Enjoy Japan

» see enjoyjapan.naver.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

In 2002 machine translation, from where i was sitting, meant pasting a paragraph into Babel Fish and getting back something you could squint at. Turkish was not in it at all. So a service whose entire premise was that Japanese and Korean could be run through a translator in real time, well enough that strangers would argue in it for seven years, is a thing i can only look at from outside and be impressed by.

NHN opened Enjoy Japan in June 2002. The point was cultural exchange between two countries whose internets sat next to each other and never met, separated by two writing systems and a great deal of history. Korean users got Enjoy Japan. Japanese users got a mirror service called enjoy korea, which its regulars shortened to enkori.

Machine translation between Japanese and Korean is unusually good, because the grammars line up in a way that neither of them lines up with English. That technical accident is the reason the board could exist. It meant nobody had to be bilingual to take part, which turned out to be the best and the worst thing about it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the red team and the blue team ~

The interface marked which side you were posting from. Japanese icons were red and Korean icons were blue, so the two populations became the red team and the blue team in their own slang. Nothing about the design hid where anyone came from, and after a while nothing about the conversation was about anything else.

Translation was applied to the site and to chat, so an insult typed in Seoul arrived in Tokyo in fluent enough Japanese to land. What began as a place to ask about music and food turned into a permanent argument over the islands and over what the textbooks on each side said about 1910 to 1945. When an anonymous editor working from an American embassy address defaced the Japanese Wikipedia article on Korean history in October 2006, the fight about it happened here, because this was the only room where both sides were standing.

~ what it turned into ~

Traffic was never the problem. Naver's own explanation when it closed the board was that by 2009 there were plenty of other ways to reach Japanese culture, through blogs and through the books and films that now crossed easily, so usage had fallen. Nobody in Korea read that as the whole answer. The board had become the thing Naver's name meant in Japan, and it meant something ugly.

The timing fits a broader retreat. Daum had already switched off its own overseas community, Segye-en, on 10 February 2009. Portals were cutting anything that cost money and returned nothing during the financial crisis, and a board that generated headlines about diplomatic incidents returned less than nothing.

~ the last day ~

NHN announced the closure in mid-February. Posting and new registration stopped on 20 February 2009, and the remains of the service were switched off that June, with the Japanese translation feature moved into Naver's Japanese dictionary, where it survives as a utility with no room attached.

The part people still tell each other about is what the board did on its way out. Users who had spent years telling each other to die spent the final threads saying goodbye and wishing each other well. It reads as sentimental until you consider that seven years of arguing with somebody is still seven years of showing up for them, and the machine that made it possible was a translation engine nobody thanked.

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