What You Need to Know: Adventuring .jp Sites

Calvin Michel Sidjaja on February 15th, 2008

So you’ve been wondering how to navigate japanese sites to find ton of goodies? Worry not, this guide is absolutely for you. Dear japanophiles. If you could read hiragana and katakana, blessed you be. It will make things much easier. If you want to venture in japanese websites (.jp) you might want to read this first.

What you need to Prepare:

1. Activate your East Asia Language Support (could be done in control panel>Regional and Language Options>Languages>Install files for east asian languages). If you are prompted to enter your windows xp CD, enter it. If you are losing it (or most likely, you are using pirated version) download Japanese IME from microsoft site.
2. Memorize hiragana/katakana as soon as possible. It will make things much easier. Actually, it only takes two day for beginner to memorize them, really. It’s that easy.
3. Get a japanese dictionary software. You will need them to decipher the furigana reading, unless you are fluent enough already of course. I recommend Babylon.
4. Use Opera, it could detect all links in a web, so you could click the descriptive url instead of painfully deciphers the meaning.

Got them all already? Good.

As far as I concerned (my japanese kanji reading is still poor, so please correct me), Japanese seem have different e-culture with rest of the world. If it’s pretty common practice to use webhosting services when exchanging files, Japanese oddly don’t use it too much. Their file exchange is occured using peer-to-peer program called winny. This is ultimate p2p program if you are looking anything freshest from japan’s sites but ensure that you have big harddisk and a broadband connection. Many music files are lossless.

Anyway, let’s skip this winny thing aside. I don’t understand it really well actually.

You could also actually download free stuff from japanese sites just like everyone else. The files provided are different though, it seems the law are pretty strict and really protecting each respected artist’s copyright. Let’s take a look from fansite, I have acrossed a lot of japanese fansites (and original doujinshi) and most them provided original content, not the typical adobe photoshoped wallpapers you could find anywhere in english sites.

See this site for comparison. As you can see, usually, artists divide their works into “copyright” and “original”. In some sites, they also put specific pairing fanarts.

What could you get from venturing japanese site you ask? Well, a lot, of course but maybe only for fanboys and fangirls:

1. Getting beautiful fanart from doujinshi artist site (同人誌/Doujinshi). This is what I do most of the time. If you are on certain fandom and you are hunting beautiful fanart, japanese sites have a lot of it. The artists consist from beginner to professional artist.

2. Downloading music from Japanese musician (同人音楽/Doujin Ongaku/Doujin Music). If you are familiar with doujin music, you will be delighted to visit these type of sites. Many doujin music groups put either sample or full-version music (on lower bitrate) in their site. Many are originals, and don’t expect to find a whole OST download, I think you could find them only in Winny.

3. Downloading… h-stuff (エロ絵/Ero-E/Erotic Pictures, エロ/Ero/Erotic, エロ同人誌/Ero Doujinshi). Japanese call hentai as ero. If you are hunting adult-rated manga contents, you could actually find dozens of them easily in japanese doujinshi sites. They are the counterpart of these crappy adult sites, loading the pages with a lot of ads, and redirecting you everwhere. Be prepared mentally if you are looking for specific doujins.

4. Fandom. This is probably the best feature when venturing Japanese site. There are lot of specific-fandom search (サーチ/Saachi) engines scattered on the .jp domain. They are corresponding to what we know as “web directory”. But what they are listing for? Fandom! You could fulfill all your pairing needs and fetish here if you found the right site. Fanfic (小説/Shuusetsu)? Manga (漫画)? Art (イラスト/Airasato/Illustration)? BoysxGirls & GirlsxBoys (男×女＆女×男)? BoysxBoys (男x男)? GirlsxGirls(女x女)? Just name it! They providing from the most general content to adult fanarts!

5. Exclusive contents. As far as I concerned, many Japanese game publishers also provide exclusive contents you could only find in their site, like trailer, or widgets. If you are gonna google-hacking in certain game site (using “site:” string), use also “ダウンロード” (dounraado/download) in your query. This will force google to display any pages containing downloadable stuff from the site you are lurking in.

6. Online manga (立ち読みコミックス/Tachiyomi Komikkesu/Stand-reading Comic?). If you read my previous post, you should aware already. It seems publishers started providing online manga in their site. So far I only know CoroCoro’s site. I haven’t bothered to check the “立ち読みコミックス” string (though it yields a lot of result). I think there are more sites other than this.
7. Japanese music lyric (歌詞). I know, animelyrics.com is pretty dependable if we are looking for romaji lyrics, but there are times when I couldn’t specific song. These sites come to rescue. I managed to find a lot of Tatsuro Yamashita and Paris Match lyrics actually. But of course, it’s in kanji.

I’m not venturing Japanese sites as much as I used to be. It’s really pain in ass to read kanji. I only do it when I have too much time to spare, and of course, some fandom obsession. Well, if you are interested, why don’t you try it by yourself? Try starting from these links I provide below. Hope you will get something from your little adventure. Comments are greatly appreciated. Tell me if you have more links to add, and if you could fulfill my to-do-list below.

To-do:
-Kekkaishi Fandom
-Sorcerous Stabber Orphen Fandom
-Disgaea Fandom (LaharlxFlonne FTW!)
-Is there actually any BL/Yaoi doujinshi online just like the h-stuff online? I’m yet to investigate this.

Tips:

-to find raw-manga, use the string “一般コミック”. For some unknown reason, all raw manga floating in internet using this label. I wonder what does that mean?

Links to start out

1. Fandom/Doujin Artists

a. General/Search Engines

b. Series

Fate/Stay Nights

Fire Emblem

Bleach

Ichiruki Links

xxxHolic (mostly DouWata)

2. Japanese Game Sites

Capcom
Atlus

3. Doujin Music

4. H-Stuff

www.mangakan.net/

http://www.erojima2.com/

http://www.doujin-w.com

5. Manga Publishers

CoroCoro Online Manga

6. Lyrics

Evesta

Popularity: 69% [?]

Tags: Anime, Fandom, Internet Guide, Japan, Japanese, Manga

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5 Responses to “What You Need to Know: Adventuring .jp Sites”

AeolusFebruary 15th, 2008 at 8:00 pm

Using Opera 9.23 on Windows XP

Really, you’ve been playing too much in Fandom world…

Just like me.
DonFebruary 17th, 2008 at 11:37 pm

Using Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.12 on Windows XP

Looks to be very helpful. I’ll have to give it a shot a bit later.
Calvin Michel SidjajaFebruary 18th, 2008 at 3:45 pm

Using Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0 on Windows XP

@don
I’m gonna update this in future, don. There are lot of doujin music groups providing samples in their site (and also some very neat arrangements). Too bad they are not available in my bookmarks when I wrote this…
nadjaaJuly 24th, 2008 at 2:04 pm

Using Mozilla Firefox 3.0 on Windows XP

japanese webcomic ranking

http://www.otchy.com/wcrank/open.cgi?original