ENSOKU

» see ensoku.club as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

ENSOKU went up in the last week of July 2014 and published in eleven languages. That number is the reason it gets a grave. A small Japanese company with one product decided the way to sell Japanese pop culture abroad was to write about it in eleven languages at once, from an office in Japan, at a point when the streaming platforms were only starting to do the same thing at scale.

The company was ShiftOne, funded by Amutus, which is the Infocom group's internet arm and which runs めちゃコミック, one of the larger manga services in Japan. ENSOKU was the outward-facing experiment. It ran articles about anime and games and everything adjacent to them, and by March 2015 the language count had reached eleven, with Japanese, English, Korean, French and Spanish among the ones anybody wrote down.

On 30 June 2017 it closed. The Japanese notice said 諸事情により, which comes out as "due to various circumstances" and is what a Japanese company writes when it has no intention of telling you. ENSOKU STORE, the paid half, went off the same day. The domain hung around afterward as a parking page, which is how most of these finish.

Eleven languages and no Turkish. That is the entirety of my relationship with this site, and it is a fair summary of how the Japanese export business treated my part of the map for about two decades: worth translating into Spanish for readers in South America, never quite worth a country of seventy-odd million sitting between Europe and the Middle East.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ eleven languages ~

The eleven-language figure is dated 31 March 2015 in the Japanese record, so it took roughly eight months to get there from a July 2014 opening. Five of them are named. Nobody appears to have written down the other six, and the surviving archive captures of ensoku.club are thin enough that they cannot be recovered off the page furniture either.

What did get recorded is where the readers actually were. Spanish and Portuguese were supported early and were supported deliberately, because the overseas traffic was arriving disproportionately from South America. A Japanese pop-culture site aimed at the whole world found Brazil and its neighbors first, which is a result anybody who has looked at an anime convention in São Paulo would have called in advance, and which the Tokyo licensing business has managed to be surprised by for thirty years running.

~ the motion comic ~

From 1 October 2014 ENSOKU started publishing motion comics: manga panels with camera moves, timing and voice laid over the top. On 25 November that year the operation grew a storefront at its own subdomain, ENSOKU STORE, selling them in five languages with Japanese, English, Spanish and Portuguese among them.

Motion comics were a repeated Japanese bet through that decade and they never took hold anywhere. The format sat between two things that already worked, a manga page you read at your own speed and an anime episode somebody had actually animated, and it cost less than the second without being as good. The store closed with the site in June 2017 and took its catalog with it.

~ for various reasons ~

諸事情により is worth sitting with, because it is the standard formula for a Japanese closure whose cause is not going to be published. Nothing in the record says whether ENSOKU was losing money or whether Amutus had simply got the answer it was funding the experiment to get. Both are ordinary endings for a corporate side project at the three-year mark, and the notice is written so that either can be true.

The parent came through fine. めちゃコミック is still one of the biggest manga services in the country and Infocom is still listed. What died on that June day was the idea that the outward-facing version could be run out of the same building in eleven languages, on a small team with a three-year runway.

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