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The History of Tomobiki-cho

By Mason Proulx



I've been working on this site off and on now for nearly six years. In that time there have been many radical changes, both in these pages and in the Urusei Yatsura fan community. Looking back, I'm proud of what I've been able to accomplish and I marvel at how much its grown over the years. However, most people don't know the amount of work I've put into it, nor do they understand my motivations. So I present to you, the history of Tomobiki-cho, the Urusei Yatsura web site. This is pretty long, but this site was built on much more ambition than just any fan page.

Sowing the Seeds

Tomobiki-cho began almost 8 years ago as a simple idea I had to increase awareness of Urusei Yatsura. I thought of starting a fanzine, but didn't have the resources or the energy to do so. I let the idea go until the spring of 1995 when I was introduced to the World Wide Web. I was no newbie to the internet though. I had already been playing around on Usenet and bulletin board services years earlier, but this world wide web thing was really revolutionary. The browsers of choice were Mosaic or Netscape 1.0 so everything was on an ugly grey background with no attention to page design. But it still knocked my socks off. Finally the internet had images and words along with a point and click interface. But everyone here already knows how the internet used to be so I'll spare you.

I had been an anime fan for years back when it was a secretive hobby that no one but the fortunate few had any knowledge of, but now it felt as if the doors were blown wide open. The internet helped paint a much grander picture of the anime fan scene than what I had previously experienced. It was becoming less and less of an underground cabal of university fan clubs. Anime was finally coming into the public consciousness, thanks to the internet.

Urusei Yatsura in need of a boost

I went through an obsessive phase for a while, often browsing 12 hours a day. However one thing really bugged me. All over the web there was a wealth of information about most of my favorite anime series, but next to nothing about my number one favorite series Urusei Yatsura. Back then there was the old Urusei Yatsura Homepage hosted on the UC Berkeley servers, [1] a couple of FTP sites with Urusei Yatsura image files and fanfics and that was all. [2] Sure there were a few fan pages, but nothing worth mentioning. In the days of Usenet, students had placed a fair number of Urusei Yatsura images on the net, but afterwards, no-one bothered to add more images. As I searched the web I saw nothing that would attract new fans to Urusei Yatsura. There was only one Urusei Yatsura web page and it had all the appeal of a political science textbook. Just skin and bones with sparse, inacurate information and a few unimpressive images. The fact was that there was nothing at all on the web that would peak someone's interest and I could plainly see that Urusei Yatsura would slowly vanish from consciousness of the fan community in favor of newer releases.

In the beginning...

Urusei Yatsura was once the king of all anime back in the golden days of western anime fandom around the late 80's to early 90's. Back when being a North American otaku meant that you were either a university student participating in your anime club, or that you lived in a Japanese community. Sure there were the old time Robotech and Star Blazers fans who embraced Streamline's titles such as AKIRA and Fist of the North Star. But they weren't exactly an organized fan community, just casual buyers. Only the universities offered that kind of fan scene and Urusei Yatsura was the title on the lips of every hard-core fan.

Urusei Yatsura on the Decline

Around the time I was introduced to the web, the anime scene was also starting to gain some momentum as a lot of newcomers were getting into anime. In response, more and more new titles were beginning to be released. Gradually people were starting to overlook Urusei Yatsura. I saw the huge internet community of anime fans, but since Urusei Yatsura was getting very little representation, not many of the new generation fans even heard of Urusei Yatsura.

The Urusei Yatsura mailing list was the only place I could find where people wanted to talk about the series. [3] It was a very different list back then. A lot larger and made up of veteran fans since the underground days when ex-pats made up most of the fan base. Compared to these guys even I was a newbie. But over the year, I began to notice that the mailing list was on the decline. An increased number of people were leaving the list. It seemed to me that most of these guys were college post-grads who just couldn't find time for anime anymore. After the year was over only a small handful of them remained. Now the already small Urusei Yatsura fan community was even smaller and it felt rather lonely. As always, I was very active in newsgroups and mailing lists so I did my part through word of mouth, doing my best to advocate for Urusei Yatsura. Even so, I was fighting a losing battle. No new pages had shown up in over a year. Not a single new graphic or multimedia file had been uploaded. While Ranma 1/2 and Kimagure Orange Road fans were running rampant, Urusei Yatsura fandom had remained stagnant.

The Sluggish Birth of Tomobiki-cho

I was tired of sitting on the sidelines, I wanted to make a difference. No one else was doing anything about it so I decided to step up to the plate. While I didn't know anything about HTML, I made a commitment to create my own Urusei Yatsura web site. My mission was fairly straightforward; to create the definitive Urusei Yatsura site which would encompass everything I love about the series. A one stop shop for all your Urusei Yatsura needs. My hope was to ultimately introduce newcomers to the series while pumping a little enthusiasm into those stagnating fans.

Slowly I began to teach myself how to create web pages and haphazardly put together the first working version of Tomobiki-cho. It made its debut March 1996. [4] In all honesty, I was still learning so it wasn't good at all. I remember the green background with the embossed Urusei Yatsura logo, the cover of wideban #1 on top, and a rather messy collection of links encased in a bordered table. The images were just thrown on unoptomized with little regard for download time. The writing was childlike. There were only 5 sections and each was mostly incomplete. It wasn't much better than the other Urusei Yatsura pages out there that I wanted to beat. In short, it was pretty bad. At the time I was attempting to create a huge database on nearly all of my favorite anime. I eventually decided to scrap the idea and dedicate my site only to Urusei Yatsura.

I began to concentrate on the one section I knew I could write, the character bios. For months I tried my best to write essays about all of the cast that truly captured their personalities in a way no other mere character description page had ever done on the web. Little by little I would finish each essay, and then spent even longer making constant revisions. The Ataru page for example must have been fully revised at least 20 times over the years. It took a lot of hard work but I eventually completed all the main characters. This was the moment when the site started to take shape. To this day, the character biographies remain the part of the site I'm most proud of.

In the beginning, while I was starting to write the bios, the site was only called "Mason's Urusei Yatsura Page". The name "Tomobiki-cho" came to me two months later. I was watching a copy of an Urusei Yatsura laserdisc that a friend recorded for me. After it finished, the trailer for Urusei Yatsura movie 5 "The Final Chapter" came on. It certainly wasn't the first time I had seen this trailer, but this time it gave me some inspiration. It started with the words "As the world looked on, Earth's fate hung in balance. The fight for survival now begins. Final battle in...TOMOBIKI-CHO." Right then I started thinking what better name for a definitive Urusei Yatsura site than the town where it all takes place? So I used the town's name and even borrowed my logo from the very trailer that inspired me. From that point on, I worked like mad to make it a site worthy of the name. It was at that point that I believe my site was truly born.

Tomobiki actually means "to drag friends along with you"

Around this time I believed other Urusei Yatsura fans would rally to my side and help me construct a network of pages like the world had never seen. It would become a utopia of Urusei Yatsura fandom. Everyone contributing to the greater cause. However such an expectation was unrealistic and admittedly an adolescent fantasy. It's not that people don't care, it's just that most people don't have the time or the motive to commit to building a site that they feel doesn't belong to them. I quickly lost the illusion that this would be a community effort. I realized that if I was going to do it right, I'd have to do it myself. It's one hell of an undertaking for one person.

But I haven't been totally without support. Over time I've had a few people make an impactful contribution to the site. In the early days, Jerry Wright helped me a great deal. He was someone who I could bounce ideas off of and who would actually help with research. We'd talk on the phone and often send each other anime goods. Jerry was one of the few internet acquaintances who I might call a friend. We eventually lost touch though as most internet friendships tend to do.

Another person who has helped make this site even greater would be J.M. Steadman (a.k.a. Sakurambo). He came to me out of the blue one day when I posted a request for someone to take over the fanfic section of the site. Out of the three people who volunteered, I chose him based on nothing more than a hunch. It worked out better than I had hoped. Initially a bit wet behind the ears, he soon became a most worthy collaborator. His summaries of the Urusei Yatsura movies are written with such professional pride and his work on the fanfic page shows such dedication that I'm glad he was on my side. Most people will tell me what they like about the site, but no-one tells me what I'm doing wrong. Fortunately 'Sak' was one who's not afraid to put me in my place.

There have been many others who have helped along the way. Davey Jones, Norikazu Ikeno, Charles McCarter, Sean Worsham, Joe Rispoli, K.J. Karvonen, Matthew Webber, Aishath Nazir, Akira Hojo and Leo Sutic have all helped me in one way or another. I am very thankful for their insight and inspiration. Most recently I have to thank Harley Acres and Dylan Acres for without them, this site would no longer exist. I'll tell you what I mean later on.

Blood, sweat and beers.

By now I've revamped the site 7 different times and each of those times I was always revising. During the first 2 years I spent about 900 hours on Tomobiki-cho. The work I put into it tapered off in the following years, but that initial spurt took up a lot of my youth. I'm sure my time wasn't spent too efficiently since I would often watch TV or browse the web at the same time as working on the site, but still, that kind of investment of time is mind boggling. I could have been out making money. A lot of this time spent was nothing more than tinkering; rewriting a line of text here, replacing a picture there, then going back and tweaking it some more. It was a very messy process for the first year. It took me a long time to streamline my efforts.

This site was once painstakingly built with just a text editor and Photoshop 3 (before the advent of layers). After I started going professional, I began to use programs like Homesite, Dreamweaver and the latest versions of Photoshop. Not only that, but my methods became more organized and efficient. Now it takes me a couple of hours to accomplish what used to take me a week.

Evolving with the site

Thanks to cutting my teeth on this site in its early years, I eventually grew more and more proficient with the web to the point where I could code with the best of them. Not only that but my knack for graphic design gave me an additional advantage in being able to design sites that could contend with print quality design. I began to work as a freelance web designer. Eventually landed a full-time job with a design agency as a web developer where I became a full-fledged professional. There I created and designed web sites for many big money clients. I quit after a wonderful year and a half to go back to college and get my graphic design diploma (where I'm currently taking my 3rd year). It's very likely that none of this would have happened, if it weren't for the learning experience that came with creating Tomobiki-cho.

Since its creation in early 1996 this site the site has hit a couple of major snags. Looking back on them, if these crises had never happened, this site would have long since faded away. Here's a look at the two biggest turning points in the site's history.

Crisis in Tomobiki-cho part 1
- Death & Rebirth

The first crisis came in the summer of 1997 when I had started to grow weary of the site. AnimEigo had temporarily lost the rights to distribute Urusei Yatsura in America, Viz Comics decided to stop selling the manga and I felt like my site was the only thing keeping the spirit of Urusei Yatsura alive in the English-speaking world.

Being a candle in the darkness for so long, slowly but surely I began to lose interest. I wasn't putting the same passion into my work that I previously had. The old 'bijin' of the month page (R.I.P.) was on the end of it's run, all of my major pages were finally complete and I didn't have a single new idea for my site. I felt like I had reached a dead end so I just stopped caring. Just then my access to the internet was cut off.

As some old-timers may know, this site used to be on a server called ottawa.net. [5] I had stuck with this company for a long time despite the fact that they had the worst service out of any provider I've ever known. One day I had returned from an anime convention to find that they removed my e-mail address for some clerical reason which was no fault of my own. They then restricted my access to my ftp site (again, their fault). As usual I spent 3 days on the phone trying to clear it up, but I figured that I would never get it back again. I was sick of going through a new ordeal every month with them. I decided I would let it end here and Tomobiki-cho would die off.

For two months, I used this opportunity to take a rest from the internet. This gave me a fresh perspective on Tomobiki-cho and soon with a ton of new ideas spilling out of my head, I was eager to get back to my beloved site. I had just graduated high school and wasn't going to college right away, so I had lots of free time to recreate the site into something truly special.

Around November of 1997 I was just about done and ready to launch on my father's company server. However just as I went to update the old site and post a link to the new place I found out that ottawa.net went out of business (good riddance!) and shut down their servers. So my old site was gone for good and I didn't have any way to tell my old regular visitors where I had gone. That's when I got the inspiration to register tomobiki.com as my new domain name. [6] Not only that, but I moved the site to a faster, more professional web host. Now that the site had been reborn, it was a very different web site than it once was. It finally had become the site I always dreamed it would be: the most comprehensive Urusei Yatsura fan site in the world.

Crisis in Tomobiki-cho part 2
- Coma & Reawakenings

1997 to 1999 were the salad days of Tomobiki-cho. The site had grown to be one of the most popular anime fan sites on the web. My inbox was constantly full of letters of praise and people claiming they had become Urusei Yatsura fans thanks to my site (which is the nicest compliment I can get). It was practically a ministry unto itself. Soon I had so many ideas that I started creating other fan sites such as my short lived Patlabor site and my more permanent guide to Japanese rock and pop music. Eventually I began to concentrate more on my J-pop site and let the nearly complete Urusei Yatsura site stand on its own, without any updates for years to come.

After staying in Japan in the summer 2000 and then starting college back home in the fall, things changed for me. Having done web professionally for so long, I was just plain sick of it. It was no longer fun for me, just a lot of work with no benefit. The dot.com boom had also lent a sickly smarminess to the whole web mystique that began to turn me off. I didn't want to have anything more to do with the internet for the rest of my life. Just the thought of having to update Tomobiki-cho gave me a heavy, uncomfortable feeling. Besides, my studies had taken me in other directions and the web was a part of my old life. I didn't feel like revisiting the past so Tomobiki-cho just stayed there untouched for the next few years, growing moldier by the day.

I'd still get e-mails every day with requests, questions and comments, but if I'm being completely honest here, I didn't even open them to read. I regret shunning all of those who came to me, but the fact is that I just wanted to forget all about my site and didn't want to explain that over and over to a hundred people. It was just easier to ignore it. I was content enough that my site was merely around to provide a resource.

Things came full circle in the summer of 2002. After having been out of the country for a while I had come back home to find my inbox flooded with e-mails asking "Where did Tomobiki-cho go?" It was true, my host cut off access to my site even though I was still paying for it. Apparently even though I hadn't touched the site for years, it kept exceeding its 8 Gigabyte traffic limit each month, so they decided to shut it down. After a mild dispute, I was considering cutting my loses and letting the site die (saving myself a lot future payments in the process). Frankly I was embarassed by how my site had aged. My design and coding skills had become exceptionally good in recent years, but Tomobiki-cho featured the same tired old look from back in 1997. Redesigning the site had always been on my mind, but it would take so much hard work to revamp it that I just wasn't up to it. Since I was so embarrassed by the site, I just would rather not see it anymore. I decided to shut down Tomobiki-cho forever.

Just then as I was catching up on my backlogged e-mail, I found a divine message in my inbox (sent several months earlier) from the webmasters of www.furinkan.com. They had created an excellent network of Rumiko Takahashi pages partly inspired my Tomobiki-cho and were inquiring why my site was no longer running. They offered to host it if I was in need of a new place. After talking to them and seeing what passionate guys they were (they reminded me of myself a few years ago before I became all jaded) I accepted their offer. They would have a Urusei Yatsura page to add to their Takahashi network, and I would be able to give my site to someone else and wash my hands of it.

But then, inspiration hit me out of nowhere. Maybe their enthusiasm was catching because suddenly I cared about Tomobiki-cho again. Feeling motivated, I began to work on several design ideas and that same day I had my home page all designed and assembled. It was official. Tomobiki-cho was coming back and better than ever. For the next few weeks I spent most of my free time designing the site, scanning, assembling the pages, rewriting some of the text and adding new content. The results are what you see here. Version 7.0 of Tomobiki-cho in all its glory.

Daring to be different

I'm proud of the fact that my page was always built entirely upon my own merits. No text or images were swiped from any other sources in building this site. Everything you see here is original and created exclusively for this site.

Borrowing content from another page is standard practice on the web. It's not entirely wrong, and everyone does it anyway, but personally I have no respect for it. When I started the site, as I looked around the web very few of the other anime pages out there were truly unique. Everyone was stealing ideas and pictures from each other so that most anime pages were incestuously identical to one another. Site after site said the same bloody boring things about Urusei Yatsura like a broken record.

I was intent on making a site that was entirely from my heart, not some rip-off. In that spirit, every graphic and written word on this site was created by me (or donated to me for the purpose of this site). I obtained each piece of Urusei Yatsura art myself whether I scanned it from my own collection of Urusei Yatsura paraphernalia or I got a friend to scan it for me. Even though it's a common thing, I feel that stealing other people's page content is a corrupting practice on the web. It shows a lack of imagination and all you're doing is adding another aimless page in a sea of similar web pages with nothing new to say. If you can't contribute anything original to the web, what purpose is there in having a web page?

From the start I set out present something completely different than what was currently on the internet and I feel that I've exceeded my expectations. By now I've reached a position where people steal subject matter from my site and put it on their own. There must have been a dozen Tomobiki-cho clones out there. To be perfectly honest, this development is quite flattering yet insulting at the same time. I'm happy that people appreciate my work and that it's now a part of anime culture on the internet. It tells me that I must have done something right. But on the other side of the coin, it disturbs me to see my work which I've spent years laboring over, slapped onto someone else's page willy nilly with little regard for all of the time I spent researching, editing phrases, scanning images, perfecting code and creating graphics. I'm not naive though. I know this is inevitable when you create your own material on the internet. There's not much you can do about it. All I can do is continue to be creative and keep the site as dynamic as possible. If this is one of the only sites that keeps offering new and original content, people will keep coming back.

I'm almost done here. Just a little bit more. Honest.

This site has been a great success and it's poised to keep going strong for years to come. Now that I have a great community behind this site, I finally have the support I always wanted.

Some people may wonder why I do all of this? I certainly never stooped to advertising and don't make any money off of the site. I suppose just because I'm in constant need of a creative outlet. Simply put it's fun to see my work come to life like this. But also I do it because I want the world to know how wonderful Urusei Yatsura is. Urusei Yatsura being over 20 years old often gets snubbed by anime fans in favor of newer releases. But I believe anime was really at its most genuine and original back in those days, not the derivative fluff that passes for entertainment nowadays. And Urusei Yatsura was among the best.

It makes my day whenever I get an e-mail from some newbie anime fan who tells me that they went out and rented a few tapes of Urusei Yatsura because my site peaked their interest. It's comments such as those that makes it seem worthwhile. I've gotten my share of awards and accolades but they mean nothing to me (of course web awards are a dime a dozen). I only want to do my part to make sure that even with all of the influx of flashy domestic titles flooding the market today that Urusei Yatsura doesn't become another forgotten classic. It's been a part of my life for 14 years and I want to know that other people are experiencing the same joy that Urusei Yatsura has brought to my life.

This whole page was mostly just a sentimental journey for me so please forgive me for rambling on like this. If you have read this far, I hope you've learned something about this site and perhaps have gained an increased appreciation for it. That's all I have to say, I'm done here.


Footnotes

Mason Proulx is a graphic designer living in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Mason turned his love of the early internet into a career in design and has worked in the field since the beginning of the 21st century. You can read Mason's rebuttal to a piece submitted to Tomobiki-cho here as well.

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Rumic World
Published: July 2002
Author: Mason Proulx
Translated by: ---
Archived: ---
ISBN/Web Address: https://www.furinkan.com/ features/articles/history.html
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