A (Not So) Brief History of Tanuki & Visual Kei Message Boards

[cvltic 1482]

I've been wanting to write some of this stuff out forever because I'm a huge digital packrat and I like to archive these types of things... I don't think any of this has been written out anywhere before, but I'm not sure how much people actually care about the fan culture part of VK here, especially the Japanese fan culture, and especially the online Japanese fan culture. But, just in case any of you are also level 50 Turbo Nerds I thought I should post it here. I hope this is a sensible place to put it??

this piece is WAY too long for how lame the subject is and i'm so sorry
tl;dr: tanuki is old as fuck and there used to be another tanuki and forums are dead, long live tanuki

edit: fixed a number i screwed up
 

Spoiler

 

A (Not So) Brief History of Visual Kei Message Boards

               It was not that long ago that the rumor mill in the Western Visual Kei fandom was powered entirely by girls who claimed to have Kyo’s AOL screen name, Taste of Chaos tour gossip, and legends brought to us by Chinese fansites and Altavista Babelfish in a machine translation-based game of telephone. When I first heard mentions of a mysterious message board known as “Tanuki”, the few foreign fans who knew of it were trying to keep it a secret. The link was not to be given out, and anonymous LiveJournal comments that mentioned it would receive replies admonishing the poster for spilling the secret. But as the fandom aged and the overall Japanese proficiency levels raised, it didn’t take long for the cat to come out of the bag.
 

               Despite its hand in providing us with endless amounts of juice, shitposts and memes about Juka’s predilection for scat, Tanuki still remains a bit of a mystery to most non-Japanese fans. Sure, they know it exists, and that it simultaneously is made up of 100% truths and 100% lies, but that’s about it. Part of this is due to the structure of Japanese discussion forums in general. In this horribly written article I’ll be visiting both the surface-level and underground boards and attempting to archive their history in English before their remnants are wiped out any further.

 

               Before Tanuki and its ilk were well known, there was 2ちゃんねる or 2 channel, best known as 2ch for short (though it recently rebranded as 5ch). Launched in 1999, the organization of the website remains to this day a hellscape of Web 1.0 design, which was the template for every Japanese BBS for years – hence why Tanuki looks like hot garbage. In its mile-long sidebar there are topic headings with a series of links to pertinent anonymous discussion boards. VK related discussions are split into 2 separate boards: “Visual Bands”, where each thread is dedicated to one band; and “Visual Salon”, the general discussion board. Some bands occasionally made an appearance on the HR/HM board as well if they managed to generate interest with the predominantly male hard rock/heavy metal userbase. But for whatever reason, 2ch's VK boards are basically dead now.
 

               Unlike Western-style forums with their archives of content that are near-everlasting so long as the site remains online, much of the content on 2ch is ephemeral. Threads that reach 1000 posts are closed, and eventually disappear from the site (exactly like Tanuki, although Tanuki's limit is 2000 and threads back to 2010 can be dug up by searching). Several years ago, there were still archive sites with many past threads available, but these too are starting to disappear. It’s precisely because of this that researching older rumors or Japanese-language Visual Kei discussions is so difficult. It’s also hard to say when 2ch’s Visual Kei boards were established or when they reached their peak, but I distinctly remember it being quite lively around 2003-2012.
 

               However, 2ch wasn’t the only hub of activity during the 00s  – most bands had their own BBSes available on their official websites, where gya would post under cringy handle names which were generally the Japanese equivalent to Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way. The members themselves would post on these message boards as well in some cases. This lead to drama on more than one occasion, such as the time Tora (A9) posted on Givuss’ BBS to call Shouka from Vogus Image a drug addict after Shouka accused him of being a thief. Sadly, these too are mostly lost.

 

               These are the surface sites, the ones everyone was expected to know. Sure, 2ch was anonymized and it had its own board, but it required no insider knowledge to access. But while Visual Kei wasn’t mainstream like it had been in the late 90s, it was still booming in the 00s, and its internet fan culture quickly developed several more underground venues for discussion.
 

               We tend to perceive Japanese fans of being more respectful of copyright laws, but in the 00s there were many more fans exchanging media on public sites. There was a dedicated lyric thread on 2ch that lead to archival sites with splash screens that required passwords or following some arcane trail of hidden links to get to the goods. Personal sites were a common thing amongst gya of that era as well, and many of them would post lyrics from their favorite bands despite the threat of the RIAJ. (Most of these personal sites were lost with the closing of web host mahou i-land, a kind of mobile-friendly Geocities.) There were also imageboards (think of a mini-4chan) known as “uploaders”, where Japanese gya would post actual scans (!) as well as digicam pictures of photosets. (These are all lost too, sadly.) MP3s were the one thing that weren’t traded freely on the Internet, instead circulated on programs like Winny and Share.
 

               These media-sharing sites were underground, but even a foreign fan could stumble across them with some effort.  Gossip/hook-up boards however, were basically VK’s very own deep web. Just like the first murmurings of Tanuki in the foreign fandom, they were not to be discussed on “mainstream” boards like 2ch. It’s hard to account for how they ended up taking off, but eventually they became boards-that-must-not-be-named: known to any true fan, but kept hush. It was understood back in the day that discussion of bandmen dating was not to be done on 2ch. Perhaps it was too public, too well-known, and too obvious of a place for these topics. “Serious” discussion was for 2ch, but gya had several options for seedy behind-the-scenes discussions: Shitaraba’s Kitsune and Degawa (a thread hosted on Kitsune), and Tanuki.
 

               Like so many of the bands it featured, Shitaraba is currently on a “temporary hiatus”, but its content is gone. It appears that Shitaraba was the overall message board system, which hosted many topics like 2ch. Kitsune was the board dedicated to Visual Kei, and was apparently primarily used for talking about gya, much like Tanuki still is today. Kitsune hosted a thread called “Degawa” which was used for gya/bandmen hook ups. Even now, Tanuki is split into “Old Tanuki” (the board for hookup threads) and “New Tanuki” (the board most people use for gossip and band threads), seemingly as an evolution of the Kitsune board. Judging from discussion about these boards on Tanuki, Tanuki was derived from these boards, thus why the name is another Japanese animal like Kitsune.
 

               I’m not sure when Kitsune was founded, but there exists a “nostalgia thread” of sorts about it on Tanuki that was posted on 2010, and the slang used there is much akin to the slang used on 2ch around the early 00s, and the bands mentioned are also from around that time and even older (peak Matina, Soleil, Luciffer's Record). The aforementioned nostalgia thread suggests that this board basically invented gya/bandman hookups as we know them today (in fact, “Degawa” used to be what hook-ups were called in the fandom), and Tanuki is a derivation of Kitsune. It would also appear that the Degawa thread was a huge point of contention between users and the admin of Kitsune, which might be why Tanuki has its hookup threads semi-quarantined. Other hook-up venues mentioned are: “Yurikago” (famous for being frequently by VERY popular bandmen), “Iron Maiden” and “Escape”, but it’s unclear if these were separate sites or threads on Kitsune similar to Degawa.
 

               Tanuki has almost certainly existed since before 2003, and in my research I found posts claiming that it has existed since 2000, including mentions of meeting bandmen that would have been active around that time (Lareine, Elldorado). There is a complete lack of threads from much earlier than 2010 (edit: although there is a small archive of 2008 threads to be found); I suspect the board either moved or was wiped for some reason. This means that sadly much of Tanuki’s history is gone forever, and we will never find the thread that led to the creation of @peko-crash-trap.

 

               Tanuki is quite possibly the only true remaining forum for Japanese Visual kei fans in 2017. Shitaraba & co. are long dead, 2ch/5ch is an absolute ghost town, and Tanuki now serves all of their roles. There are VK fans on Twitter, of course, but you curate who you speak to rather than deal with a sprawling community. For the users of MH, and especially any of you who used LiveJournal during the foreign Visual Kei fandom’s insanely active peak, this should sound very familiar. Someday it might fall to the wayside too, but I hope if you’re the kind of dork who finds this stuff interesting that this gives you a little more appreciation for Tanuki, and for how much of VK’s history has been straight up lost to the internet.

 

Edited November 20, 2017 by cvltic

[r... 720]

that was great! thank you @cvltic, I'm a huge nerd about these things. I love reading and researching about it. And I've always, ALWAYS wanted to do a doc about the scene and the surrounding culture. I still hope to be able to do it while some of my favorite people are still alive.

 

The first time I heard about these boards was around 2005, but I was a 2ch lurker since... late 2003. And, I loved seeing the japanese BBSes for specific bands. Some are still up after 15 years (which is incredible, if you thing about it!) or a little of it survived due to being archived. I never really liked the gossip thing because: 

 

1- my japanese was awful (still is, but now it's more manageable)

2- gossip eventually gets passed around as truth and that's never good.

 

So I always took everything with a grain of salt. But those boards were also a nice source of knowledge about how the fan culture works, and how it isn't really different from general fan culture around the world, except for its inherent "Japanese-ness".

 

Edited November 19, 2017 by r...

[Laurence02 185]

Really, really interesting. It's like the culture's rise and downfall... unfortunately I never got into VK during when it was popular, but it sounds like it would have been great fun.

[LIDL 692]

I never really look up for them. Just saw from what people post here or tumblr, whether they are really legit or not. But seems there was this tumblr account who relayed any message about bandomen and got private threats for it (??) and stopped doing so at once? 🤔🤔🤔

 

I guess whats inside these tanuki boards must have either lots of lulz or cringe. 

 

 

[Mamo 1172]

I recall much of this and indeed it is very sad that much of it's history will be lost. Thank you for this @cvltic

 

This thread should be stickied.

Edited November 19, 2017 by Mamo

[emmny 4139]

>copies, pastes article into my vk history column

thanks for the content sis !

[suji 8317]

Jeez, I had no idea that tanuki and the idea of gossiping about fuccboi bandmen in general ran this deep and went this far back *_* It's also nice to know other forums/boards that existed long before tanuki that also served the same purpose. This is just all so fascinating and I thank you for preserving all this. Bangya/fan culture is not something that some of us think about every day, although it plays a very important part in vk history.

[qotka 433]

i feel a lot smarter now that i've read this. thank you!

[cvltic 1482]

21 hours ago, LIDL said:

I guess whats inside these tanuki boards must have either lots of lulz or cringe.

I'd say a healthy dose of both, lel

 

23 hours ago, r... said:

And I've always, ALWAYS wanted to do a doc about the scene and the surrounding culture. I still hope to be able to do it while some of my favorite people are still alive.

Honestly, something like this would be the absolute dream.


Thank you so much to all of you who took the time to read this, I'm so glad it went over well! Eventually I'd like to write about the old roadie/mentor system in VK (but it's been a pain in the ass to research), or do an archive of the older legends/rumors of VK (easy to research but probably going to take 100,000 words to write it all out), it was very encouraging to see that people were actually interested in this piece since it was my first crack at this kind of thing.

[returnal 543]

thaaaaaaaank you, this sorta old jp/vk/net/fandom shit is so my thing! really cool

[Peace Heavy mk II 7200]

do they talk about us there?

[cvltic 1482]

2 hours ago, Peace Heavy mk II said:

do they talk about us there?

Pretty much no. The only time anything other than individual foreign fans came up that I can remember include:
-Jrockanonmeme on LJ making Aoi flip out on twitter
-Dir en grey overseas tour rumors and happenings; like the incident where coffeebunnies posted pictures of herself with the band at a strip club on LJ

-Tanuki/gossip translation tumblrs being mentioned here and there, particularly in regards to Satsuki drama (which directly involved foreign fans)

 

It seems like unless our venues of discussion kick up a huge storm and involve both Japanese and foreign fans, no one cares.

[Case 13]

" I'm not sure how much people actually care about the fan culture part of VK here" - For me the whole fan / industry background is sometime even more interesting than the music itself.  And this was a fascinating read, so thanks a lot for taking the time to write this up!

[jaymee 405]

Awesome post! I think generally 2ch VK forums basically just migrated to Tanuki? Like after Tanuki took off there wasn't much of a need of for 2ch any more. I also remember that it wasn't uncommon for some non-VK fan trolls coming into the VK forums on 2ch to insult people/VK and the like, so the desire to get away from non-fans might have also been a partial motivating factor to move off of 2ch completely.

 

The same happened with Mixi. Mixi used to have fan communities where (not only limited to VK) fans would trade goods, buy/sell tickets, etc. but Twitter now serves this purpose and offers more, so Mixi is pretty much dead for that now, at least as far as VK is concerned.

 

Back in the day, I remember a lot of doujin and oekaki/fan art were distributed on personal sites/fan sites, and many had their own BBS to chat and trade. Beyond forums like Tanuki, they were connected by a series of web rings catering to certain interests. (I'm sure anyone over 30 on here who has ever made a webpage on Tripod or Geocities before remembers these types of things.)

 

Also, I feel like most BBS in the Japan never evolved past their ugly layouts because some people still use the old Japanese flip phones (garakei) that don't have "regular" browser support and wouldn't be able to support a forum like MH. Japanese people have always used their phones to connect online over landlines, and long bus and train commutes have no doubt influenced this and the development of better portable gaming devices. When I first moved here in 2005 most people were not hooked up to the internet at home. Even now, schools don't assign a lot of projects requiring internet research and besides university, reports and essays are handwritten and not typed. Heck, even resumes are still painstakingly handwritten except for rare exceptions. Although at least now I'd say most people do have internet at home.

 

I once translated and article about how idol fans communicated and stayed informed pre-official sites, Twitter, and SNS. Because artists could not communicate immediately with their fanbases, and very similar to it, VK fans had to search out and engage in communities to learn information about releases, gigs, etc. So something that has changed is that, while Tanuki is mostly used for gossip and shitposting now, the previous 2ch boards, BBS, and communities were also places to spread information to the larger fanbase. Likewise, I think this is why over time these sites and communities have mostly died out (even in the West), because largely there is no need for them and you can get all the info you need in one or two places.

 

I would love to hear from some other people that remember the old 2ch and communities, tho! I wouldn't be surprised if my memory is fuzzy and I've forgotten some things...

[Masato 365]

And today is the day that tanuki died....

[Komorebi 2193]

RIP Tanuki. Hypocrits on FB are celebrating, like they have never, ever talked about someone behind their backs.

[zombieparadise 487]

This was a great read, thank you. As an almost 30 year old male, I have had little to no interest in gossiping about hookups with bandomen with my bangya brethren, but the concept of Tanuki itself has always intrigued me. Thank God MH isn't anything like that.

[urumomo 22]

7 hours ago, Masato said:

And today is the day that tanuki died....

wait what happened?? 

[Masato 365]

1 hour ago, urumomo said:

wait what happened?? 

No idea. Tanuki was shut down today. Lol. 

But it will resurface somewhere.... where else should bandomen find mitsu etc? 

[Peace Heavy mk II 7200]

[LuckyCat12901 0]

Does that mean this is the...

Ta NEW ki Boards?

Should I see myself out now?

[meat 135]

On 11/26/2017 at 12:52 PM, jaymee said:

Back in the day, I remember a lot of doujin and oekaki/fan art were distributed on personal sites/fan sites, and many had their own BBS to chat and trade. Beyond forums like Tanuki, they were connected by a series of web rings catering to certain interests. (I'm sure anyone over 30 on here who has ever made a webpage on Tripod or Geocities before remembers these types of things.)

*Ahem* Yes, I remember all the sparkly banners for displaying your allegiance. I also remember  a number of bands had chatrooms on their HP where, if you join at around late evening JST, you often ended up chatting with the bandomen themselves. 

[wesjrocker 21]

This is a brilliant topic, unfortunately my japanese level still isn't suitable for reading message boards like tanuki or 2ch.

Maybe there is still a way to view some old topics through archive.org (wayback machine), sometimes you even can download files.

It is possible to visit old versions of websites but I don't know about message boards.

 

I know this is subject for another topic but it would be nice to more about the Tereko テレコ [live recording] scene when it was allowed  to record concerts in MD/tape format or even take pictures inside live houses. After recording it, japanese fans used to trade these files through Utatane and WinMX.

I remember there was a ranking website for people who used to trade them, but it was almost impossible to trade anything because I didn't understand japanese and did not have anything special to exchange.

Edited July 15, 2018 by wesjrocker

[Seelentau 884]

Tereko trading is still a thing, but it's very hard to get into the scene for newcomers, especially those in the West. It's also very easy to get shunned in the scene.

Personally, I really don't like it when people hoard rarities just so that they have something that nobody else has. It's one of the highest forms of arrogance.

This does not only go for tereko, but also Western bootlegs (like rare video recordings, demos etc.). There are so many 90s Slipknot shows that won't ever see the light of the day, simply because whoever has them refuses to leak them .__.

But then again, I'm obviously not uploading my terekos for a similar reason: If I did, they'd lose their worth and I wouldn't be able to trade them for more^^

[Monochromelove 6]

I would resume this thread about a curiosity. When I go on tanuki, and I try to reply something , a message appear telling 投稿完了！

But even if I refresh the page more times , my comment don't appear. 

For example if I try to post here http://new02.bbs.2ch2.net/test/read.cgi/visualtanuki/1540240492/i?guid=on 

(I just got a casual thread, just as example), nothing appears.

There's any kind of block for foreigners comments? I'm quite sure that some times from times to times, I was able to post. . but now again don't works anymore... someone knows? thanks ^^