I’ve made up my mind to close the website "HIMEMIKO*WEB." It was one of the toughest decisions I’ve ever made because I’ve kept this website for almost ten years.
It was in November 1998 that I founded the website. After I had read a comic book Hi no Tori by Osamu Tezuka I wanted to know about Princess Tōchi, who was starred in the book. I looked for the information about her throughout the internet but not so much information was found. Then I started to set up a website about her, after the research with many books, documents and other resources. Because no good HTML publishing applications were sold at that time, I made the HTML pages putting tags manually in the text files and uploaded them to the web server using a simple FTP uploader. I registered the website named 十市皇女～山吹の常処女～ (Tōchi no Himemiko — an ever virgin with Japanese yellow roses —) to many search engines to make it easier to be found.
After the registration to the search engines, many people came to see my website and left messages to me because there were no other kinds of websites that introduced this ancient lady. I replied all of the messages, and I got in touch with countless of men and women who were interested in her and Japanese ancient history. I had some meaningful experiences with a few of them, including even romance.
In addition to human communication, the creation and the maintenance of the website helped me to improve technical skills related to HTML and HTTP. I made simple bulletin board systems and guestbooks using CGI scripts, and made them communicate with a database.
There were many personal websites in the early five years of 2000s, because web browsers with higher functionality like Netscape 4.x or Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.x were released and web surfers could see more expressive web pages with large-sized images and motion videos. Many people uploaded their own information they wanted to give in public for lower costs. Most of the information was creative, and helpful to people, from a different viewpoint from that of old-fashioned mass media.
My website has been also informative and has helped many people of the same taste. In 2003, my website introduced not only Princess Tōchi but other 16 princesses who lived in the same era as Tōchi. In 2004, my website, renamed into HIMEMIKO*WEB, started giving information in both Japanese and English so that much more people all over the world can understand what I meant.
However, the mass media and big companies with much more funds began to take part in sending their information over the internet a few years ago. Many individual webmasters, being inferior to those companies in funds, time and amount of own information, were losing the reason-d’etre of their own websites, because the new websites those companies created were better and more informative by excellent web designers and engineers, and were maintained 24hrs/365days by special maintenance teams.
Also, the web-related techniques became much more complex and confusing for individuals. DHTML, Ajax, and many new techniques appeared one after another to make websites informative and interactive, and there have been too many things-to-be-learned for us to catch up with. We are busy, and we have no such time to master them all.
At the same time, the Web 2.0 policy is being popular and now we have many alternatives of expressing our own information more easily, instead of learning those dreadfully-difficult technology from scratch to maintain personal websites. Blogging is the easiest way of introducing yourself, by choosing a blogging service providers and creating your own account, or by installing a general-purpose blogging system like Movable Type to your server and changing a few settings as you like. If you know something useful and share it to the public, you can write it in Wikipedia. Google, Yahoo! and YouTube also have some nifty options to share information. If you want to just communicate with others, you can sign up to a popular SNS like MySpace, Facebook, mixi, GREE, etc., and join communities.
In such circumstances, the good old days of personal websites is now over. From now on, it’s better to share information in other ways. That’s why I’m going to close HIMEMIKO*WEB. (Another reason is that I’ve become too busy to have time to update it frequently 🙂
Of course it doesn’t mean that the content of HIMEMIKO*WEB turns invisible forever. The text, the images and other information used there will be transfered to other media, like Wikipedia and Google Maps, and you can get my idea in various places. I’ll never throw away the data I’ve made for years.
I’m very excited to meet the new style of the internet and get acquainted with many new things and people in the next ten years. It’s hard to follow the flow of change, though.
Category: Yuki’s Diary 日記
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HIMEMIKO*WEB will be closed
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Snowing! / 大雪です
日本文が後ろに続きます。
When I woke up and opened up the entrance door in the morning I was surprised to see the HEAVY snow covering all over the area…. The weather forecast was saying that it had been snowing very much in the Kanto Plain.
The heavy snow piled up on my Accord, too. It was the first time to see my Accord covered with such heavy snow. I ripped the snow off the windshield with my hands and drove to the nearest car service shop to buy a snow brush with a window scraper.
The lessons I learned today was that the snow chains I bought this winter was useless because it was too hard to be installed, and that it was okay to drive without chains or snow tires as long as driving on the street with moderate traffic.
今朝起きて玄関のドアを開けると、一面大雪で埋もれてました！・・・天気予報によると関東地方は昨夜から大雪だそうです。
私のアコードワゴン君もごらんの通り雪に埋もれてました。今のクルマが雪で埋まるのを見るのは初めてです。とりあえず手でフロントガラスの雪を払い落とし、近くのオートバックスまで走ってウインドウスクレイパー付きのスノーブラシを買ってきました。
今回の大雪でわかったことは、この前買ったタイヤチェーンはこのクルマにはつけられなくて役に立たないことと、普通に交通量のある道路を走っている限りノーマルタイヤでチェーンを巻かなくても普通に走れるということです。 -
Inukai memorial exhibition / 犬養孝生誕百年回顧展
日本文が後ろに続きます。
This morning I visited Daikan’yama i-Studio to see the exhibition commemorating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Takashi Inukai, a leading scholar in the field of Man’yoshu. For those of you who don’t know it, Man’yoshu is Japan’s oldest collection of tanka poems created more than 1,300 years ago by emperors down to aristocrats and unknown common people nationwide. Inukai was an authority on the studies of the ancient poetry for over 50 years, teaching at many schools including Osaka University and Konan Women’s University as a professor.
According to the biography displayed in the exhibition room, he was born on April 1, 1907, in Tokyo. His first encounter with Man’yoshu was in the classroom of the high school in Kumamoto. Through the teachers of the high school he was greatly attracted by the beautiful words, melodious rhythms, and expressive images of the 4,516 verses.
After graduating from Tokyo University in 1932, he got a teaching job at Kanagawa Prefectural Yokohama Dai-ichi Junior High School, or Jinchu, where he taught for ten years. In 1942, he moved to Taiwan and became a professor of Taipei High School, teaching many students including Lee Teng-hui, who became a Taiwanese president 45 years later.
When the WWII came to an end in 1945, the Island of Taiwan belonged no longer to Japan, and accordingly he lost his teaching job. He returned to the mainland and landed at Wakayama. After that, he started living within the Kansai district. It was very convenient for him, because the area had plenty of places where the Man’yoshu verses were created and it could help his profound research of it. When he got a job at Osaka University in 1950, he made up his mind to walk around the places where each poem was sung to help him understand it more deeply. His idea impressed the students very much. They proposed him to make a trip to those places to understand the feelings of the ancient people. He agreed. He and his students went for more than 250 trips all over the country for almost 50 years, until he died in 1998. The total number of participants of those trips reached more than 40,000 (including me).
His contribution to the studies of Man’yoshu affected many people very much. In addition to writing papers and books as a specialist, he made his best efforts to spread it to the general public who aren’t familiar with pedantic literatures. He put his own melodies to each poem and sang it to the people to make it suit the popular taste. His “propagation” of Man’yoshu had influenced many artists, including Peggy Hayama, a singer, and Machiko Satonaka, a cartoonist who wrote Tenjo no Niji, a comic describing the life of Empress Jito.
His achievements was the object of public admiration in all directions. In 1978, he received the Order of the Riging Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon. The following year he was invited to the Imperial Palace and showed a tanka in front of Emperor Hirohito. Also, he gave a lecture on Man’yoshu to Hirohito on the top of a hill in Asuka, Nara, on December 4 that year. He was qualified as a person of cultural merit in 1987. The Order of the Sacred Treasure, Gold and Silver Star, was posthumously conferred on him on October 3, 1998, the very day that he passed away.
I have ever met him on our way of the trips by Osaka University students. He was very frank, friendly and humorous. Although the term that I was in touch with him for is much shorter than that of his life, I feel that I am sharing very many memories with him.
I uploaded the pictures of the exhibition to Flickr.
今朝、代官山ｉスタジオで「犬養孝生誕100年回顧展」というのをやっていたので見に行ってきました。犬養孝は、万葉集の研究の権威で、大阪大学や甲南女子大学などの教授として50年以上にわたって研究にたずさわってきた人です。
展示室にあった年譜によると、犬養孝は1907年4月1日に東京で出生し、熊本の第五高等学校にいたときに初めて万葉集と出会い、その美しい言葉、躍動的なリズム、表現力豊かな心象風景などに魅惑されたといわれます。
1932年に東京大学を卒業後、神奈川県立横浜第一中学校（神中）に奉職し10年間教鞭をとりました。そのあと台湾に移って台北高等学校の教授となり、数多くの学生を教えました。教え子の中には、後に台湾総統となった李登輝氏もいたとのことです。
終戦後、台湾は日本の領土でなくなったので、帰還船で内地へ帰り和歌山に上陸しました。そして、万葉集の歌の宝庫である関西に居を構え、1950年には大阪大学で教えることとなり、そのころから、万葉集を理解するために実際に現地を歩くという研究スタイルを確立させていったそうです。その考え方に学生たちは共鳴し、万葉集の故地を歩くツアーを提案しました。これは「大阪大学萬葉旅行」として、犬養が1992年に死去するまで50年近くにわたって250回以上も続けられました。この旅行の参加者は延べ4万人以上で、私もその中に含まれています。
犬養の万葉集研究は多くの人に影響を与えました。論文や著書を書くほかに、衒学的な学問としての文学になじみのない一般層に対して万葉集を広めることにも努力しました。万葉集の一首ずつに独自の節をつけ、それを人々の前で朗誦することにより、万葉集を一般向きのものとしました。犬養の“布教活動”は多くのアーティストに影響を与え、歌手のペギー葉山や、「天上の虹」を描いた漫画家の里中満智子も、すべて犬養孝が原点です。
これらの業績は多方面から評価され、1978年には勲三等旭日中綬章を受章、翌年の歌会始には宮中に召され、昭和天皇の御前で歌を読み上げられました。またその年の12月4日には、奈良県明日香・甘樫丘の上で昭和天皇をお迎えし、御進講を行いました。1987年には文化功労者に叙せられました。そして、死去した1998年10月3日には、正四位勲二等瑞宝章が追贈されました。
私は学生のときに萬葉旅行でこの犬養先生にお会いしたことがありますが、非常にフランクでフレンドリーでユーモラスな方だった記憶があります。実際に犬養先生と接した期間は犬養先生の人生に比べればごくわずかの期間なのですが、非常に多くの記憶が残っているような気がします。
回顧展の模様をFlickrにアップしました。
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What I’ll do this year / 一年の計は
日本文が後ろに続きます。
New Year’s Day is a good time to decide what we’ll do this year. Many people set up their own goals of the year on New Year’s Day.
I’ll buy a tabloid every day to read what’s happening in the world. It has a wide variety of topics, ranging from world affairs to sport, TV dramas and gossips. It is a goldmine of the knowledge people know, and a basis of common sense everybody has.
I have been lacking of the ability to entertain people in a party or during lunchtime. I have only stiff and boring information like politics and economics that most people would be tired of, or maniac topics that only few people can catch up with. This year I’ll be “a normal man” that can talk with normal people and let them enjoy, by getting easy-to-read information from those papers.
一年の計は元旦にあり、ということで、皆さん年始にはその年の目標など立ててみたりするものですが、私の今年の目標としては「スポーツ新聞を買って世間の出来事を知る」ことでしょうか。スポーツ新聞には世界の情報からスポーツ、TV、芸能ネタまで、世間一般に広く通用する話題が幅広くつまっていますから、みんなが知ってる常識のよりどころとなっています。
私の欠点としては、堅苦しい話題やらマニアックな話題に偏りすぎていて、飲み会や昼食などで人を楽しませるような話題が貧困なことだと思ってるので、今年はスポーツ新聞を読んで、みんなが簡単についてこれる話題を幅広く仕入れ、「普通の人」として人と話せるようになることかなあ、と思ってます。
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Welcoming 2008 / ２００８年を迎えて
日本文が後ろに続きます。
Every year I do the Japanese traditional rituals on the New Year’s Day — making a wish for my family’s happiness to the gods and Buddhas we worship, eat special dishes that mean health and prosperity. It’s the New Year’s Day that I strongly feel that I’m really a Japanese.
Another custom on the New Year’s Day as a Japanese is to set up what I’ll do this year. My goal of this year is to meet as many attractive girls as I can and have a meaningful, romantic experience with them 😉いよいよ平成も20年になりました。毎年この日は、家の神仏を拝み、おせちをいただくことにしています。日本人だということを強く意識させられる日です。
今年はどんな出会いがあるんでしょうか。どんな素敵な女性たちに会えるのか、楽しみです。 -
Looking back 2007 / ２００７年を振り返る
日本文が後ろに続きます。
New Year’s Eve is a good chance to look back what I did this year. Every year I remember big topics of the year on the last day of the year. The year 2001’s topics for me was moving my apartment within Tokyo metropolitan area and buying Toyota Soarer. In 2002, I made my first visit abroad (Washington, DC). In 2003 I started studying aviation (aircrafts and its operation), and encountered musicals and performing arts by small troupes. In 2004 I started blogging, visiting Asian countries (Singapore and Hong Kong), and had GSM cell phones distributed throughout those countries. In 2005, I began playing darts, studies GSM/W-CDMA mobile telephony , and visited Hong Kong again. Last year, I opened a Firstrade account and began buying US stocks and mutual funds.
Although I had nothing special this year, some of my big events of this year would be (1) getting a new car, and (2) making my visit to Hawaii.
Hope that 2008 will be a better and more meaningful year for me, my family, my friends and everybody around me.
今年もいよいよ最後になってしまいました。毎年、大晦日になるとその年の出来事など振り返るのですが、
2001年 都内一人暮らし、職場の異動、ソアラ
2002年 アメリカ
2003年 飛行機、ミュージカル
2004年 ブログ（文芸業界）、アジア（香港・シンガポール）、GSM携帯電話
2005年 ダーツ、GSM/WCDMA携帯電話、香港再訪問
2006年 アメリカ株・ミューチャルファンド
ときて、今年のトピックとしては「クルマの買い替え」「ハワイ旅行」といったところでしょうか。
花の33歳も終わってしまい、少し枯れ始めてきたような感もなきにしもあらずですが・・・気を取り直して魅力アップに力を注いでいきたいと思います。
ともあれ皆様（誰やねん）よいお年を・・・ -
帰省
飛行機で帰省しました。
バックにちょうど富士山が見えました。偶然のキレイな景色につい1枚。
今年も残すところあと1日です。 -
Christmas illuminations / クリスマスのイルミネーション
Illuminations displayed in front of houses near my apartment. Thanks to Shuji Nakamura who invented a blue LED, we get more variations of decoration with lights.
近所の家がイルミネーションで飾ってました。青色LEDのおかげで、昔よりイルミネーションのバリエーションが増えたように思います。発明者の中村修二さんに感謝です。 -
Navigation / カーナビ買いました
日本文が後ろに続きます。Last week I bought a portable navigation device (Garmin nüvi250) for my car because I had bonus this month and I did “holiday shopping” like an American. Although many cars in Japan have in-dash HDD car navigation systems costing over 300,000JPY with a receiver for Vehicle Information and Communication System (VICS), they were too expensive for me to afford. Nüvi250 has only a GPS receiver and power cables to be connected to a cigar socket or PC’s USB port, so it’s very cost-effective, costing only 38,500JPY! (about one tenth of the prices of traditional HDD car navi) More than that, it is not only sold within Japan but used worldwide, because Garmin is an American company. Nüvi250 is widely distributed in UK, European countries and the USA (in the USA, nüvi200 is sold instead of 250).
This device is simple and does not provide traffic information to avoid jamming routes, but GPS reception accuracy is very good. It displays an accurate position of where you are driving, keeps track of your driving routes, and calculates routes to destination very fast. Road maps are very simple, and easy to see while driving. It is very useful for 38,500JPY navigation device, as long as you use it just as a navigator.
As it is removable from your car, you can carry it with you anywhere, on the street or on the train, and you can install it to a rental car in a district far from your home town or even in a foreign country, just by plugging the power cable to its cigar socket. When you leave your car, you can put it off the car and in your pocket. There are no risks to be stolen.
Navigation is navigation. No functions more than navigation are necessary. PNDs are the most reasonable navigation system of today and more and more devices will be released in a few years, because you have only to pay the reasonable prices for necessary and sufficient capabilities.
今月のボーナスで、先週カーナビを買いました。といっても日本のクルマに多い30万円もする据え付け式のVICS付HDDナビなどとても買えないので、今はやりのポータブルナビ（PND）というやつです。米国のGarminという会社のnüvi250で、GPSレシーバーの付いた本体をシガーソケットに挿して使うタイプで、お値段はなんと38,500円！（普通のHDDナビの十分の一です）米国のメーカーなので、日本だけでなく、欧米など世界中で使われています（米国はnüvi200という名前です）。
シンプルなので、交通情報や渋滞情報を出してくれたりはしませんが、ナビとして使う限りでは、38,500円のものとしてはこれで十分です。GPSの捕捉精度も良く、位置を正確にとらえてくれますし、ルート計算もメチャ速！ 地図もシンプルで見やすくなっています。
取り外し可能なので、道を歩いていても、電車の中でも、どこへでも持ち運べます。遠くの場所や海外でも、レンタカーに乗るとき、シガーソケットに差し込むだけで使えます。車から離れるときは取り外してポケットに入れることができるので、盗難の危険もありません。ナビはナビ。ナビゲーション以上の機能は必要ありません。PNDは今日最も合理的なカーナビゲーションシステムだと思います。必要十分な機能に適正な値段を払えばいいわけで、今後数年でますます増えていくことでしょう。