What else was Google supposed to do? They don't want to get involved in these crazy cultural wars. They just make information available: it's the culture which attaches weird connotations to it.
>There was no note made of the changes, and they were seen by some as an attempt to quietly dodge the issue.
Circular. Who are the unnamed "some"?
>"This is like saying those people didn't exist. There are people for whom this is their hometown, who are still living there now," said Takashi Uchino from the Buraku Liberation League headquarters in Tokyo.
Bizarre. If Google Earth did not exist, would these people cease to exist?
>The League also sent a letter to Google, a copy of which was provided to The Associated Press. It wants a meeting to discuss its knowledge of the buraku issue and position on the use of its services for discrimination.
Google has no knowledge of the buraku issue, doesn't care like you idiots do, and are in a much saner headspace than the lot of you.
Quoting ekiru: The information about discrimination against descendants of burakumin in Japan does somewhat justify their oversensitivity, but prejudice in Japanese culture is no reason to suppress these maps.
-- right, while they are totally unable to actually fix ongoing prejudice, and can do nothing in the face of large well-known companies following the same discriminatory policy, they target the one company that probably truly does not discriminate based on their pet issue.
Google maps are not the problem, the government is.
I don't think it's poor editing on the part of Google at all. Poor editing would be altering the historical record in order to assuage the feelings of one group who might be made uncomfortable. To run with your example, if you're going to alter the map why not go the whole way and replace 'negro' with 'happy black people live here'?
It's a sad but seemingly universal fact that when one social group oppresses another and later people ask 'why are the conditions of (oppressed group) so awful?', the self-serving response of oppressing group is 'they choose to live that way', ascribing their negative situation to some inherent defect on the part of the oppressed.
Maybe Tokyo will eventually become as open about its history -- but before that can happen, quite a few people will have to stop thinking about others by 17th century Edo period standards, it seems.
