Forest Page

» see fm-p.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Japanese middle and high school girls wrote on Forest Page. The service published its own numbers in 2015 and 92.6 percent of the accounts were female, with 81.2 percent of those in their teens. I was thirty-one that year, in Ankara, writing embedded code. There is no version of this product that was ever pointed at me.

It was a homepage rental for feature phones. Visual Works opened it on 22 July 2003 on top of a 2001 predecessor called Forest March. Anyone with a keitai got a free site with a message board on it. The feature it was actually known for was the novel function. You wrote chapters into it. Readers left applause on the way out.

The house specialty was the dream novel. A reader typed her own name into a form before starting. The story then came back with that name in the lead role. Most of what got written was fan fiction over anime and manga properties. Because Forest Page let you keep the raw HTML the sites got customized down to the stylesheet. That is how a fan-fiction host became the place where a generation of Japanese girls learned to write markup.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

Feature-phone Japan was a complete internet on its own terms. It was i-mode that put the web on a small screen for an entire country, years before the iPhone arrived. The services that grew inside it were native to the phone rather than ports of desktop sites. Forest Page was one of those. By 2015 it carried three million visitors a month and 1.8 billion page views, which is a lot of traffic for a product almost nobody outside Japan has ever heard of.

Visual Works built the smartphone successor in 2017. Forest Page Plus opened in beta on 31 August and formally on 13 December. The two products then ran side by side for seven years.

~ what got buried with it ~

The announcement came on 26 June 2024. The service would close on 27 August. Everything on it would be deleted. There was no automatic transfer to Forest Page Plus, so anyone who wanted to keep twenty years of chapters copied and pasted them by hand before the deadline.

Japanese press covered the closure as the end of 22 years, counting from the predecessor. The replies were all the same shape: thank you for the memories, this was my youth. The domain fm-p.jp still answers today. It serves four lines of JavaScript that send you to the successor at plus.fm-p.jp. That one is still running and still taking new sites. The Forest Page anyone actually wrote on is gone and so is everything that was on it.

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