Wonder Ocean (ワンダーオーシャン)

» see wonder-ocean.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Barely anything has been written about Wonder Ocean. The Japanese encyclopedia entry is five lines and a bullet list, there is no English one at all, and the trade press covered it exactly once. The press release Namco put out for the opening sits behind a blanket block on the publisher's own site and was never archived. What survives is the site's own HTML, and the HTML turns out to say more than the five lines do.

The site's help page described a strange sea somewhere out in the internet with islands floating on it, each island having a theme. Join and you became a resident, which got you an avatar and a house. The house held a diary and a personal message board. It also held a wardrobe for the avatar and a room you could redecorate, stocked from a mall with a boutique and a hair salon in it, paid for in a currency called Wonder Cash that you topped up by credit card or over the counter at FamilyMart. A treasure hunt ran sitewide with presents hidden on different pages.

It did not arrive all at once. Cooking Island came first, with its terms of use taking effect on 15 December 2003, and for the first half of 2004 the domain was nothing but a redirect pointing at it. The ocean itself opened on 15 September 2004, adding Pet Island alongside the cooking one, and the date is on the site's own terms page, which printed its revision history at the bottom. A larger rebuild followed on 9 June 2005, after which the front page came back several times its old size and the old gift certificates had been converted into Wonder Cash.

None of it crossed a border. The keyword block buried at the foot of the front page is the plainest statement of what the site thought it was selling, and every term in it is a Japanese consumer-web commodity of that exact decade: free homepage, mail friends, public diary. Those were the phrases that moved traffic in Japan in 2005, and they are the vocabulary of a web still in the business of selling people somewhere to put a homepage.

~ the chronicle ~

~ eight islands ~

The archipelago was not a metaphor the site mentioned once and dropped. Each island got its own tab image and its own subdirectory of furniture graphics. Counted off the final front page they were book, cinema, cooking, health, kids, music, pet and travel.

Two things made it feel like Namco's rather than anyone's. The first was editorial: staff writers filed magazine-style columns per island, with headlines on the last front page about a beer shop in Paris and a hideaway in Chiba, and the footer carried an advertisement for writers. The second was the merchandise. In November 2005 Namco put THE iDOLM@STER on sale as avatar clothing, ten characters' stage costumes in three colorways with matching backdrops, wrapped in a Christmas hunt that ran from 25 November to 10 December and dropped one new item a day. You could win an angel ring or a pair of cat ears.

~ the contractor got the keys ~

On 10 March 2006 the site posted a notice about a change of operating company. Namco was transferring Wonder Ocean, effective 24 March, to GaiaX, a company the notice describes as Wonder Ocean's operating partner. That phrase is the whole story. GaiaX ran white-label communities for other companies, among them a cafe site for NTT Communications and a community for Matsushita's internet provider, and the tombstone HTML still carries a comment showing the page had been saved from an address inside GaiaX. It had been running the ocean for Namco rather than buying into it. What changed in March was the ownership, not who was at the controls.

The notice adds that member details collected at signup would be handed to GaiaX under the personal information law, and that apart from some services nothing would change for users. The footer flipped on cue. A February capture of the company page credits Namco with its corporate URL and an April one credits GaiaX, but the Namco credit is still sitting there in the source, commented out rather than removed. The same thing happened to the cooking credits, where ABC Cooking Studio and a small firm named Akai had supplied the food side between them.

Namco itself had a week left. The game business was consolidated into Bandai Namco Games on 31 March 2006, seven days after the transfer took effect. Nobody has written down whether one of those things was arranged because of the other, and the two documents do not refer to each other, so the only honest statement is the order they happened in.

~ what the notice was for ~

The last working front page is from 26 October 2006. In December the host returns a forbidden response, and by the following March the address serves something much smaller, 1,449 bytes, which is the closing notice. It went on being served for years after the thing it described.

It is headed as a notice of service termination and it says that as of 24 November 2006 the service was stopped and closed. It thanks people for their long patronage. There is no reason anywhere in it. What there is, taking up more room than anything else, is an inventory of deletions: the registered personal information would be erased along with the closure, and so would the contents of every house on the islands, the private mail and the diaries included.

The notice is dated 25 November, the day after the service stopped, and it is signed by GaiaX, which had owned the site for eight months and operated it for considerably longer. The address it gives for questions is the same support mailbox Namco's handover notice had used in March. Nothing about the ending was addressed to the person who had built the place.

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