Global Voices Online

Coffee Stains & Inks from the Philippines hints that embassy officials were slow in helping Filipinos who were stranded in Thailand during the airport crisis.

Minae Mizumura's The Fall of the Japanese Language in the Age of English, which sparked debate recently in Japan on the future of the country's national language, is the subject of a blog post [ja] by Nobuo Ikeda. Ikeda writes that his wife had bought the book and described it as “boring”, and when he later picked it up and had a read himself, he felt the same. “She says that Japanese literature is being threatened so we need to protect it, but her understanding is mistaken,” he writes. “In scholarship and business, at least, Japanese is already nothing more than a regional language.”

Indonesia Anonymus from Indonesia metaphorizes president-elect Barack Obama for the nation's governance: “… are [Indonesians] going to cling on to the same old divisive politics, same old status quo while at the same time happily cheering for America's Obama?”.