Four Japanese blog search engines

Digging through the Japanese blogosphere is of course possible with Technorati Japan, but if you want to try something else, be sure to give maplog.jp a spin. Search results are displayed in the classic list form, but also projected on a Google powered map. I don't know if it's terribly useful, but well, it's a cool trick.

Also worth a look is kizasi. Its interface is different from other search engines: you not only get search results, but also a tag cloud of related terms + a time based stats overview - try "メリークリスマス", for instance.

And to finish this short list, a link to blogWatcher: although the service is visually not very appealing, there's a lot of power under the hood, and the statistics on the right are more than a gimmick.