ekiSh

» see eki.sh as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

A game you can only play by standing at a Japanese railway station rules out most of the planet, and ekiSh was built that way deliberately. The site's tagline promised 日本全駅, every station in Japan, collected and then collected some more. You sent your position from your phone, the service decided which station you were nearest, and the stamp went into your book.

Opencube ran it out of Shibuya from December 2010, first as a site for Japanese feature phones. An iPhone and Android app followed, announced in November 2011. The things you collected were stamps and badges tied to specific places, so the collection doubled as a record of where you had physically been.

By May 2011 it was respectable enough to be running a tie-in with JR East, which is the largest passenger railway company in the world by ridership. Five months from launch to a deal with a railway of that size is a serious pace.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the collecting part ~

Japan already had station stamps before anybody had a phone to prove anything with. Rubber stamps sit on counters at stations across the country and people carry notebooks for them, a hobby with decades behind it. The behavior already had an obvious digital form, and ekiSh built it before anyone else bothered.

What changed in translation was what the stamp proved. An ink stamp in a notebook means you were at that counter with a notebook. A GPS check-in means your handset reported a position the server found acceptable.

~ the phone it was built for ~

The hardware timing matters here. December 2010 in Japan still meant a large installed base of feature phones with GPS and carrier billing, a stack that had no equivalent anywhere else and that disappeared inside the following few years. The service was designed for a device category that was already being replaced while it launched, and it ran out its remaining years on the hardware that replaced it.

~ what eki.sh is now ~

The closure page went up with no explanation at all. It reads 「2016年5月31日をもちましてekiShはサービス終了いたしました」, service ended on 31 May 2016, under a green banner with the mascot still on it, and below that 「今までご利用いただきありがとうございました」, thank you for using it until now. No cause and no successor. Opencube simply stopped.

The domain went on without it. Since 2018 eki.sh has served a German-language site for a climate and energy initiative in Schleswig-Holstein, which found the same two letters useful for a different reason. Saint Helena sells its country code to whoever has a word that ends in those letters, and a Japanese station game and a North German energy agency both did.

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