> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
But this isn't really that interesting though, it's one of those stories meant to get you riled up, isn't it. "Outrage" stories are plentiful in this injust world of ours, and nearly all of them are, in many ways, way more important than hacking and startups. We could fill the entire site with them if we wanted.
I mean, it's pretty common knowledge that Japan (like many other countries) has some issues with its history and culture that some people there have not come to terms with 100%. If this is actually news to anyone, you should spend more time reading something like The Economist.