知日部屋

» see cuhkacs.org/~benng/Bo-Blog/ as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

知日部屋 ran from 2005 to 2018, almost exactly the window I was online most, and I never encountered it once. It was written in traditional Chinese by a Hong Kong academic, about Japanese popular culture. Either of the first two facts would have been enough on its own to keep it away from me.

The name needs both languages to work. 知日 is the Chinese word for knowing Japan in the serious sense, the term used for someone who has studied it rather than someone who merely likes it. 部屋 is the Japanese word for a room, carried into Chinese unchanged. A room for people who know Japan, named half in one language and half in the other, which is a fair description of what the blog was doing.

It belonged to Ng Wai-ming, born in 1962, an associate professor in the Japanese Studies department at the Chinese University of Hong Kong who had studied and lived in Japan for years before he began writing it. He opened it in May 2005 and put it on the server of the university's computing student association, at a path with a tilde and his username in it. The engine was Bo-Blog, a PHP package widely used across the Chinese-language web at the time and almost unknown outside it. Nothing about that address suggested a publication. Within two years it had taken two and a half million pageviews.

By 2007 it was drawing close to ten thousand visits a day, which for one academic writing in his own time is a real readership. The material started in otaku territory, covering doujinshi culture and Lolita fashion, and widened over the years into Japanese politics and the state of relations between China and Japan. A Hong Kong publisher eventually put out a selection of the essays as a book.

~ the case file ~

~ what a professor's blog was for ~

The stretch from 2005 to around 2010 was the last period when a specialist could reach a general audience by having nothing more than a URL. Ng was not writing for a journal and he was not writing for a newspaper. He was writing the thing in between, an essay every few days for readers who had found him and then stayed, and the comment threads under the posts ran long enough to be part of the work.

The subject matter left him more exposed than most academic bloggers. Writing in Chinese about Japan, from Hong Kong, during years when the Senkaku dispute and arguments over wartime history were both live, meant that every post landed in a political field whether or not the post was about politics.

~ the attacks ~

知日部屋 was hit hard at least three times, and the attacks came from both directions. Japanese right-wing users went after it. So did mainland Chinese nationalists, the 憤青, who read a Hong Kong professor's sympathetic treatment of Japanese culture as something worse than an academic interest. The blog was also blocked from inside the mainland, which cut away a large part of the readership that would otherwise have reached it without any difficulty at all.

~ the last post ~

Regular posting stopped in late 2016. The last entry written in the blog's ordinary rhythm went up on 16 November 2016, a favorable review of Makoto Shinkai's Your Name, which Ng called the most successful work Shinkai had made.

Then fourteen months of nothing, and then one more. On 15 January 2018 at 14:36, filed under cultural phenomena, a post titled 蒼井空的餘暉效應. Ng had given the BBC an interview about Sora Aoi, the Japanese adult-video performer who had become famous across the Chinese-speaking world on a scale no Japanese entertainer had reached before her, and he published the full text of his answers on the blog because the broadcast version had been cut down. It took 10,522 reads and 25 comments. Nothing followed it.

The pages stayed up regardless. The university server kept serving them for years after the writing stopped, and the address only began redirecting long afterward. Ng moved his posting to Facebook, which is where his readers already were, and what he writes there is shorter and has no archive anyone can walk backward through. The tilde path was better.

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