The original Brainstorm blogger was Joichi Ito. The Tokyo-based blogger/investor (blinvestor?) has been coming to the conference in Aspen since 2002 and faithfully recording his impressions. He will presumably be doing the same this year, although he is no longer quite as dauntingly frequent a poster as back in the day.

Ito is a phenomenon, a man who seems to not just know but be friends with an insane agglomeration of interesting people. (He was even buddies with Timothy Leary!) Faithful Malcom Gladwell readers will know him as a "Lois Weisberg type."

I finally met the great man at the Asia dinner referenced below last night. During our conversation, he told a fascinating story about a blog post he wrote back in April 2005. It was the time of the big protests in China against the depictions in new Japanese textbooks of the Japanese occupation of China. Ito's post was a thoughtful little essay about how Japanese educators did in fact misrepresent the Japanese army's behavior in World War II, but that if the Chinese wanted to change this they were going about it all wrong.

Nothing particularly earthshaking or groundbreaking there, but it started a cascade of comments (which can be read at the same place as Ito's post) from readers. Some of the commenters were Japanese, some were Chinese, and a lot were neither. Their discussion was at times heated, but never uncivil. (Ito's regular and calming presence among the commenters surely played a role in that.) By the end it amounted to a remarkably thoughtful and honest take on where things stand between Japan and China, something that is almost impossible to find in either the Japanese or the Chinese media.

Now the comments were all in English, which meant that only a tiny minority in Japan and China could follow along. But now Ito says they are being translated into Japanese, to be published in book form. I'm not holding my breath waiting on a Chinese translation, of course, but what a cool accomplishment.