Kinugasa

» see kinugasa.cc as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

At eleven minutes past eight on the evening of 18 May 2004, Kazuma Ieiri registered kinugasa.cc. There was nothing to put on it. What he had done was post a fake signup form for a social network on his own blog, because mixi and GREE had both opened that spring and announcing that you too had started a social thing seemed funny. People filled the form in. They were then annoyed to discover it was a joke, and Ieiri's conclusion was that building it for real would be funnier still. The service's own news log records construction starting on 10 June and the doors opening on 25 June, by which point two thousand three hundred and fourteen people had accounts.

The name is two jokes stacked. Kinugasadake is a mushroom, the veiled stinkhorn, and Ieiri said he took it because it sounded strong. Underneath that sits Sachio Kinugasa, the Hiroshima Carp infielder who played 2,215 consecutive games and was known as the Iron Man, which is why every member of this social network introduced themselves as the iron man of something. The site described itself in its own title tag as an ironman-type social networking service. The member counter on the login page did not say how many users there were. It said how many iron men there were in the world.

Everything else was in the same register. The login page was styled after Kill Bill because, Ieiri said, the designer had gone ahead and made it like that. Removing a friend was called cutting them down. The internal message board lived at a URL ending 2cm.php and was titled Kinugasa Two Centimeters, which is a pun on the name of the message board the whole Japanese web was arguing on. Joining required an invitation, and the stated reason for that was to give members a feeling of superiority. If you did not have one, the login page advised you to keep praying until a friend asked you in.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the only money it had, given away ~

Kinugasa was free. Its single revenue mechanism was the one everybody used. Members reviewed books and CDs and the reviews carried Amazon affiliate links, so a few percent of anything sold came back to the operator. On a service with no subscription and no advertising to speak of, that was the whole business.

What happened next deserves stating exactly. Kinugasa let any member register their own Amazon ID, and if a purchase came through that member's review, the entire commission went to the member. Ieiri's explanation was that it would be interesting if users could build a little shop and make some money. The company had exactly one income stream and it handed the pipe to whoever asked for it. ITmedia's writeup in August 2004 said plainly that the model was deliberately less profitable than mixi's or GREE's, and filed the whole thing under the heading that a system which does not earn today might be the key to the business tomorrow.

~ sixty-eight thousand ~

The counter is preserved across the whole five years because it sat on the public login page. Twelve thousand by August 2004, twenty-three thousand by December, thirty-two thousand by mid-2005. Then it slows: forty-nine thousand in 2006, fifty-five in 2007, sixty-three in 2008, and a high of 68,895 on 22 May 2009. Ieiri's stated goal in that first summer had been a hundred thousand. In the last captures before the end the number is going backwards, down to 68,282 by late October.

Set that against the field it opened into. mixi launched a few months before Kinugasa and passed ten million members in May 2007. In March 2009, GREE added 850,000 members in a single month, which is more than twelve times the most Kinugasa ever held at once. And for its first six months, in press releases issued at twenty-three thousand members, paperboy and co was still describing its own social network as a service being run on a test basis.

~ two in the afternoon ~

paperboy and co listed on JASDAQ on 19 December 2008. In March 2009 Ieiri handed the presidency to Kentaro Sato and moved into a newly created creative-officer seat, still a representative director. On 13 October, with the company eleven months public, it told two reporters that Kinugasa would end at 14:00 on 13 November. There was no press release. The company's own news archive for that fortnight does not mention it, and the announcement exists only in what ITmedia and CNET Japan wrote the following day.

The reasons given were that it did not pay and that membership had stalled around sixty-eight thousand. CNET had a third that ITmedia left out: the downturn had taken the advertising with it. A backup tool was built so people could pull out their diaries and photographs. Asked how users were taking it, the company said that since the backup tools had been provided, no great confusion had arisen among them at present, which is a sentence written by somebody who has been asked a question they would rather not answer.

The tombstone went up and stayed up for more than four years. It gives the date and the time, and thanks you for your patronage. Then it signs off with the line from the Kill Bill login page the site had opened with in 2004. The domain outlasted all of it. kinugasa.cc is still registered, through GMO Pepabo's own registrar, renewed in April 2026 and paid up until 2027, with no address record attached to it at all.

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