I've been working on this site for over two years now. In that time there have been many radical changes, both in these pages and in the Urusei Yatsura fan community. Looking back, I'm proud of what I've been able to accomplish and I wonder how I ever got this far. However, most people don't know the amount of work I've put into it, nor do they understand my motivations. So I present to you, the history of Tomobiki-cho, the Urusei Yatsura web site. This is pretty long, but this site was built on much more ambition than just any fan page.

My introduction to the web

Tomobiki-cho began almost 3 years ago as a thought in the back of my mind. Esentially it was born from my resolve to increase awareness of Urusei Yatsura. It started the spring of 1995 when I was introduced to the world wide web. I was no newbie to the internet though. I had already been playing around on Usenet and with BBS's years before, but this world wide web thing was really revolutional. The browsers of choice were Mosaic or Netscape 1.0 so everything was on a ugly grey background with no attention to page design. But it still knocked my socks off. Finally the internet had images and words together along with a point and click interface. I was blown away, but everyone already knows how the story goes. I had been an anime fan for years, but now it felt as if I had been flying blind for all of those years. The internet helped paint a much grander picture of the anime fan scene than what I had previously experienced.

Urusei Yatsura in need of a boost

Anyway I went through an obsessive phase for a while, often browsing 12 hours a day. However one thing really bugged me. All over the web there was a wealth of information about most of my favorite anime series, but next to nothing about my favorite series Urusei Yatsura. Back then there was the old Urusei Yatsura Homepage hosted on the UC Berkeley servers, a couple of FTP sites with UY files and that was all. Sure there were a few fan pages, but nothing worth mentioning. In the days of Usenet, students had placed a fair number of UY images on the net, but afterwards, no-one bothered to add more images. As I searched the web, I saw nothing that would attract new fans to Urusei Yatsura. There was only one UY web page and it had all the appeal of a political science textbook. Just skin and bones in terms of information and images. The fact was that there was very little to peak someone's interest and I could plainly see that Urusei Yatsura would slowly vanish from consciousness of the fan community.

In the beginning...

Urusei Yatsura used to be the king of anime back in the old days around the turn of the decade. Back when being a North American otaku meant that you were either a University student participating in your anime club, or that you live in a Japanese community. Sure there were the old time Robotech and Star Blazers fans who embraced Streamline's titles such as Akira and Fist of the North Star. But they weren't exactly an organized fan community, just casual buyers. Only the Universities offered that kind of fan scene and Urusei Yatsura was the title on the lips of every hard-core fan.

Urusei Yatsura on the decline

Around the time I was introduced to the web, the anime scene was also starting to gain some momentum as a lot of newcomers were getting into anime. In response, more and more new titles were beginning to be released. Gradually people were starting to overlook UY. I saw the huge internet community of anime fans, but since UY was getting very little representation, not many of the new generation fans even heard of Urusei Yatsura. The UY mailing list was the only place I could find where people wanted to talk about Urusei Yatsura. It was a very different list back then. For one thing, it wasn't in digest form. Mostly it was a lot larger and made up of very longtime fans since the underground days. Compared to these guys, even I was a newbie. But over the year, I began to notice that the mailing list was on the decline. An increased number of people were leaving the list. It seemed to me that most of these guys were college post-grads who just couldn't find time for anime anymore. After the year was over, only a small handful of them remained. Now the already small UY fan community was even smaller and it felt rather lonely. As always, I was very active in newsgroups and mailing lists so I did my part through word of mouth, doing my best to convince people to give Urusei Yatsura a try. Even so, I was fighting a losing battle. No new pages had shown up in over a year. Not a single new graphic or multimedia file had been uploaded. While Ranma 1/2 and Kimagure Orange Road fans were running rampant, UY fandom had remained stagnant.

The sluggish birth of Tomobiki-cho

I was tired of sitting on the sidelines, I wanted to make a difference. No one else was doing anything about it so I decided to step up to the plate. While I didn't know anything about HTML, I made a commitment to create my own UY web site. My mission was fairly straightforward; to create the definitive UY site which would encompass everything I love about the series. My hope was to ultimately introduce newcomers to the series while pumping a little enthusiasm into those stagnating fans.

Slowly I began to teach myself how to create web pages and haphazardly put together the first working version of Tomobiki-cho. It made its debut March 1996. In all honesty, I was still learning so it wasn't that good. I remember the green UY logo pattern as a background, the cover of wideban #1 on top, and a rather messy collection of links. The images were just thrown on with little regard for download time. The writing was a bit childlike. There were only 5 sections and each was very incomplete. It wasn't much better than the other UY pages out there. At the time I was attempting to create a huge database on nearly all of my favorite anime. I eventually decided to scrap the idea and dedicate my site only to Urusei Yatsura.

In the beginning it was only called "Mason's Urusei Yatsura Page". The name "Tomobiki-cho" came to me two months later. I was watching a copy of a UY Laserdisc that a friend recorded for me. After it finished, the trailer for the final Urusei Yatsura movie came on. It certainly wasn't the first time I had seen this trailer, but this time it gave me some inspiration. It started with the words "As the world looked on, Earth's fate hung in balance. The fight for survival now begins. Final battle in...TOMOBIKI-CHO." Right then I started thinking what better name for a definitive Urusei Yatsura site than the town where it all takes place? So I used the town's name and even borrowed my logo from the very trailer that inspired me. From that point on, I worked like mad to make it a site worthy of the name. It was at that point that I believe my site was truly born.

Tomobiki actually means "to drag friends along with you"

Around this time I believed other UY fans would rally to my side and help me construct a network of pages. It would become a utopia of UY fandom. Everyone contributing to the greater cause. However such an expectation was unrealistic. It's not that people don't care, it's just that most people don't have the time or the will to commit to helping build a site that they feel doesn't belong to them. I quickly lost the illusion that this would be a community effort. I realized that if I was going to do it right, I'd have to do it myself. It's one hell of an undertaking for one person. But I haven't been totally without support. Over time I've had a few people make an impactful contribution to the site. In the early days, Jerry Wright helped me a great deal. He was someone who I could bounce ideas off of and who would actually help with research. We'd talk on the phone and often send each anime goods. Jerry was one of the few internet acquaintances who I might call a friend. We eventually lost touch after he lost his internet account and moved away, but I still remember him now and then. Another person who has helped make this site even greater would be J.M. Steadman. He came to me out of the blue one day when I posted a request for someone to take over the fanfic section of the site. Out of the three people who volunteered, I chose him based on nothing more than a hunch. It worked out better than I had hoped. Initially a bit wet behind the ears, he soon became a most worthy collaborator. His summaries of the UY movies are written with such professional pride and his work on the fanfic page shows such dedication that I'm glad he's on my side. Admittedly we do have our differences and communication problems at times, but I'm glad I have him around. He's one who's input has influenced quite a few aspects of this site. Most people will tell me what they like about the site, but no-one tells me what I'm doing wrong. Fortunately Sak's one who's not afraid to put me in my place. There have been many others who have helped along the way. Davey Jones, Norikazu Ikeno, Charles McCarter, Sean Worsham, Joe Rispoli, K.J. Karvonen, Matthew Webber, Aishath Nazir, Akira Hojo and Leo Sutic have all helped me in one way or another. I am very thankful for their insight and inspiration.

Blood, sweat and tears. (mostly just sweat)

By now I've revamped the site 6 different times and I work on it constantly. A while back I actually calculated how much time I've spent working on this site and it astonishes me. During the past 2 years I've spent about 870 hours on Tomobiki-cho. If this were a full time job, that would equal about 108 working days. I'm sure my time wasn't spent too efficiently since I would often watch TV at the same time as working on the site, but still, that kind of investment of time is mind boggling. A lot of this time spent was nothing more than tinkering; rewriting a line of text here, replacing a picture there, then going back and tweaking it some more. It was a very messy process for the first year. It took me a long time to streamline my efforts. Now it takes me a quarter of the time to accomplish the same amount of work.

Daring to be different

I'm proud of the fact that my page was always built entirely upon my own merits. The originality of a page is what gets it noticed. Borrowing some text and images is fine, everyone seems to do it with their pages. As I looked around the web, very few of the other anime pages out there were truly unique. Everyone was stealing ideas and pictures from each other. But I was intent on making a site that was from my heart, not some carbon copy. In that spirit, every graphic and written word on this site was created by me (or donated to me for the purpose of this site). I obtained each piece of UY art myself whether I scanned it from my own collection of UY paraphernalia or I got a friend to scan it for me. If I needed to use something that wasn't written or scanned by me I always made sure I had the creator's permission. Even though it's a common thing, I feel that stealing other people's writings and graphics is the lowest form of bad netiquette. It shows a lack of imagination and disrespect for a person's efforts. I set out present something completely different than what was currently on the internet and I feel that I've exceeded my expectations. By now I've reached a position where people steal subject matter from my site and put it on their own. To be perfectly honest, this development is quite flattering yet insulting at the same time. I'm happy that people appreciate my work and that it's now a part of anime culture on the internet. It tells me that I must have done something right. But on the other side of the coin, it disturbs me to see my work which I've spent the last 26 months laboring over, slapped onto someone else's page as if that person was the one who spent all of this time researching data, editing phrases, scanning images, perfecting code and creating graphics. I'm not naive though. I know this is inevitable when you create your own material on the internet. All I can do is continue to be creative and keep the site as dynamic as possible.

Tomobiki-cho - Death:Ribirth

Since its creation this site has grown steadily and without a single snag. Well, actually there was one major snag, but looking back on it, I'm glad it happened. The summer of 1997, I had started to grow weary of the site. AnimEigo had lost the rights to distribute Urusei Yatsura, Viz was putting it on hiatus and I felt like my site was the only thing keeping the spririt alive. Slowly but surely I began to lose interest. I wasn't putting the same passion into my work that I previously had. The old 'bijin' of the month page (R.I.P.) was on the end of it's run, all of my major pages were finally complete and I didn't have a single new idea for my site. I felt like I had reached a dead end so I just stopped caring. Just then my access to the internet was cut off. As many of you know, this site used to be on a server called ottawa.net. I had stuck with this company for a long time despite the fact that they had the worst service out of any provider I've ever known. I had been putting up with their crap for two years. This time I had returned from an anime convention to find that they removed my e-mail address for some clerical reason which was no fault of my own. They then restricted my access to my ftp site (again, their fault). As usual I spent 3 days on the phone trying to clear it up, but I figured that I would never get it back again. I was sick of going through a new ordeal every month with them. I decided it would end here and so I just let it go. For two months, I used this opportunity to take a rest from the internet. This gave me a fresh perspective on Tomobiki-cho and soon with a ton of new ideas in my head, I was eager to get back to work. Even though I hadn't payed my bills or made any attempt to contact my provider, I noticed that my site was still up. I still couldn't use my password though. I decided that I would go find a server that would give me what I wanted. I started re-creating the site and moving it onto a temporary server which my father's company uses for their site. I even got my e-mail with them. Around Novemember, I was about to notify everyone of my goings-on to let them know I was moving Tomobiki-cho elsewhere. However just as I went to update the old site and post a link to the new place I found out that ottawa.net went out of business (good riddance!) and shut down their servers. So my old site was gone for good and so I didn't have a way to tell all of my regular visitors where I had gone. Soon after I decided to register tomobiki.com as my new domain name and moved the site to a better server. Now that it's been reborn, it's a very different web site than it once was. It's finally becoming the site I've always dreamed it would be.

In closing

This site has been a great success and it's poised to keep going strong for years to come. Some people may wonder why do I do all of this? I suppose just because I'm in constant need of a creative outlet. Simply put it's fun to see my work come to life like this. But also I do it because I want the world to know how wonderful Urusei Yatsura is. It makes my day whenever I get an e-mail from some newbie anime fan who tells me that they went out and rented a few tapes of Urusei Yatsura because my site peaked their interest. It's comments such as those that makes it seem worthwhile. I've gotten my share of awards and accolades but they mean nothing to me (of course web awards are a dime a dozen). I only want to do my part to make sure that even with all of the new fansubs in circulation and the influx of new and flashy domestic titles flooding the market that Urusei Yatsura doesn't become another forgotten classic. It's been a part of my life for 12 years and I want to know that other people are experiencing the same joy that Urusei Yatsura has brought to my life.