found images of men urinating outdoors, and others have caught couples entering love hotels [ja] (not to mention birds in full flight). All of this has raised serious privacy concerns [ja].

But as much as reaction has focused in other countries on private information such as license plates and personal identity, in Japan it is as much the less obvious cases of privacy infringement that provoke a reaction: seeing people’s clothes out on the line [ja], open windows where robbers could break in [ja], or cars parked in the parking lot [ja].

One blogger, noting the cultural differences between the United States and Japan, realized that there was a need to explain to people at Google in the U.S. what was happening in Japan, and why the company — which generally has a very positive reputation locally — had provoked such strong opposition with Street View. The blogger is IT professional Osamu Higuchi at Higuchi.com, who wrote a post in his blog on August 7th titled “Letter to the people at Google” which states:

As soon as I tried out Google’s Street View, I had the feeling that I had to make a comment on it, so I decided to write [this post]. If by some chance this site falls out of favor with Google and disappears from search engine results, please remember what was written here.
Now, let me start by saying that I actually really like Google (everybody likes them, no?). While I was involved in the creation of the Japanese Infoseek, I always felt envious of Google, a company that presented, as their vision, a dream that we were never able to attain. This was the dream that “if all the information and knowledge scattered all over the world on the Web could be organized in an orderly way, so that anybody could access it whenever they needed to, then the world would undergo a major change”. This was a dream that Google managed to realize.

でもね、この日本でのストリートビューは、僕は生理的にダメ。ここまで無邪気に踏み込んではいけないと思うのです。
きっと、セルリアンタワーの中の人も同じように感じていると信じて、なぜこれがダメなのか、海の向こうの人にも分かりやすいように説明を試みますんで、聞いてください。で、リエゾンとして、正しいローカライズについて、きちんと向こうの人を説得してくれるとうれしいです。

But you know what? This Japan Street View, it just feels instinctively completely wrong to me. You can’t play innocent and go this far.
I’m sure that the people in the Cerulean Tower [where Google is headquartered in Japan] are feeling the same way, and are also trying to explain to people overseas in an easy-to-understand way what is wrong [with Street View], so please listen. And I would be grateful if you guys, acting as liasons, could properly convince the people over there of how to correctly localize [this service].

ご検討をお願いしたいことはひとつだけ。

I ask for you to consider just one thing.

In the following, Higuchi is addressing the people at Google in the U.S.:

日本の都市部の生活道路をストリートビューから外してもらえませんか

Could you please remove the residential roads of Japan’s urban areas from Street View?

以下にその理由を書きます。

Below I list the reasons [why this is necessary].

日本の都市部の生活道路は生活空間の一部で、他人の生活空間を撮影するのは無礼です

The residential roads of Japan’s urban areas are a part of people’s living space, and it is impolite to photograph a stranger’s other people’s living spaces

米国、特に西海岸に住んでいる人は自宅のプライベート空間とパブリックな空間の境目は、所有権的にも精神的にも公道と私有地の間にあると思います。というか、みなさんの感覚では公道に面した自分の庭のほうが公的な空間で、自分の庭をきれいにしていないとコミュニティの景観上よろしくないと思っていますよね？

In the United States, and particularly in the case of people living on the west coast, the boundary line between private space and public space, both in terms of actual ownership and in terms of the way people think, is in the boundary line between the public road and privately-held land. In fact, I think that you all will agree that your home’s garden, which faces the street, actually feels itself more like a public space, and that not keeping your front yard tidy ruins the look of the community, right?

ところが日本の都市部生活者は逆で、家の前の生活道路、いわゆる路地のほうが感覚的には自分の生活空間の一部、庭先なのです。日本の都市部では、家の前の公道を掃いたり、打ち水をしたり、雪かきをしたりするのが居住者のつとめとされています。下町を歩いているとよくわかるけれど、家の前の路地に鉢植えとかちょっとした物置とかをはみ出して置いてあるのもその感覚の表れです。

For people living in urban areas in Japan, though, the situation is quite the opposite. The residential street in front of a house, the so-called “alleyway” (roji/路地), feels more like a part of one’s own living space, like a part of the yard. In urban areas in Japan, sweeping the road in front of one’s home, sprinkling water over it, shoveling snow off it, these are all considered to be the responsibility of the resident. Wandering around the older parts of the city, you’ll see evidence of this way of thinking in the potted plants and little storage rooms crowded out [onto the street].

僕らはそういう路地を歩くときには、路地の周りの家のほうをじろじろ見つめることはしません。ちょっと横を向くと、文字通り鼻の先はだれかの生活空間なので、そういうところをのぞき込むのは失礼なことだという意識が働いていると思うんです。

When we walk along an alleyway like that, we don’t stare at and scrutinize the houses along the way. If you look away [from the road] even a little bit, you find someone’s living space literally right in front of your nose. It is for this reason, I think, that we have this awareness that peeping at these kinds of places is something that is actually quite rude.

日本人がアメリカに家を建てるときに、日本の感覚で家の周りに塀をめぐらせて周りからひんしゅくを買うことがあるそうですが、日本の都市部の感覚では逆に通りを歩く人が塀の中をのぞき込むとひんしゅくを買います。

I’ve heard that when Japanese build houses in America, they do so in the Japanese way and surround their home with a fence, to the displeasure of people living nearby. The way that people in Japanese urban areas think, however, is very different, in the latter case it being people walking on the street, peeping beyond the fence, that draw frowns [from the locals].

もちろん、塀や垣根の隙間から中を覗こうと思えば覗けます。そういう行為は「垣間見」と言って、源氏物語の昔から、ちょっとはしたないこととされています。
この季節、なにかのはずみで、軒先で下着同然の格好で涼んでいるおじさんと目があったりします。そんなときも、その人が近所の風呂屋でのなじみとかだったら、ちょっと立ち話をするかもしれませんが、そうでもなければちょっと会釈をするような格好をしてそのまま目をそらし、お互いに見なかったことにする、というのが礼儀です。

Now of course, if you peep through gaps in the fence or hedge, you can peek inside [people’s homes]. This kind of act is referred to in Japanese as “kaimami” [stealing a peek], and from back in the days of the “Tale of Genji”, it has always been considered to be in somewhat bad taste. At this time of year, [walking down these streets], your eyes will meet those of old men cooling themselves under the eaves wearing nothing but their underwear. If this person was someone familiar to you from the local bathhouse or something, then in a case like this you might strike up a conversation with them. If this was not the case, however, you would still nod and greet them, but then turn your eyes away and each pretend like you hadn’t seen each other. This is the etiquette.

「公道からの風景だから公開を前提としているはずだ」ではなくて、「公道を通る者はその鼻先の生活空間はのぞき込んではいけない」というのが、日本の都市生活者のモラルなんです。

According to the morals of urban area residents in Japan, the assumption that “it is scenery [viewable] from public roads and therefore it must be public” is in fact incorrect. Quite the contrary, [these morals state that] “people walking along public roads must avert their glance from the living spaces right before their eyes”.

僕らの生活スタイルは、生活空間の様子を一方的に全世界に機械可読な形で公開するようにはなっていません

In our way of living, you do not unilaterally, and in a machine-readable form, lay open people’s living spaces to the whole world

そういう文化ですから、東京の都市部で路地を歩きながら10メートルごとに360度周りを見回して歩く、なんていうことをやっていると、確実に30分以内に警察に通報されます。手にカメラでも持っていて通りからの風景を撮りためていたりしようものなら、僕の家のあたりのストリートビュー空白地帯なら職務質問の後、池上署か田園調布署にご同行を願われることうけあいです。

With this culture [of privacy], if you were to walk along a residential street in an urban area of Tokyo, every 10 meters surveying all 360 degrees of your surroundings, there’s no question that you would be reported to the police within 30 minutes. Even just filming the scenery from the street with camera in hand, there’s no question that if you tried to shoot the area not covered by Street View, you would be asked, after initial questioning, to come to either the Ikegami Police Station or the Den-en-Chofu Police Station.

生身の人間が路地から生活空間をじろじろ覗いているとやっかいなことになりそうなことは日本人なら直感的にわかるので、普通の人はそういうことをやりません。そのため、生活者側も路地から生活空間の様子が知れてしまうことに対してわりと無防備です。

Japanese people intuitively recognize that a flesh-and-blood human being peeking into people’s living space from the alleyway results in trouble, so ordinary people don’t do this kind of thing. It is for this reason that residents are comparatively defenseless against [people looking in] from the side of the road and learning everything about their living spaces.

ところが、ストリートビューを通して覗くのは、覗かれていることに気がつきませんから通報されることもありません。この非対称性が別の問題を引き起こします。
日本中の、いや、世界中の人が、ケーサツのお世話になるというリスクを負わずに、無防備な生活者の生活空間の様子を見ることができるということは、例えば侵入が簡単そうな構造の家屋を探したり、転売価値の高そうな自動車が公道に面した場所に駐車してある場所などを、誰もが通報されるリスクなしで下見できるようになってしまった、ということです。

On the other hand, nobody notices when someone peeks — or is peeked at — through Street View, and so it is not reported. This asymmetry gives rise to a different problem.
The capacity for people in Japan — or rather, people across the whole world — to look into the living spaces of defenseless residents, without any risk of being stopped by the police, makes it possible for anyone to carry out a preliminary inspection without any risk of being reported. This kind of inspection can be used for example in searching for houses with a configuration that is easy to break into, or in looking for places along the side of public roads where cars with high resale values are parked.

そりゃ、通りからじろじろ下見をする人がいれば通報されるはずだから、と安心して無防備に暮らしている我々が悪いのかもしれないけれど、この安心感が一方的に突然乱されるのは、どうにも納得がいきません。

A person was to do this kind of inspection from the actual street, they would be reported. Maybe it’s a bad thing, but we live with a peace of mind in knowing that this is true, and therefore for this sense of security to be unilaterally and abruptly thrown out of order is completely unacceptable, however you look at it.

ややこしいことになる前に、ご自身のモラルで判断して行動してください

Before this problem gets more tangled, please make a decision and take action on this based on your own sense of morals

それにしても、ストリートビューとプライバシーの問題について、意外なほど日本の新聞が何も言わないのはなぜでしょうね。梅田本だか、アンチマイクロソフトのドグマか何かのせいで、彼らの中では「Google＝なんかわからんけど絶対善」ということになっているのかもしれません。右も左も、あの人たち思考停止しているのかな。

Despite this, however, why is that Japanese newspapers, to a surprising degree, have said nothing about this problem of Street View and privacy? Maybe it is because of Umeda’s books, or because of the anti-Microsoft dogma, but there seems to be a sense among these people that “we don’t really know, but Google must anyway be an absolute positive”. Whether from the right or from the left, people seem to have completely stopped thinking.

でも、近い将来、ストリートビューで下見をして空き巣とかクルマ泥棒をやった奴がきっと捕まって、その手口を供述すると思うんですけど、そのときになって突然鬼の首を取ったように「クルマ泥棒、インターネットで下見」とか書き立ててバッシングキャンペーンを始めるのも、その人たちです。そういうことになる前に、常識的なローカル社会のモラルに照らしたサービス設計をしていただきたいと心から願っています。

But in the near future, there will for sure be a case in which a street prowler or car thief is caught and testifies that they used Street View for preliminary inspection. When that time comes, it is these same people who will suddenly start a campaign triumphantly writing articles [with headlines like] “car thieves preview [crime site] on the Internet”. Before it comes to that, I am hoping dearly that you guys design a service reflecting the common-sense morals of local society.

繰り返しますが、私はみなさんの「世界中の情報を整理し、世界中の人々がアクセスできて使えるようにする」というビジョンを非常にすばらしいと思っていますし、それを実現していることを尊敬し、感謝しています。

I repeat, I consider your vision of “arranging the world’s information in order to make it possible for people across the world to access it” to be something truly wonderful, and I greatly respect — and am thankful for — the fact that you have managed to realize [this goal].

でも、公開することを前提としていない生活空間の様子を勝手に公開されるのは、どうにも気持ちが悪い。僕らの「ほっといてもらう権利」をないがしろにしていて、どうも“evil”だと思えてしようがないのです。

To have one’s own living space exposed to the whole world without ever having been asked about it beforehand, this however really makes me uncomfortable. It ignores our “right [to demand that] you leave us alone”, and comes off as nothing short of “evil”.

お願いですから、僕らのプライバシー感覚と防犯意識が、あなたがたのそれと同じようにアメリカナイズされるまでの間で結構ですから、日本の路地の様子をストリートビューから外していただけませんか。そのために、インターネットがほんの少しだけ不便なものになっても、僕は全然かまいません。

My request is thus, given that it will take considerable time before our sense of privacy and awareness of crime-prevention are Americanized to be more like yours, to remove Japanese alleyways [residential streets] from Street View. This will make the Internet ever so slightly less convenient, but for me that is no problem at all.

Thanks to Taku Nakajima for the suggestion to translate this article.

Posted by Chris Salzberg

 

Global Voices: Global Voices is a non-profit global citizens’ media project founded at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, a research think-tank focused on the Internet’s impact on society. Global Voices seeks to aggregate, curate, and amplify the global conversation online - shining light on places and people other media often ignore. We work to develop tools, institutions and relationships that will help all voices, everywhere, to be heard.
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