Butsuryu Town (物流タウン)

» see transport.or.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The closing notice did its own arithmetic. Ten years and four months, it said, counting from the opening in November 1996 to the last day of March 2007, and then it thanked everybody who had ever linked to the site. Corporate web pages do not usually bother to count. Most of them just stop resolving one day and that is the whole announcement.

What stopped was a logistics portal run by 鉄道情報システム, JR Systems, one of the twelve successor entities Japanese National Railways was carved into. It was incorporated on 9 December 1986, nearly four months before the breakup itself, because the handover of assets had to be done first. It opened with 280 staff and no agreed name, and until one was settled the thing was referred to as the system company.

The seven JR railway companies own it between them. Its serious work is MARS, the reservation system behind the seat tickets sold at ticket counters across Japan, and it is still doing that today. Off to one side of all that, from late 1996, it also ran a website for the freight business.

The name was literal in a way only 1996 would allow. Companies listed on the site were 入居者, tenants, as though a directory entry came with a lease. There was a 交流の広場, an exchange plaza, which is where the talking was meant to happen. The farewell page uses a longer name, サイバー物流タウン, Cyber Butsuryu Town, which was also the name of the committee that steered it, though the title bar of the site itself said only 物流タウン for its entire working life.

In November 1996 I was not online at all. That started two years later, over a modem in Turkey, and Japanese freight forwarding was never going to be the corner of the web I ended up in. So this one is reconstructed from what the site left behind, which turns out to be a good deal more than most dead sites manage.

~ the record ~

~ a town with tenants ~

The 2006 homepage reads like a filing cabinet somebody loved. There was a search for logistics operators and a separate search for the companies that made logistics equipment. There was a cargo location lookup, a moving-quote form, freight-rate tables for road and for sea with more of the same for air and post, railway timetables, road traffic, port conditions, weather and maps.

There was also a page of 物流関係の記念日, logistics-related anniversary days, which is what you end up building once the site is a town and the town needs a calendar.

~ who was paying ~

Keyence bought a banner. So did a maker of vehicle equipment. Two further slots on that same 2006 homepage read バナー広告募集中, banner advertising wanted, and they were still reading it when the site closed fifteen months later. The portal sold its own sidebar and never managed to sell all of it.

~ the move that came first ~

It changed address before it died, and the two overlapped for most of a year. transport.jp was already serving the site in April 2006 while transport.or.jp was still serving it too. By the start of 2007 the old address had become a page titled 物流タウンHOMEPAGE ドメイン変更のお知らせ, a domain-change announcement, with a ten-second meta refresh pointing at the new one and a line asking you to go and update your bookmarks.

The move was therefore finished roughly three months before the closure. The archive shows the full site at the new address through early March 2007, and from the first week of May the only thing there was the farewell, dated April, signed 鉄道情報システム株式会社. Whoever ordered the migration either did not know the closure was coming or already had it scheduled, and no source says which.

~ who kept the lights on ~

The farewell did not simply end. Below the thank-you it set out ten logistics trade associations by name and linked to each of them, the national trucking association and the air-cargo forwarders among the ten, under the heading 参考情報, reference information. The last thing the directory did was hand you ten other directories, on the assumption they would still be there.

Most of them still are. The operator certainly is: jrs.co.jp answers today and the company is still running the ticketing system. transport.jp does not resolve at all now. transport.or.jp still answers, and what answers is a placeholder carrying a noindex tag under the title "transport.or.jp｜Colony Entrance". That is not a tombstone. That is the look of a lapsed domain somebody else has since picked up.

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