Otoko no Ko Bokujou

~ the last words ~

It was live for six days. CyberAgent launched Otoko no Ko Bokujou, which translates as something close to Boys' Ranch, on Japanese mobile phones on 13 May 2009. It was pitched at konkatsu, the marriage-hunting boom that Japanese media had been running hard on for about two years: a woman would register men she knew, the men would appear as livestock icons, cattle and horses among them, and she could plot them on a two-axis grid and share the whole ranch with friends looking for someone.

The company's explanation of the name was that it came off the soushoku danshi keyword, the herbivore men trend that was in every magazine that year. If you are naming a product after herbivores, the barnyard art follows on its own. What followed after that was the part nobody at CyberAgent seems to have modeled.

This one is entirely outside anything I could have touched. It existed only on Japanese carrier handsets, in Japanese, for a marriage market that works nothing like the Turkish one, and it was gone before the story could have traveled anywhere. I found it in a Japanese category listing of dead websites, seventeen years after the fact, where it is filed under discrimination cases rather than under products.

~ the record ~

~ six days ~

13 May, launch. By the 14th and 15th the complaints were in every tech outlet in Japan and the parodies were already up. On the 15th CyberAgent said publicly that it was taking the reaction seriously and would consider changing both the name and the structure of the service, aiming for what it called healthy operation.

That was the last version of the plan where the thing survived. On 18 May the company announced it was suspending the service and closed new registrations the same day. On the 19th it stopped. The stated reason was that the service was under review, and a spokesperson said that both whether it would come back and when it would come back were undecided. Neither question was ever answered, which is its own answer.

~ the two complaints ~

The first objection was the obvious one, and the loudest. Displaying men as farm animals under a name that means ranch reads as contempt no matter how the product manager meant it, and the anger came from men and women both. Japanese coverage at the time settled on the phrase that men are not livestock.

The second objection is the one that aged into something larger. A man could be entered into the system by somebody else. The terms of use did say that the man's consent was required. Nothing in the software checked it, asked him, or told him he was in there. In 2009 that was an ethics complaint in a news article. Ten years later the same design decision is a regulatory event on two continents, and the fact that a terms-of-use sentence carried the entire burden of consent is the detail worth keeping.

~ what came after ~

The parodies outlived the original. Onna no Ko Bokujou, a girls' ranch running the same idea in reverse, had nearly 300 users by 15 May. Bokujou Maker copied the two-axis plotting with randomized labels. Two more fictional versions went up aimed at other targets, and none of them were still there a year later either.

CyberAgent was fine. Ameba was already its real business, and Ameba Pigg had launched three months earlier and would run until the end of 2019. What the company lost here was six days and a name. What the episode shows is how fast a Japanese mobile service could be built and withdrawn in a market where the whole audience sat behind two carriers.

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