Narinari.com

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

~ the obituary ~

Narinari.com began on 4 October 1999 under a different name, Narinari Headline, and for its first three and a half years it was one man. He wrote under the handle Komarusuke, a lightly censored spelling of Korosuke, the robot from Kiteretsu Daihyakka whose entire verbal habit is ending sentences with the word nari. Every news item on the site ended that way too. That is where the name came from and it never stopped being the joke underneath the whole operation.

The choice that made it last was structural rather than comic. In 1999 the Japanese web was full of news sites that each covered one thing well, anime or games or hardware, and very few that tried to cover everything for a general reader. Narinari.com went the other way and eventually ran nine sections, from sports and mobile phones through to film and celebrity gossip, with a writing team that included correspondents living abroad.

April 2001 brought the second rebuild and the name it kept. That September it ran live rolling coverage of the attacks in the United States, which for a small Japanese site in 2001 meant somebody sitting up all night rewriting a page by hand. February 2003 introduced the multi-writer system and changed the prose at the same time: the early format had been a short note plus a link plus a comment, and it became the long-form column style it kept for the next two decades.

Its start date is roughly where mine is. I came online in 1998 on a modem in Turkey, and this thing opened a year later on the other side of the world in a language I cannot read, and then outlasted almost every site either of us was reading at the time. I did not know it existed until I went looking for what closed in 2026.

~ the case file ~

~ nari ~

An entire news site written in the speech pattern of a children's cartoon robot sounds like a gimmick that burns out in a year. It did burn out, in the sense that the writing moved on once more people were producing it. But the name stayed, which means every reader for a quarter of a century was typing a joke from 1999 into their address bar without necessarily knowing it.

The renewals came at a pace that tells you somebody was paying attention: March 2000, April 2001, April 2002, February 2003, October 2004, then December 2008. Six rebuilds in nine years and then none for a long time, because by then the shape was right. In May 2020 the video section spun off as its own property under the name Narikuri.

~ the notice still on the front page ~

Ikeda died on 26 January 2026. The site published to the end of February and then stopped, and what sits at narinari.com today is a single page on a yellow background with a waving cartoon figure and a farewell written in the formal register Japanese keeps for this exact purpose.

It opens by noting the site had walked alongside the changes of the internet for a quarter century since 1999, says the decision was taken for various reasons, and states plainly that operations ceased at the end of February 2026. One line in it is the one that counts: that from its founding to that day it had continued spinning out information without missing a single day. It is signed by the whole operations office and dated an auspicious day in March 2026.

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