Japan, China, and Wikileaks' Cablegate: Is it anything?

Resources

Guardian: Cable mentions of:

In Japanese

TassaLeaks

tag	topic	number of cables tagged
JA	Japan	5532
PGOV	Internal Governmental Affairs	2842
KPAO	Public Affairs Office	2770
OIIP	International Information Programs	2717
KMDR	Media Reaction Reporting	2714
ECON	Economics	2504
PREL	External Political Relations	2090
PINR	Intelligence	2026
ELAB	Labor Sector Affairs	1861

Analyzing

If you've have the cablegate.7z files from BT, there's a good PHP app here that you can run locally to browse. Follow here (RSS) for new cable releases.

Did you know that you can tweet what to look for in the cables to @gdncables and The Guardian, which has 'em, will look?Jay Rosen
jayrosen_nyu

Latest Wikileaks links related to Asia

November 30

We've seen the first releases of the mammoth Wikileaks data dump (251,287 docs in total) over the past few days, with a few interesting revelations but nothing as spectacular as we saw from the Afghanistan or Iraq leaks. Is it relevant here in Japan and around Asia? A cable said to incriminate China's Politburo as being behind the the Google hack could be interesting.

While nothing juicy about Japan has come to light just yet, save for some remarks by Taro Aso about the genki-ness (or lack thereof) of his Chinese counterparts, it will be interesting to see if later releases bring anything of impact. On the heels of the coast guard video leak that created an international incident and caused investigators to head to Google's offices, the privacy and legal protection of a site like Wikileaks for whistleblowers make an interesting contrast.

So while we don't yet know specifically what the majority of the texts contain, The Guardian has listed an index of sorts that shows that 5697 of the documents originate from the US Embassy in Tokyo. Each document is tagged according to topic, and you can see the distribution above.

[view data on Google Spreadsheets, some lower values excluded]

*Richard also has a good write-up of this data on Tokyo Digital