Thanks very much for your detailed feedback. I really appreciate it.
I'll assume you were making a joke about "Hanzi". (It's "Hanzai"...the Japanese word for "Crime")
I agree that 20 minutes is probably about right. The bulk of the podcasts dealing with crime are 30 minutes (no added audio from news clips, interviews, etc) or one hour (with clips).
With the current news editions, when I first started this I really thought I would have trouble finding enough stories each week even to make a 5 minute mini-show. Turns out you can fill up 30 minutes and still leave lots of stories completely untouched. I'm surprised to find that people download the back editions of the news stories. 10 minutes of news would barely be enough to cover all the shoplifting and upskirt video shooting police officers and school teachers, let alone anybody else. I thought those would suffer from short shelf life. I think I may be trying to get more and more stories included because for years I have been mildly dismayed by the complete lack of interest that so many foreigners have in local/domestic news from Japan that doesn't directly touch upon or affect their lives as foreigners in Japan. I think much of it probably has stemmed from so little news of that sort being offered in anything except Japanese. I also think the news stories can serve a very valuable function in that they show people the unvarnished Japan...Japan doing things they'd probably rather nobody else took a look at. The purpose of including the news stories isn't to titillate or to show Japan being whacky or quirky...although that sometimes unavoidably happens...I'm trying to include news that gives a more complete context for knowing or understanding the place and the people, and showing people at their worst behavior certainly throws the polished and carefully curated PR image into sharp contrast. I let Japan show itself as it is when it thinks nobody else is looking.
I wish I had an intern. You wouldn't believe the number of hours this eats up every week. I think it takes me at least 10 hours of work to create 20 minutes of a podcast, whether that be a historical case or a news roundup.
I include what details I can dig up. Not all the information I would like to have is available. Japan is still a bit behind on having all the old stuff you would like to have access to actually available. I've had several stories I started to do but had to drop because there was no information available on what happened in the end, regarding even such basic stuff as the outcome of a trial. I went to the public library on Sunday and looked for supplemental information on the main case I covered in Episode 9. I dug through the newspapers around the date of the murder and found not a single mention of it. If I were in Tokyo or a major city I would have better access to more papers on microfilm, but that's not the case. Another factor is the nature of privacy in Japan and the nature of the police force and the lack of a mechanism to dig into what they do or did beyond what they choose to make public. Podcasters in the U.S. with the time and tenacity can sometimes do Freedom Of Information requests and actually get access to records of investigations. I can't do that here.
I probably won't do Aum, for the simple reason that it has been covered in English. My primary criterion for deciding which historical cases and which current news items to handle is that they not be available in English elsewhere (to my knowledge, anyway).
I would dearly love to have sponsors. I will be 100% frank and tell you that at some point it is going to have to generate some degree of revenue or it will be dropped like a hot rock. I am able to access the information that goes into the podcast for myself without going to all the effort and bother that goes into putting it into a digestible format for others and I am not so large-hearted or possessed of such a volunteer spirit that I will continue to spend 20 or more hours a week doing this forever if it doesn't eventually bring in a few bucks. I have other things that I have put aside in order to try to get this going as a side source of income and if at some point that isn't happening, I will put this aside and go back to those things instead.
Thank you for listening and especially for letting me know your thoughts and giving me a chance to reply to them. Engagement, feedback, and encouragement are the only things that keep podcasting from being just a guy sitting in a room talking to himself.