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""In September 2007, Rolling Stone Japan rated their album ...""

From the article:

In September 2007, Rolling Stone Japan rated their album Warning from Stardust at No. 23 on its list of the ""100 Greatest Japanese Rock Albums of All Time"".

Untrue.

This is the front cover of the September 2007 edition of Rolling Stone Japan (which would have come out in August or conceivably even July of 2007). It's the best reproduction I've found of the cover; Google image search may turn up a superior alternative. Unsurprisingly (as it's a Japanese-language magazine) it shows no article titled ""100 Greatest Japanese Rock Albums of All Time"". It does however show an article whose title might reasonably be so translated. (Furthermore, Japanese magazines love decorative snippets of English; and it's conceivable that the actual article, which I haven't seen, is decorated with this or another English title.)

The web page that this article cites for the claim that In September 2007, Rolling Stone Japan rated [etc etc] actually tells its readers that:

The ""100 Greatest Japanese Rock Albums of All Time"" have been chosen by Rolling Stone Japan. Well, they've been chosen by RS contributing editor Kawasaki Daisuke, who also founded the very stylish pop music/fashion/design mag Beikoku Ongaku, so the list could very well be worthwhile.

(Rolling Stone Japan is linked to its web page; Beikoku Ongaku [literally ""America music"", with a (jokily?) old-fashioned term for America] is linked to beikoku-ongaku.com, an anonymously run domain name running a website for some ""collagen drink"" [?] put out by an unnamed company.)

So the source says that the records have been chosen by one person, Kawasaki Daisuke (or ""Daisuke Kawasaki"", as en:WP would insist on writing his name).

Further, there's no hint on the cover of the magazine that the magazine is presenting the list as its list. Instead, it's just one article, and it's presented as the third attraction of the month, below a multipart feature on rock and ecology and also below something about Bob Dylan.

What kind of list is this? The small print on the magazine cover is too small for me to make out. But I showed it to Mrs Hoary (a native speaker of Japanese); and without any prompting from me she said that it almost certainly says 独断と偏見で選んだ. This means that it's a personal, opinionated choice.

There's nothing inherently wrong with personal, opinionated choices. I'd take the personal, opinionated choices of Pauline Kael over the collective wisdom of the various august bodies that showered awards over Forrest Gump. But I'd take them because she's Pauline Kael, not because the choices are opinionated. If Kawasaki is a noteworthy critic, then the listing  of course described as by Kawasaki, not as by Rolling Stone Japan  should be mentioned.

I know next to nothing about Japanese rock music criticism. But Daisuke Kawasaki doesn't have an article in en:WP. He's not mentioned in the ja:WP article on Rolling Stone. And I don't think he gets an article in ja:WP: certainly when I look for 川 or 河 in the list of articles in ja:WP that list to the ja:WP article on Rolling Stone, I see nothing.

Of course, plenty of noteworthy people never get articles at either en:WP or ja:WP. But without some indication of Kawasaki's noteworthiness, it seems odd for something like this  even if it were labeled as Kawasaki's opinion and not the opinion of Rolling Stone Japan  to appear in the lead of an article.    "