TechCrunch Japan
» see jp.techcrunch.com as it lived, on the wayback machine
~ the last words ~
TechCrunch Japan did not start as a business. Around 2006 a handful of people began translating posts off the American TechCrunch into Japanese and putting them up, and the earliest pages the archive holds show exactly that: the same URL slugs and the same dates as the US originals, in Japanese. The oldest of them are stamped 5 May 2006. The site itself first appears in the Wayback Machine on 17 June 2006.
Sixteen years later it was something else entirely. It had a Tokyo newsroom covering Japanese startups and funding rounds nobody in San Francisco was ever going to write up, and it ran TechCrunch Tokyo, an annual conference whose pitch competition founders built their year around.
From where I sit none of this was readable. I have had the English TechCrunch in a tab since the mid-2000s, and the Japanese one looked from outside like a parallel copy of something I already had. It was not a mirror. By the end it was producing reporting that existed nowhere else in any language.
~ the record ~
| Born | 2006, as a volunteer translation of the US site; the oldest posts carry US dates from 5 May 2006 |
|---|---|
| Peak | TechCrunch Tokyo, run every year from 2010, with the Startup Battle pitch contest |
| Killed | 1 May 2022, with updates stopping on 31 March |
| Lifespan | 16 years |
| Made by | volunteers, then AOL Japan, then Verizon Media Japan, then Boundless |
| Killed by | the US parent's global strategy after Apollo bought Verizon Media |
~ the volunteer years ~
For its first stretch the site inherited everything from the parent, including the dates. A post about Microsoft quietly launching a Froogle competitor sits at a 5 May 2006 URL on the Japanese domain because that is where it sat on the American one. You can read the whole translation era off the URL structure without opening a single page.
AOL bought TechCrunch in 2010 and AOL Japan took over the Japanese edition. That is the point where it stopped being a volunteer project and started having a payroll.
~ tokyo, every november ~
TechCrunch Tokyo ran from 2010 onward and became the thing the site was best known for at home. Startup Battle put early-stage Japanese companies on a stage in front of investors once a year, and the conference ended up carrying as much of the brand in Japan as the website did.
~ what a 404 means here ~
The closing notice went out on 15 February 2022 under Boundless, the renamed Verizon Media Japan, by then owned by Apollo. Updates stopped on 31 March. The site closed on 1 May and readers were sent to the English TechCrunch.
Four years on, jp.techcrunch.com is in a strange state. Over HTTPS it answers nothing at all. Over plain HTTP it answers 404, which means a server still exists with that hostname pointed at it and has been told there is nothing there. Sixteen years of Japanese startup history, and what is left on the domain is a machine confirming the absence.
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