Engadget Japan

» see japanese.engadget.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

I read Engadget for years and never once read this one. The version I had open during university was the English site, written in America about hardware that was being designed and built in Japan. The edition sitting where the products actually came from was japanese.engadget.com, and the language it was in kept me out of it completely.

It started in June 2005, a year after Engadget itself. The oldest posts that survive are dated 20 June 2005 and they are translations: an iRiver announcement, a PlayStation 3 development kit. For the first stretch the Japanese edition carried the same post slugs and the same dates as the American one, which is what a translation desk looks like when you read it through a URL.

That did not last. By the 2010s エンガジェット日本版 had a Tokyo editorial staff doing its own reporting on Japanese carriers and manufacturers that the US site was never going to cover. Seventeen years of that accumulated at one hostname.

~ the record ~

~ who owned it, in order ~

Engadget was a Weblogs Inc blog when the Japanese edition launched in June 2005. AOL bought Weblogs Inc that October. Verizon bought AOL in 2015 for 4.4 billion dollars. Apollo Global Management bought the media group off Verizon in 2021, and the Japanese subsidiary, which had been AOL Japan and then Verizon Media Japan, renamed itself Boundless that September.

Four owners in seventeen years, and not one of those sales had anything to do with Japan. The site was a line item that came attached to something larger every time.

~ the fifteenth of february ~

Boundless published the notice on 15 February 2022. It gave two dates: updates would stop on 31 March, and the sites would close on 1 May. The reason it printed was 米国本社のグローバル戦略に伴い, a decision taken in line with the US head office's global strategy, which is a sentence that explains nothing and names everything.

TechCrunch Japan went in the same notice, on the same two dates, under the same owner.

~ where the archive went ~

The announcement said readers would be sent to the US editions after 1 May, and that is what happened. Seventeen years of Japanese-language writing about Japanese products stopped resolving to anything. Japanese tech writers published guides on how to pull old articles back out of the Wayback Machine, because that was the only way left to read them.

The redirect is gone too now, and japanese.engadget.com does not resolve at all. [[techcrunch-japan]], which died on exactly the same day under exactly the same owner, still has a server answering on port 80, and what it answers is 404.

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