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2channel

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This article is about the Japanese forum. See 2CH for the Sydney radio station and Futaba Channel for the website 2chan.net.
2ch home page.
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2ch home page.

2channel (2ちゃんねる, pronounced "ni channeru", 2ch for short) is thought to be the largest Internet forum in the world.1 With over 10 million visitors every day (as of 2001), it is gaining significant influence in Japanese society, approaching that of traditional mass media such as television, radio, and magazines.

Contents

Overview

2ch was opened on 30 May 1999 by Hiroyuki Nishimura, known simply as "Hiroyuki" (ひろゆき). Today, most moderation on the forum is done by a voluntary group, self-elected and picked from 2ch users. 2ch itself is non-commercial and run by banner advertisement fees and support from a hosting service company that provides specially priced inexpensive UNIX hosting.

What is unique about this website is its scale and management style. It has more than 600 active boards (Japanese ita) such as "Social News", "Computers", and "Cooking", making it the most comprehensive forum in Japan. Each board usually has thousands of specific threads, such as "Coming election in Tokyo: 4th vote", "P4 vs. Athlon: overheating 51 times", and "Best wheat for making Pizza: 3rd slice".

2ch operates on innovative forum software which is a major departure from 1980s bulletin board systems or 1990s forum software such as vBulletin. Most importantly, nearly everything is done anonymously and voluntarily. A posting in a thread will either "age" (bump, from Japanese "ageru", to raise) or "sage" (not bump, from Japanese "sageru", to lower) its position in the thread list; "saged" posts have no effect on its position. Threads may be "saged" if the thread is disliked, or to keep it from cluttering the main thread list, or to prevent idle browsers from flooding in and trolling the thread at the top of the list.

Each thread is limited to 1000 postings at maximum, and a new thread must be opened (by some anonymous user, self-elected during discussion) to continue discussion. This prevents the rotting of old threads and keeps active topics refreshed. It also saves bandwidth, which is a major concern on a forum as large as 2ch. Old threads are moved to a paid archive, then eventually deleted. This system is not seen on most Western boards, but a few such as GameFAQs do close threads automatically when a certain number of posts is reached.

With the huge popularity of this forum, the style of web forums with anonymity, index, and sage features is now known as "2ch-style".

Anonymous posting

One of the most distinguishing features of 2ch is the complete freedom of anonymous posting. This is a great departure from most English language internet forums which require some form of registration, usually coupled with email verification for further identification of an individual. On 2ch, a name field is available but seldom used. Entering your name in the field either identifies you as a newbie who doesn't understand the forum, or an administrator, or someone attempting to be a Web celebrity, or you are typing in your name for no specific reason.

From an [interview] with the founder in the Japan Media Review:

Q: Why did you decide to use perfect anonymity, not even requiring a user name?
A: Because delivering news without taking any risk is very important to us. There is a lot of information disclosure or secret news gathered on Channel 2. Few people would post that kind of information by taking a risk. Moreover, people can only truly discuss something when they don't know each other.
If there is a user ID attached to a user, a discussion tends to become a criticizing game. On the other hand, under the anonymous system, even though your opinion/information is criticized, you don't know with whom to be upset. Also with a user ID, those who participate in the site for a long time tend to have authority, and it becomes difficult for a user to disagree with them. Under a perfectly anonymous system, you can say, "it's boring," if it is actually boring. All information is treated equally; only an accurate argument will work.

Culture

Shift JIS art is popular on 2ch.
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Shift JIS art is popular on 2ch.

Several important and/or well-known social issues (incidents, social movements, etc) are known to have relation with this forum, and due to early shocking events such as the Neomugicha incident, this forum is somewhat acknowledged as "underground-ish" despite its wide acceptance, especially in the younger generations. On the other hand, these incidents helped 2ch gain huge publicity through mass-media coverage.

2channel is often sued for defamation and libel by prominent public figures who are attacked on its forums. Among these are a women's mahjong league and the controversial activist Arudou Debito [link].

2ch members participate in various distributed computing projects such as the United Devices Cancer Research Project and SETI@home. 2ch is the current leader of the UD project, with the highest results and point total, as well as having the largest number of participants.

Frequent visitors of 2ch usually call themselves "2ちゃんねらー" (meaning "2ch'er", pronounced "ni-chan-ne-raah", romaji is "ni channerā). Even though topics vary a lot between each thread or board, 2ch as a whole keeps its unity through its unique cultural backplane. "2ch slang", "2ch AA" (Shift JIS encoded ASCII art) and "2ch Flash" are examples of such culture. Many virtual characters, such as Mona, and Onigiri have evolved out from these creations, and are now acknowledged as mascots representing the whole community. The now famous Soy Sauce Warrior Kikkoman parody character was created by members of the 2ch forums, as well as its flash movies.

Trolling and off-topic posting on 2ch is tolerated and has become a common feature of its culture. In this way it is similar to the early Slashdot, where trolls were commonplace, or the modern Something Awful Forums, where bad threads are quickly derailed or "saved" by mocking the original poster and changing the subject. However, 2channel does not tolerate spamming and flooding.

Due to its chaotic nature and large size, it is difficult to describe or define this emerging community. Several movements to self-describe it have been running, and so the reader is recommended to visit these materials. For that matter, similarities with Usenet are many.

Korea and 2channel

2channel has a conflicted relationship with Koreans. As 2channel is anonymous, racism and complaints that would not be made in polite company can be freely posted, and racism in Japan is often directed towards Korea. On the other hand, many 2channelers are interested in Korea, so there is a Hangul board on 2channel for academic discussion of Korean language and culture. This board is rife with racist trolling. The popularity of SJIS art Nida, curicutured Korean variation of Mona grown to such a level that a separate SJIS board, named Nida, was created for Korean bashing and humor. It was named after the SJIS caricature of an average Korean and the fact that many Korean language expressions end with the syllables "nida", e.g. "kamsa hamnida," meaning "thank you". The Nida character has pointy cheeks and is always complaining about discrimination and mistreatment by Japanese. He also has an explosive temper, somewhat inaccurately described as Hwa-Byung in 2channel. Nida is, arguably, the most popular subject of AA art along the line of such cartoon characters like Donald Duck, Wile E. Coyote and Eric Cartman. The plot usually revolves around his attempt to harass Mona or his attempts to become number one in the East which invariably fail, often with a comedic ending.

In April 2001, a sit-in demonstration was held in front of the Japanese Diet to protest an alleged whitewashing of Japanese history textbooks. Kim Yeong-jin, a member of the National Assembly (the South Korean parliament), attended and held a placard which said Nippon wa hanseishiru (日本は反省しる), which is nonsensical but can be rendered in English as Apolojuice, Japan!. The placard was meant to say Nippon wa hanseishiro (日本は反省しろ, or Apologize, Japan!); the kana for ro has obviously been miscopied, being very similar to the one for ru (compare る ru and ろ ro.) A photograph of him and this sign was taken and published on the webpage of the Korean newspaper Dong-A Ilbo. Many members of 2channel found this quite amusing, and attaching shiru to the end of sentences is now quite common on threads concerning Korea. On western Internet forums, such as 4-ch.net, the phrase is often rendered as "apology juice."

Between March and May of 2004, an anonymous user posted in a thread for single men to decry their woes. His post detailed an event that had happened that day as he was riding the train. According to his account, he was sitting on the train when he noticed an attractive woman. Suddenly, a drunken man entered the car and bothered many passengers, who did not offer any resistance to his disturbance. This man then began to badger the woman, and seeing no one else coming to her aid, the poster took the risk of telling the man to stop bothering the passengers. The two struggled for a short time while the other passengers used this distraction to summon the conductor, who took control of the situation.

This poster was an extremely introverted, socially inept otaku. Never having done such a thing before in his life, he was amazed to find that the woman was thanking him deeply for saving her from harassment. They exchanged addresses and parted ways. The poster, upon returning home, began talking with other posters in the thread and was nicknamed "Densha Otoko" (Train Man) for his bravery.

A bit later, Densha received a package from the woman he had saved. This package, originally thought to be a generic thank-you gift such as one would buy in a drugstore, turned out to be an expensive tea set. Flabbergasted, he turned to the 2channelers for advice; he was soon convinced that such a gift was too expensive to be a mere thank-you gift. Densha contacted the woman and began meeting her regularly, all the while posting updates and conversing with other posters. Following their collective advice, he got a haircut, purchased new clothes, and began to come out of his shell. After a while of seeing her, his personality had changed for the better and this culminated a few months later in his confessing his love for her. She accepted and when the 2channelers were informed of this there was a mass celebration; posts began flowing in congratulating the new couple, extravagant ASCII art pictures were posted.

Because 2ch has an enormous impact on net culture in Japan, this story quickly spread throughout the media and became an instant hit. Its almost fairy-tale-like simplicity and emotional power drew people in, and a copy of the original threads was successfully published in a printed book. Since then, there have been four manga adaptations of the story, as well as a feature film which reached #1 in the box office upon its release, and there was a hugely popular TV live-action drama aired during the year 2005. According to Densha Otoko and Hermes (the nickname of the woman, so named for the brand name of the tea set she sent him), they are still together.

Terminology

These terms are used both on 2channel and on its Japanese and American spinoffs.

Common abbreviations and phrases

English Offsprings

There have been some attempts by various internet communities to form their own, more English or internationally-oriented message boards in the style and tradition of 2ch. The first and most notable has been the now defunct world2ch, administered by Taichirou Kosugi ("RIR7") and abandoned in late 2003. Two boards have been put up to replace world2ch, but neither has become anywhere near as popular.

Masashi Tashiro

Tashiro was chosen as Person of the Year.
Tashiro was chosen as Person of the Year.

In 2001, many 2ch users voted for Japanese TV performer Masashi Tashiro as Time Magazine's Person of the Year. An act which chooses Tashiro as Person of the Year by 2ch users is called "Tashiro Festival" (Tashiro Matsuri, 田代祭). Tashiro was infamous in the Japanese media for committing several crimes, including peeping up a woman's skirt using a camcorder, using stimulants twice, peeping in a male bath and causing a car accident. 2ch programmers developed many scripts such as "Tashiro Cannon" (Tashiro-hō, 田代砲), "Mega particle Tashiro Cannon" (Mega-ryūshi Tashiro-hō, メガ粒子田代砲), "25 repeated blows Tashiro Cannon" (Nijyū-go renda Tashiro-hō, 25連打田代砲) "Super Tashiro Cannon" (Chō Tashiro-hō, 超田代砲) to be able to vote efficiently. (Since "Super Tashiro cannon" was especially powerful, it shut down Time's server. Afterwards, "Satellite Cannon -Tashiro-" was developed, but it was restrained) Due to the votes of 2ch users, he got to the No. 1 position temporarily in on December 21, 2001. However, Time's staff realized that something was unusual, and Tashiro was removed from contention.

He has been called "Tashirock" (タシロック), "God" (神) or "God of Laughter" (笑いの神) in 2ch since then.

IRC@2ch

There's also an IRC network called 'IRC@2ch', whose main IRC and web server are both hosted on [irc.2ch.net]. The network is rather small with two servers, no services, and relatively few users. The chat in most channels is in Japanese, using the ISO-2022-JP encoding. The network maintains a list over what channels are currently the most active on its web page.

See also

References

External links

Special characters

Due to technical limitations, some web browsers may not display some [[meta:Help:Special characters|special characters]] in this article.

Footnotes

Note 1: At [stats.2ch.net] one can view the number of posts made every day. Currently there are 2.3 million posts made every day. This is two to three times larger than the biggest Internet forum on [big-boards.com]. (Note: on its front page Big-Boards lists the total posts of all time, not the daily number of posts.)

[[zh-yue:2ch]]

 

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