MiChao!

» see michao.ne.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Kodansha is the largest publisher in Japan, and in April 2006 it held a grand opening for a website that gave its comics away. MiChao! had been quietly up since the previous December, and the grand opening put twenty-four original serials on it at once. Inside two weeks the site had passed a million page views, a number the company then put out by press release, having run at close to a hundred thousand a day from the first morning.

The deal was that everything was free and you had to register to read it. Five fields: address, password, nickname, gender, age. After that the site updated every Friday, and each new chapter stayed readable for three weeks before it dropped off and you had to buy it on your phone. By October 2007 the site's own page description was boasting of more than seventy serials in progress.

It was never a standalone thing. MiChao! was the comics floor of MouRa, a portal Kodansha had built in 2005 on top of the remains of an older online magazine, and every page carried a breadcrumb saying so. That arrangement is also what killed it, just under four years later, without anybody at the publisher having to make a decision about comics at all.

~ the case file ~

~ what you got for registering ~

More than the serials, in fairness. There was a children's comic magazine inside it with its own front page and its own editors, which stopped updating in November 2008 and was then left standing where it was. There was a talent contest called Colosseo, eight rounds of it between 2006 and 2008 across four categories with cash at the top. Next to that sat a showcase for CG artists, and a wallpaper drawn fresh for members every month. Some of the serials came out afterward as paperbacks under a MiChao! imprint, and that imprint is the piece of this that outlived the site: the back catalog was digitized in 2018 and the label is still sitting on the e-book listings.

The registration form stood in front of every bit of that. I could have filled it in from Ankara in 2007 and then sat looking at a Friday update I was unable to read one word of. A Japanese publisher handing Japanese readers free chapters of Japanese comics on a three-week clock has no door in it for anybody else, and never pretended to.

~ the parent that went first ~

On 1 June 2009 Kodansha dissolved MouRa's editorial department. The reporting at the time described content editing being pushed back out to the print book and magazine desks while the systems went to a newly created digital unit, and said something close to fifty web editorial staff had been let go the month before. The publisher had just posted a record annual loss. MouRa's one commercial hit had been a book of e-mails from a university co-op employee, which sold over 900,000 copies in 2005, and nothing in the four years after it had turned into a business.

MiChao!'s farewell notice names exactly one cause and stops there. Because the parent body MouRa was ending its updates, it says, MiChao! would end its own on Friday 27 November. Nothing in it about money, and nothing about whether anyone had been reading. Kodansha had issued a press release for every milestone this site ever had, including its third birthday in April 2009. For the closing it issued nothing, and the trade press never wrote it up.

~ the date that moved ~

The notice promised the pages would stay readable until Thursday 7 January 2010. A later revision of the same notice moved that to Friday the 8th at ten in the morning, and offered members a month to migrate their accounts over to Kodansha's own comics site, with a hundred QUO gift cards going out by lottery to the ones who did. A hundred cards is the only membership-shaped number this site ever put in public, and it was a prize draw.

Neither takedown date held. The MiChao! pages were still being served a year later, frozen, and only started returning 404 during 2011. MouRa itself did not die either, exactly. It kept pushing out feeds from the print magazines until around 2017, an address with nobody home, long after the floor that made things had been cleared out.

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