It is the Age of the Internet, and the new DPJ-led administration under Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama is flexing its progressive, youthful muscles by...opening a weblog.

OK, so it's a baby step forward, but remember that Japan is always being accused of run by old people, and not five years ago now America had (and probably still has) politicians who know the web as "a series of tubes," and call it "the Internets."

The blog mostly does boring things like discuss current events right now, but with enough influence from 2ch and these here Intertubes, we might see some official DPJ ASCII characters like Yaruo and Kuma (the original source for 4chan's "Pedobear") below.