Sutokya! (すときゃ!)

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

~ the obit ~

Office Stray Cat was one man's outfit. Seiya Miyazaki set it up in Adachi, in the north-east of Tokyo, as an unincorporated association, and the internet radio station he ran under it lived on a domain called stcat.com for the best part of eight years. The browser title bar read ONLINE RADIO STATION, letter-spaced, with the domain in brackets after it.

Nobody can quite agree when it started. The farewell notice the station posted at the end dates the first broadcast to November 1999. The Japanese reference article says the association was founded that month and the station opened in December, and further down the same page says the site did not go public until March 2000. Its first program, a show fronted by the voice actress Kaori Fujisaki and labeled on that page as Sutokya's program number one, ran from November 1998, at least a year earlier than any of the other three dates.

What the station had instead of a clean birthday was a schedule. By the time it closed there were seventeen programs spread across all seven nights of the week, most of them going out live. Behind that sat a studio and a shop selling the station's own merchandise. There was a podcast feed as well, and it carried material recorded specially for it rather than clips pulled out of the broadcasts.

By the Japanese-language account it also carried a time signal, which practically no internet station bothered with, and ran almost everything live rather than recorded, which is why that account describes it as closer to a community FM station than to internet radio. It was not a community FM station. It had no license and no transmitter, and the man running it would spend the next decade trying to get both.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the mispronunciation ~

From November 2002 the station carried a show by Poaro, a unit that included Takashi Ifukube. Reading out a web address on air is a chore every broadcaster knows, and the address here was stcat.com, which has exactly one vowel in it and no obvious way in. What Ifukube started saying was sutokya dot com.

The station took the slip and made it the brand. For its last five years it was called Sutokya, a word that exists because somebody could not be bothered to spell out a domain on air. The operator's Niconico live channel still carries it in the name today.

~ the live hours ~

A streaming server went in around April 2001 and live broadcasting arrived with it. Three years after that the station was still running only three programs a week. The change came in March 2005, when the studio and the server both moved inside a production company called Cabinet and the station began operating in practice as a department of that firm. The following month the live schedule was pushed out to more than two hours every single day, which for a medium built on recorded files was an odd thing to attempt.

Listening live cost nothing and required nothing. The archive was the part that asked something of you: it reached back one week, and getting into it meant a free registration. The live stream had needed an account too in the early years, and that requirement fell away when the station moved onto Windows Media. Programs sat on the server in two flavors, and the file names still in the archive index give the roster away: poaro dot video, baka dot audio.

~ the last September ~

In September 2007 the Cabinet studio moved from Shibuya to Akihabara, and the Friday night block went down in one piece. Five programs ended on 28 September, among them the three the Japanese account calls Friday's signature shows, and a sixth went the day after. The rest followed one at a time over the next few weeks.

The station stopped on 31 October 2007. The notice went up the following day, signed by Miyazaki and by the staff collectively, and it gives no reason of any kind. It does two other things instead. It tells you the email addresses the station was holding would be held securely and then deleted on 31 December. And it tells you that some of the programs were moving to a station called B.B.station from 1 November, with a warning that registrations were not shared between the two and that signing up again from scratch was required. Seven shows made that move. Your programs survived; the account you listened to them with did not.

~ a decade for a transmitter ~

Three of the remaining shows went to a successor site called RADIO Sutokya, a much smaller thing that limped along until around 2010 and for which no closing notice has ever been found. The more interesting afterlife belongs to Miyazaki. In October 2008, a year after shutting the station, he set up a preparatory association to get a community FM license for Adachi ward, originally aiming to be on air in the autumn of 2012. The Japanese account records that attempt as abandoned in 2018, ten years in and never broadcast.

He did get on the air eventually, just not at the power he wanted. A streaming space opened in Gotanno in January 2017, and in August 2019 it started transmitting as a mini FM station, the weak-signal class Japan lets you run without a license at all, audible for roughly the few streets around the studio. Twenty years after an internet station kept time for listeners who could have looked at a clock, the time signal finally had a frequency to sit on.

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