Amezou

» see www17.big.or.jp/~amezo_ as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

In April 1999 the most trafficked bulletin board in Japan was run by one person who never gave a name. It was taking more daily access than Yahoo's boards, which at the time were where a Japanese person went by default to argue with strangers, and it had existed for less than two years.

It opened on 5 August 1997 as Amezou Link, a page of links maintained by somebody posting under the handle Amezou. Boards got bolted on afterward. The whole thing sat at www17.big.or.jp/~amezo_, a user directory on a shared Japanese host, which is the address the country's busiest board had through 1999. What made it spread was not the writing on it but the mechanics: threads climbed to the top when someone replied and sank when nobody did, and there was no account to make before you could post.

By the autumn of 1999 the growth had outrun the hardware and threads would not load. Then came the harassment, and then an attack that circulated as the Amezou virus, a stylesheet built to crash the browser of anyone who opened a page carrying it. Then the doxing posts started, aimed at an operator whose entire arrangement depended on nobody knowing who they were.

They stopped appearing in the management threads. Someone offered to take the site over and was turned down, on the reasoning that whoever ran it next would end up in the same position. The board closed on 3 March 2000.

~ the dossier ~

~ the floating thread ~

The floating thread is the whole inheritance. A thread with a fresh reply climbs, a thread nobody answers falls off the bottom, and the board sorts itself by attention with nothing keeping score. Amezou did not invent the idea from nothing, but it was the site that made it the Japanese default, and every anonymous board after it shipped with the behavior built in.

Ayashii World had come first, in 1996, and closed in 1998, which is how most of its users ended up on Amezou in the first place. When Amezou broke two years later, those same people needed somewhere else again.

~ what i got from it anyway ~

I have never read a word of it. In 1999 I was fifteen and on a 33.6k modem in Turkey, and a Japanese text board was out of reach on two counts: I could not read the language and my browser could not render it without an encoding pack I had no reason to go and find. Nothing on Amezou was aimed at anybody outside Japan, and nothing about it was translated for years afterward.

It reached me anyway, several removes later and with every trace of where it came from filed off. The anonymous board with floating threads and no login is now a shape that exists in every language on the internet, and the ones I did eventually spend time on all trace back through 2channel to this board.

~ the second channel ~

In May 1999 a user posted an advertisement on Amezou for a site he had just built, describing it as Amezou's second channel and openly subordinate to the original. He was a Japanese student living in Conway, Arkansas, and the site was 2channel, founded on 30 May 1999. The name was a joke about being the spare.

The spare outlived the original by decades. By September 2007 2channel was reporting over 2.4 million posts a day, and its format went into Futaba and from Futaba into 4chan and from there into most of the internet's anonymous furniture. Amezou closed nine months after the second channel opened, and the person who had asked to inherit it never did.

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