Yokoso! ＼(^o^)／

In a brief nutshell, Nippon Sekai was initially created to serve as a somewhat educational resource for certain Japan related topics. Likewise, there were already a plethora of sites out there which covered the bases quite well and the last thing I wanted to do was to "reinvent the wheel" by duplicating the efforts of those existing sites. Sounded simple enough but unfortunately, other priorities kept getting in the way pushing this side hobby stuff way down the list. While there were spurts of progress, this little project spent more times in eternal suspension over the past 3 years. In the meantime, the real world ticked on and made what I originally was trying to do obsolete in more ways than one especially with how video was distributed. The technological advancements made in video compression, the standardization of utilizing Flash Video, and a proliferation of video serving sites made the media database setup I had been cobbling together for awhile pretty useless.

Since the first day in April has a significant meaning in Japan (the government starts its fiscal year on the first with many private businesses also follow suit, the school year begins, many new employees begin work, etc), I decided to restart work on this site again as opposed to letting yet another domain disappear into oblivion. This site is very much an ongoing development and evolution which will be documented in Site >/dev/blog. I know there are now (as of 2008) plenty of blogs and websites that focus on Japan or just its popular culture with more cropping up everyday which necessitates carving out your own niche. Since multimedia (specifically video) has always been a part of every site that I've been involved with, incorporating that aspect into this site was a given. Images and videos have a way of conveying a point which cannot be easily done in text alone. What is changing is the method and delivery which hopefully will make it a more usable experience than before (sayonara Apple QuickTime). It will also be comprised of a mix of original content (most of my recent video is HD) and unoriginal stuff I've had on tape for several years. What this website won't be is a personal daily blog (the development blog and occasional editorial where I usually take a devils advocate approach will be the closest it will come to that).

ibusuM (the sdrawssakcab owner and admin of iakeS noppiN)

The following is a more in-depth look into what it actually took to get to this point.

CAUTION: read only if you are absolutely bored out of your mind as it really contains nothing important except to waste space.

On the surface, it looks like yet another Japan related web site (and an unfocused one at that) in English but the truth is it has actually been rooted in several other sites in the past. The earliest incarnation was back in the 1989-1990 timeframe where community was more in the form of mailing lists (i.e. Jim Lick's JPOP mailing list) and the soc.culture.japan Usenet newsgroup. If you wanted anything resembling pictures, you needed to either use ftp or gopher to grab the content before examining them with some computer software. My JPOP ftp server housed J-idol pictures, some really crudely made postage stamp sized video clips (circa 1991 using QuickTime) of Noriko Sakai and Hikaru Nishida, and was a mirror for Byron Kidd's (of the now defunct Bonsai JPOP Page) CD Ichiba. My interest in JPOP began while growing up in the 70's which gradually morphed into a period of idol fandom in the late 80's/early 90's (a time when I was a metalhead heavily into the whole Bay Area speed/thrash metal scene; so it was an interesting and somewhat twisted combination) before I got back heavily into all sorts of J-Music throughout the 90's. This later encompassed other aspects of Japanese culture as I became more interested in my ancestry.

Around 1994 (several months after the NCSA web server was released in 1993) when everyone was making their own web pages, I started a web site called Planet Hikaru a.k.a. Hikaru's World and also not to be confused with a site called Hikaru's Planet (if you click that link, you'll be taken back to the typical garish style of web pages from that era) which ended up being one of the largest Hikaru Nishida fan sites on the web (it received a writeup in some Japanese geino publication which I can no longer remember the name of). Since net access in Japan was really expensive and hard to get during that timeframe, personal Japanese web sites back then were normally on college academic accounts and limited to small amounts of text (attributable primarily to portrait rights but also due to the acceptable use policies regarding those accounts). I didn't have that restriction so the site had plenty of pictures and videos (which in retrospect, must have been a nightmare for websurfers since many were just on plain old dialup). I took the site offline around 1999 and reactivated that smaller archived version in 2002. Humorously enough, J!-ENT and ASIJ (America School in Japan where Ms. Nishida graduated from) still have links to the old/dead URL. The concept was taken a bit further with Hekiru World (a fan site for seiyuu/JPOP singer Hekiru Shiina) but it never became completely dynamically driven. The last major version of that site was 3.1 and since 2005, very little has changed with it (the activities of the artist had begun to slow which made investing significant time into it a losing proposition). This is why I decided around that time to create this site as it was meant to tie together all the different stuff I had into something more homogenous with the "world" theme still remaining intact. But why nippon (日本 -> Japan) sekai (世界 -> World) instead of say Japan World? The answer to that is simple; the japanworld domain and other similar alternatives like it were already taken (the majority being held by cybersquatters). The way I look at this is it's a fun challenge to try and build your own brandname, identity, and traffic from scratch. The only way to go from zero is up.

Originally, these prior sites all used QuickTime to create and deliver the videos. The "fast start" capability made the progressive http "streaming" experience more tolerable. The problem of course was the YAPTI (yet another plugin to install) syndrome, users disdain for installing QuickTime, and on the backend side, Apple's constantly half-baked QuickTime publishing tools. I had been modifying an existing php script to help assist in streamlining the entire workflow of publishing the different types of media I had (photos, videos, SWF flash). This was also before YouTube when everyone was just rolling their own video portal code. For lack of anything better, I just referred to it as a media database and used that to deliver whatever content I had. That too ended up being a bit of a pain since it didn't integrate well with the frontend of my sites. After a few months, it became more of a hinderance to publish content such that less time was spent on it (and other priorities began getting in the way resulting in the site stagnating). Fast forward from sometime in mid 2006 to late 2007; I returned from a short visit to Kawaguchiko and Hakone followed by the SIAM SHADE and LUNA SEA reunion concerts. All of that made me reflect on several things including how I sort of left this site in a real half (well, not even one eighth) finished state and is the reason why I ended up working on it again with a slightly different outlook and approach.

Unlike the past, the JPOP sort of emphasis that I had originally planned for a portion of this site will be minimized since I hardly keep up with J-Music anymore. I used to follow a ridiculous amount of artists (numbering over hundred) several years ago and kept tabs on what was going on industry wise but as the years have passed, my listening tastes and interests have narrowed. The positive thing about this is the amount of money I've saved which was adding up to a pretty yen when you consider that the average Japanese CD costs ￥3000 (single ￥1200, DVD ￥5800).

As for myself (I give you credit if you actually read all that previous drivel):

I'm a nikkeijin (AJA to be exact; Tomigusuku, Okinawa-ken and Iwakuni, Yamaguchi-ken are where my ancestors are from) which means I blend right in with the majority of the Japanese population except when I open my mouth. I spent nearly 2 decades in IT primarily in systems and networking. I still do IT related stuff but only as it relates to the sites that I run; IT's more fun when IT isn't "mission critical". I also had two non-IT related businesses during the 90's before scaling back to maintain some level of sanity (there really is more to life than just working all the time). I spend most of my time now "working" with photos/videos, being a guinea pig for whatever software seed that Apple needs testing (don't ask which ones since I do abide by my NDA), and "working" on this site. -- "working" in this context = playing.

My current favorite solo J-artist is 絢香 (ayaka), favorite J-bands are 陰陽座 (Onmyouza), Binecks, 大鴉 (Taia), OOM, and MAXIMUM THE HORMONE, favorite J-bandol is EU•PHORIA, and favorite eyecandy is 平野綾 (Aya Hirano). I rarely listen to non-Japanese music except for a few metal groups like Nevermore and Testament (especially after Alex Skolnick rejoined) as well as Marty Friedman's solo work.

And despite the nickname that I use - Musubi, I'm not really that big into onigiri or omusubi as I am into gyoza, tonkatsu, and donburi.

つづく - to be continued with more in-depth background _〆(･_･｡)