15 Years of JP Writing

The year 2026 marks a milestone anniversary for JP. I’ve been writing at least one post a week for 15 years, totaling well over 1 million words. That’s hard to believe! Of course, I’ve studied animation for even longer, well into 25 years now. Over that course of time, I’ve seen animation in general and anime in particular change. Disney has been engulfed by computer animation and no longer really produces anything traditional beyond a few series–rather, as traditional as digitally-aided 2D animation as become. Those digital tools have increased the quality and speed of production. The 2D mantle was picked up by anime (along a handful of other American studios like Nickelodeon Studios), and it is now starting to move toward China. Chinese studios increasingly produce anime–with tweening and otherwise handling pieces of Japanese-produced titles and with producing their own original works. Over the time I’ve been writing, anime has shifted from the naturalistic styles of the 1990s toward moe-influenced styles. The 2020s are seeing a shift away from moe and toward a naturalistic hybrid style that remind me of elements found in 1980s-90s American cartoons except with larger budgets.

Anime becoming mainstream and gaining larger budgets has improved the overall quality of anime being produced. Even the junk-food, filler titles have better animation than many popular titles of yesteryear. The technology has improved, allowing studios to create higher-quality animation easier. Traditional cel animation is difficult and time-consuming. Watching this development and the range of stories being told by anime has been interesting. But I’ve also seen isekai push out traditional fantasy stories for about a decade now. I have nothing against isekai–Inuyasha is an isekai–but it’s a bit dull when a single genre dominates. Of course, many genres have had dominating periods. Mecha had its heyday along with science fiction cyberpunk stories in the mid-1970s through the 1990s.

Over the past 15 years, people talk about the internet getting worse. The term floating around is enshittification. It’s an apt term. When I experience the internet without all the layers of defense I use–adblockers, DNS sinks, and so on–I realize just how unusable the modern internet is. While it is more convenient in many ways, it’s less useful and less fun than the old days of the internet, the days before social media began to dominate. I’m getting a little “grandpa” on you here. Enshittification is optional, however, if you understand tech. Although, no one should have to deshitify their internet use in the first place! On the flipside, the commodification and centralization of the internet has allowed us to have simulcasts, fast dubbing, and wide access to anime and manga that wouldn’t have been possible in the past. I don’t think I would go back to the internet’s old days if I had a choice, but I would erase social media, returning to the days of “shrines” and blogging as the main social media method. While less efficient, they had fewer of the negative side effects we see with algorithmic-driven feeds. The consumer had more control back then. Anyone remember RSS feeds?

Which brings me to JP itself. It is still fairly old-school here with how I focus on readers instead of watchers or listeners. Sadly, fewer people are reading articles in their entirety as short-form media, especially video, train our brains to the point of being unable to focus longer than a few dozen seconds. In the old days, I contributed to this development with listicles and some other short-form content. I also experimented with long-form content, well over 5k words. Long articles like those never went anywhere. Even after I split them into smaller posts, they languish in the forgotten recesses of JP’s library. Which, if you want to look at the book stacks in the basement, here’s the complete index divided by category. You’ll see repeat articles because they are filed under multiple categories. After experimenting with various lengths, I settled on between 1k-2k words as the sweet spot. Most visitors still skim these article lengths, but that’s a society-wide brain training problem. Articles within this length range tend to attract the most visits.

Surprisingly, not all articles from the early years lay forgotten in JP’s basement. A few old articles remain evergreen, even after 15 years.

The most surprising is Anime’s Visual Language, written in February 2011, not long after I began writing. This is a listicle outlining the visual language of anime for beginners. I discuss sweat drops, popping veins, speedlines, and other visual symbols long-time fans understand but may not be readily understood by newcomers.

Gender Expectations of Edo Period Japan turns a decade old this year and also remains a frequently circulated article. It provides a researched, top-level overview of gender roles with a more dated followup article about gender roles of women in modern Japan after I received a request about that topic. Actually, 2016 saw many perennial articles still being skimmed–erhm, read–like Anime’s Breast Obsession Explained which I followed up on many years later with a deeper dive about large oppai. I’m pleased these articles have such a long-tail, especially the historical and deeper dive articles because of the number of hours needed to research and write them. Even a 1k-2k article can take several hours or several days to research, consider, and write, depending on the topic. It’s a little frustrating sometimes how dash-off articles do better in the short term.

As websites go, JP is small compared to many, seeing an average of 1k-1.5k visitors everyday with the sometime Reddit bump of several thousand in a day. But I’m humbled by that number of visitors. I never expected that number of people to be even a little interested in my keyboard bashings. Thank you!

I’m also humbled by how many of you have ordered my books over the years, which here’s the link for all of my books. You can find some free downloads there too. This month or so, Bloomsbury is releasing my professional development book aimed at librarians interested in getting into retro video games and vintage technology: Be Kind; Rewind! (Re)Introducing Fun Retro Media and Vintage Technology to Libraries. If you are a librarian, or if you know one who might be interested, please suggest this book for your professional development purchases. As far as I’m aware, it’s the only book that focuses on circulating retro video games, VHS, and other old tech. I learned the ins and outs through trial and a lot of errors. It’s a short read, and I made sure to keep it from being stuffy, purposefully mixing Indiana Jones references with pirates looking for treasure buried in dumpsters! If the book proves successful, I have other ideas–other gaps in the library science literature–that I hope to write on. Speaking of books, I also released Ren, book 3 of my Teahouse Mystery series. If you’ve purchased the book, or picked up any of the other books in the series during my discounts and giveaways, I would appreciate it if you left an Amazon or Goodreads review. They help with ranking and visibility. Mameko has two more mysteries left. I hope to release book 4, tentatively titled Ototo, in 2026. Each book takes a lot of time to write and revise because, despite the years of research sunk into them, it’s challenging to write from Mameko’s perspective (which is why initially I decided to write from it). I have some great cultural sensitivity readers that keep me as accurate as I can be.

Tiny sites like JP and even big sites are seeing trouble ahead as more AI is being folded into search engines. People are not clicking the links to visit the original source of the AI’s response, settling for an often hallucinated summary instead. This is because of our want-it-now, easy-to-digest online culture. But it will cause many for-profit sites to fold and many nonprofit writers to lose heart and quit if this continues. And if this continues (I have no reason to believe it won’t) the AI searches won’t have good content to ingest, replaced instead of easy-to-generate, “good enough” content created by other generative AI tools. It’s our behavior that’s feeding the problem. Granted, I’ve experimented with generative tools too, only to take down the experiments later on or otherwise flag them as generated. I write what you read.

As for what’s ahead, I’m thinking about JP’s end. Don’t worry, that won’t be any time soon–God willing! But I am thinking about the end. Everything must end, even JP. I suppose the Internet Archive will be JP’s ultimate fate. But for now, I have well over 70 articles waiting in line while writing others to add to that queue every week or so. Some articles I debate about posting because they are a bit sermony with how they discuss Bushido tenets and how to apply those tenets today. Would articles about that topic interest you? Anyway, you will see more recent-anime discussions, historical articles, and a smattering of revisit articles this year. I have a few book discussions pending. I’ve dug up some books and letters from Japanese writers and Western travelers to Japan from the 1800s to early 1900s. I also discovered an autobiography (that’s quite entertaining!) from the Edo period that’s available in English. The article queue also has a smattering of video game articles waiting. I have to keep a little to JP’s origins as a renamed video game website!

Thanks again for reading, and I hope the upcoming new year brings you joy, contentment, and lots of great anime, manga, books, and video games!