Author's Note: I've written a supplementary post to this article as a way to add extra observations and corrections overtime regarding the information I give here. However, I highly recommend reading this first before reading that post, as this article provides important contextual information.
The Personal Web, to many people, only exists in a select few places. It could be solely sites on Blogspot, or Neocities, or some other adjacent platform, and that to them is the "Personal Web". However, once you've exhausted these places and found the sites that you find interesting, it's extremely difficult to figure out where to go next—to go to some unknown territory that you don't even know exists.
For myself, I've browsed Neocities for what seems like four years now as of writing this. I've seen many sites come and go—some plenty interesting, and others not at all. And even now, with plenty of sites that I don't recognize, I've become rather jaded. It's hard for me to find sites that pique my interest anymore—and if they do, it's hard to find them actually being updated or not be completely barren. All of this is what led me to going on excursions to places that not many people have gone to.
This is difficult in and of itself since funnily enough, Neocities users tend to link to only Neocities users and no one else. Despite many of its users being against walled gardens, it ironically became one itself. Tangent aside, I had to go on sites that were independent and far from any platforms before I somehow started stumbling onto underground Japanese sites, which in turn led to me stumbling into what is essentially the underground city that is the Japanese Personal Web, or as they call it: creative/doujin sites.
This space, from what I've seen, is structured by various search engines whose sole purpose is to index personal Japanese sites and nothing else; by "index", what is really meant is people register their own personal websites onto the engine—sort of like a glorified link directory. Its scope is even narrower than that of Neocities and other hosting platforms because sites with more formal contexts (such as business sites) are not even allowed in these spaces.
This got me curious then: how differently do people over in the East Asian sphere (primarily Japan) handle personal websites compared to the West? Since the Personal Web and its culture in the West at this current time is heavily influenced by social media culture and the people coming from those spaces (for better or worse), I wondered how the differences in culture would impact the mindset between webmasters in the East versus webmasters in the West. So I set out to do some research, and I returned with a few of my findings.
If you want to take a look at these sites yourself, the banners below link to a small selection search engines that index these sites (there's many more that cater to specific niches but you can find them for yourself). Google Translate or the DeepL Translator will be essential traveling gear if you can't read Japanese (because I certainly can't, and I wasn't going to start trying).
Now this should go without saying, but when browsing through these search engines and the sites within them, please respect the people running these sites. You're stepping on their part of the world, not yours, and as such, you will find stuff that you won't necessarily jibe with—or you'll encounter fringe content that, to put it lightly, has a very niche audience; but despite this, respect these people's personal spaces and browse at a distance. I'm pretty sure Westerners already have an abysmal reputation over there due to moral policing (à la Twitter/Tumblr) those who are literally minding their own business—in a completely different continent no less. So don't make things worse for those who are already making an effort in disconnecting from those places where people who would harass them are rampant.
One major thing that I realized while browsing these places is that the Personal Web, while it was something that got swept under the rug in the West, is something that's still alive in the East. Many of the sites indexed by these search engines have been around for years—years longer than even Neocities' existence. Many sites from the mid-2000s are still being updated to this day, or at the very least have been updated in the past 3–4 years, which is significant considering that they've been up for more than a decade or two by that point.
This shouldn't really be surprising, considering that the social media networks that have become widely adopted in the West were also founded in the West, meaning that the citizens here were going to be the first adopters, and thus will have the "older" technology (i.e. personal websites) phased out way faster than those outside of North America. GeoCities here in NA was shut down in October 2009, whereas GeoCities Japan wasn't shut down until March 2019, practically a decade later.
There was an observation (and it's also somewhat of a running joke) that Japan was quite slow in adopting new technology, but it does come at a benefit: you can see the impact it can have on people before fully adopting said technology. Though people from Japan nowadays have widely adopted social media (primarily Twitter), there are likely more people who stuck with personal sites longer than those in the West have purely because they didn't adopt the newer tech that was supposed to phase them out.
Though I wouldn't say that the Personal Web in the West ever died either. It was simply unknown to a large majority of people after social media took over. There was an article written as early as 2013 about the IndieWeb (which, coincidentally, is the same year that Neocities was founded), so it's less about the Personal Web not existing and more so it being so underground that no one knew (or completely forgot) of its existence to begin with.
I still find it interesting that there are still that many people overseas updating their sites for years despite social media existing. Many people over here see it as like this new revolutionary thing, with the likes of the Yesterweb movement and whatnot, but really it was something that was always hovering in the background—it's just that no one had noticed.
Something that I've noticed in general is that the personal sites over there tend to be very creations/product focused. That is, their sole purpose is to show off things that they've made, rather than embody some sort of persona.
Even the site topic distribution makes this evident. The front page of a search engine that specializes in doujin sites called よろずりんく (Yorozulink when romanized) has sectioned off registered sites into categories, and the visual arts trumps practically every other category. An overwhelming majority of these sites' admins post illustrations, lots of them post their own mangas (original or derived from an existing series), write novels and stories, and indulge in a lot of other creative hobbies. Personal diaries and blogs do exist, but I don't think it's as ubiquitous there as it is compared to the West. And even for those that have personal blogs: more often than not they're also those same people that do illustration work, and are not purely blogs.
This emphasis on creations is also made clear by how many of these sites' administrators handle their About pages. It's not hard to find an About page on Neocities or some other site in the Western Personal Web space which has a lot of personal information—almost written like a biography—detailing who they are, where they're from, their beliefs, favourite media, food, etc.; also displaying stamps, blinkies, and that sort of stuff that came from DeviantArt and Tumblr in regards to Neocities sites.
However, in a large majority of these Japanese sites, you will have an extremely difficult time finding something like that. You're more likely to find an About page with a sentence or two at most—and it's most likely talking about their site, not themselves as a person. They may share their name and sometimes what prefecture that they were born/raised in, but that's about it.
I think this is largely due to the difference in culture in general as opposed to specifically their personal website conventions. Asian cultures tend to express individuality less and emphasize sticking to behaving in ways that are to be "expected" in the group—especially in cases where honour and shame are a big part of how the culture governs itself. As a result, personality doesn't take much of a spotlight (if at all), and there tends to be a large disconnect between them as a person and what they make.
This is the case for many instances where these people post online, even on social media. A lot of Japanese artists (or East Asian artists in general) don't post information about themselves at all—they solely post their artwork and that's really the extent of their social media "persona", or lack thereof.
As a person who grew up in such a culture myself, it's a hard thing to reconcile. This site had plenty of instances where I had some personal information, then tore it down because I thought it was a bit too much, only for me to post a tiny bit again—and so on and so forth. I'm at the point where everything in my About page is basically only about the site rather than me as a person, simply because I don't think talking about myself is going to contribute anything to the work that I make. I also had a blog around three years ago since writing this, but I tore that down too because it felt pointlessly personal, and my life didn't seem all too interesting to warrant a blog in the first place, so I completely understand why there's such a cultural difference regarding what amount of personal information is "acceptable" and expected between those from the East and those from the West.
The personal web over here definitely has an emphasis in making a "handcrafted" site. Usually the design is all coded by hand, and templates are, in a way, frowned upon. But relating to the creations-focused philosophy that a lot of these sites adhere to, the design of many of these sites are actually rather... tame. Minimalistic, even. Portfolio-like. Designs that showcases their work rather than ones that potentially take away attention from it. This is despite the fact that they're actually not portfolio sites. The informalities are evident through the work that they make, rather than shoddy web design.
And from what I can tell, a lot of people in these spaces actually don't care if their site is handcrafted, uses a template, or whatever—or at the very least there's very little emphasis on it; it's only having a personal space that matters. Now whether that's because none of them are on a centralized platform that forces users to use static HTML and nothing else, I don't know (since there's plenty of personal sites here in the West that also use templates and CMS outside of places like Neocities or ichi.city)—but there is a lot of variety in terms of what foundations these sites are built on and where their sites are hosted.
Some sites have WordPress as their backend; others have their blogs hosted in FC2; there were some sites hosted on Jimdo which I never heard of before but apparently it's quite a popular choice there; and heck, some of them are made using bloody Wix out of all things, which I didn't even know crossed over into Japan but I guess it did because there were plenty of sites built from it.
Things such as "shrine" pages that are quite popular in the personal webspace here don't really exist in the same form in these Japanese sites. Like I mentioned in the last section, if they wanted to commemorate a piece of media that they love, they'd often make fan art of it or create some other type of fanwork pertaining to it, instead of making a handcrafted webpage dedicated to it. Web design as a tool for self-expression doesn't seem to be the norm in these spaces, and again, they focus more on the things that they make instead. Their sites are solely vessels to hold their work, not the work in and of itself. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule; but from the majority of the sites that I've seen, this is how a lot of them operate.
Webrings are a lot more common over here, but over in Japan they have these things called "同盟", translated as either "union" or "alliance". Or at least that's what was translated when using a translator. You're going to find a lot of butchered translations here, sorry.
Webrings or cliques over here usually have an admission system: you apply to be part of the ring, and if your site satisfies all of the requirements, then you're allowed in. You add the widget to your site, and the site of the webring/directory will link to all sites that are a part of it.
But interestingly they do things differently with these web alliances/unions: it's merely a site that you link to that may have a certain message or stance that your own site aligns with. They provide buttons or banners that you can display on your own site to show that you're a part of this group. In fact, I'm currently linking to one right now in my About page, whose message I really resonated with and as a result I wanted to link to it myself.
There are a few more examples, such as one that simply states that you enjoy (and have) a personal website (which is a very common one that's floating around), one that enjoys a certain piece of media like Le Petit Prince, and even some very niche ones like for those that are really attracted to the aesthetic of convenience stores during the nighttime.
And that's essentially how these web alliances/unions work: just link to their webpage and you're done. There doesn't seem to be a place where people participating in such groups are linked, which I find rather strange.
Though from what I've gathered, there seems to be some remains of the antiquated practice where the groups did link to those who were a part of it (like how webrings and link directories work over here nowadays), but that seems to be phased out, and they've simply resorted to taking the banner home instead.
It seems that link rot became a major problem as a lot of sites they were linking to shut down (some of these unions were up for more than a decade after all). Also, it might've gotten too cumbersome for the people running those groups to maintain them, since these are usually run by single individuals and not a team of people, which led to this change in the first place. I'm not sure whether newer web unions still take up the practice of linking to those who are a part of the group, or if this one-way linking is a widely adopted practice now, regardless if it's new or not. Something to look into, I suppose.
It's very common practice in Neocities and other sites in the Personal Web space here to host a guestbook or some kind of chatbox as a way to communicate with the admin running the site. Japanese sites also have this too, but they handle it a little differently.
With a guestbook or chatbox, the responses are usually public. That means that visitors get to see the responses of other visitors, and—whether unintentional or not—will be able to interact with other visitors too. This can obviously lead to some strange interactions or conversations between people, or tendencies to do vexing things like callouts, or witch hunts where you get inundated with toxic comments and your entire site's guestbook just devolves into a self-sustaining nuclear reactor, where each and every comment crashes off of each other and just makes a huge toxic mess.
Over in the East, however, they tend to solely do one-on-one communication. They'll often have an email form instead of a guestbook. Or there are times when they have something called a "webclap" page, where you essentially send support through a pseudoliking function in the form of "clapping"; these pages will also tend to have a place where you can send a comment directly to them. However, 99% of the time these places where you can post comments are never public, and can only be seen by the site's administrator. Out of the hundreds of sites that I browsed, I don't think I saw a single instance of a guestbook hosting public comments—or a commenting feature in general, even for blog posts.
An interesting practice that I also witnessed is that through these one-way comments, some sites actually will make a public reply on their blog, often with titles like "Reply to Webclap Comment", or something along those lines. I suppose it's for those comments that didn't leave an email and thus the only way they can reply is through their public blog; but the fact that they even bother to do that is wholesome. I'd probably just read the comment and leave it at that, personally.
A term which I've encountered quite a bit on Japanese personal sites is "検索避け". The translation for this term is simply "search avoidance".
Essentially, there are plenty of personal sites that go out of their way to make sure their space doesn't get spotted or picked up by search engines; and not the search engines that index these types of sites mind you (like the ones I linked to in the beginning of this article)—they're explicitly talking about search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo!, etc.
These sites will have a disclaimer saying that their site "avoids search", and more often than not they will also add an additional disclaimer saying that their site is not allowed to be linked on SNS (basically their shorthand for social media).
Some of them prefer to have a personal space that's very closed-off to the public as opposed to being in spotlight constantly. From a Japanese CNET article that I read, this is happening with those using Twitter also, with them adding various symbols and emojis in between letters of words just so people who they find troublesome or those that they don't want to engage with cannot find their tweets.
Since their culture handles criticism and feedback differently compared to those from the West, it's not surprising then that they're finding it hard to adapt to the Cancel Culture that is (unfortunately) heavily normalized over here. This is likely why many of these people, even in such a secluded place as a personal website, take extra precautions to make sure that they don't get negative attention, despite the fact that their sites are already hard enough to find as it is.
For those that were less fortunate, though: there's going to come a time where they'll reach the breaking point. There were some instances where they started fighting back when they were being harassed off the platforms that they chose to reside in. The image below refers to one such example, where a group of Japanese artists that were on Twitter finally had enough and posted a PSA:
I'm sure that their desire to limit their reach isn't because they want less people to see their work, but rather to reduce chances of harassment, which is quite sad.
And the thing is that most of the time, these personal sites that have these disclaimers about search avoidance don't even have anything of note to even harass them about. It was often a site just showcasing their illustrations, or manga, and they weren't touching on topics that were particularly controversial or strange. It's depressing that the norm nowadays when posting to the public is to expect harassment at your doorstep as opposed to it being an uncommon thing. Of course, it's the Internet, so that sort of thing is going to exist—but I feel like for these people it's always to the extent where they think it's destructive.
I honestly don't blame these people for enforcing such a thing for their sites. It's definitely a problem that's prevalent in any sort of platform, and Neocities is definitely one that's getting worse in this regard, from my recent observations. You see people getting harassed over frankly petty things and while you may think that you yourself are not "deserving" to be the target of such harassment and are thus immune to it, it's hard to see people getting pummeled with such drivel and not think that you're going to be next for some really stupid, petty, or downright outlandish reason. These people could be loyal "followers" one day, and your worst enemies the next.
And if you think that there's nothing on your site worthy of being called out, you're definitely going to be walking on eggshells and watching your back for the time you're on the platform. After a while of doing that, you're simply going to get sick of trying to pacify people who are basically hostile from the start—people which you wouldn't even want to go within a 10-mile radius of if you met them IRL. It's why I've been taking a lot more steps in reducing my overall reach for my own site too, because being surrounded by or discovered by people who I don't want to be around to begin with starts becoming a rather sickening existence, to be quite honest.
There obviously comes a point where you can't really do anything about it, but at least there are some steps one could take to mitigate it. I suppose avoiding search engines and social media is one such step that these sites are taking to help prevent this problem.
Though it's interesting to note that these people avoid social media for different reasons compared to the West. Over here, there's a great deal of talk about "hating the algorithm" and comparison ruining people's mental health, but a lot of people in these Japanese sites either want to reduce as many associations as possible, or want to avoid conflict and harassment. There probably is some comparison and the algorithm playing a hand in them avoiding it too, but there seems to be a stronger emphasis in avoiding people that they find will incite conflict.
In continuation of this topic about avoiding unwanted attention, I've seen some Japanese sites who have an explicit criteria when linking to their sites.
I suppose it's in the same vein as those DNIs (Do Not Interact) or BYF (Before You Follow) type stuff that you see a lot nowadays in people's Twitter profiles or Carrds, though not to the same extreme (or absurdity). In the case of these Japanese sites, it's rarely about the interactions between them and visitors and more so just linking to their site. And in that regard, I tend to see one common criteria: you can only link to them if your own site is also a personal site.
There were even some edge-cases where if you didn't even know what "doujin" means (or I suppose if you don't respect that term), then they literally tell you to turn around and scram. Things could've been lost in translation, of course, but I found it amusing nonetheless.
I find these disclaimers to be interesting, since these imply that there are instances where these sites are being linked on non-personal sites, or were not respected as being personal sites. Though how exactly things went down, I'm not sure. It may be business sites, or directories that are not personal and are just linking to a whole host of sites without permission.
And speaking of permission: that is something that I've noticed as a criteria also. There are some sites who will say on their banner/button "Link free" or "Reporting is not required"—the word "reporting" I assume to mean letting the administrator know that you're linking to them, whether for permission or to let them know what your site is. I haven't found a case yet where the admin explicitly demands visitors to let them know before linking, but I suppose the disclaimer letting people know that it's not required implies that the inverse has to have existed in one capacity or another. Either that, or it's expected to let them know by default, and not having to let them know actually has to be explicitly written.
On places like Neocities, people post their buttons all willy-nilly and don't really have any criteria—just propagate as far and wide as possible, like some sort of fungus or invasive species; the philosophy for most sites here seems to be "the more attention and visitors my site gets, the better". But I (and many of these admins that run these sites) beg to differ, or at the very least have the complete opposite preference.
It seems to me that the people who run personal sites in Japan considers who links to them more than the average site over here on the West does—they seem to be more cautious in terms of linking and who their site is associated with. Of course there are instances of Western sites going absolutely ballistic as to who interacts with them or not, but that doesn't really hold for a large majority of sites here—for these Japanese sites it's something that's quite commonplace. But again, whoever links to you is something that's ultimately outside of your own control anyway; I certainly have a fair share of sites who I'd really prefer not to be linking to me, but I can't really do much about that.
This also might be why their "web alliances" don't actually link to any members (or at least why that practice somewhat died), since you'll risk being lumped with a whole bunch of people which you want nothing to do with, which can kill groups that still adhere to such practice (like your typical webring or directory here in the West). This way, they don't have to deal with bad actors if they're not associated with anyone to begin with.
Something that I've realized while browsing hundreds of these Japanese personal sites is that there are certain conventions that the majority of them adhere to, and the sites over here in places like Neocities are no different.
Take guestbooks as an example: what are the most common guestbooks you'll find in a place like Neocities? HTML Comment Box, 123Guestbook, and Smart Guestbook. You will see these everywhere. In the case of Japanese sites, the parallel to that that is equally common are webclaps sites, either the original Web拍手 (which I don't recommend if you want one for your own site since it doesn't use https), or FC2 Webclap. Once you find one site that uses a particular service or format, it's not hard to find other sites also adopting that same thing.
Another example of their differing web conventions is the format of the buttons they use to link to other personal sites. Over in the West, the 88x31 format for personal buttons is the standard, whereas in the Japanese side they often use 200x40 instead. There are some cases where Japanese sites also create an 88x31 version of their banners, which is interesting considering that it doesn't hold the other way around in the West (i.e. people here don't make 200x40 banners of their 88x31 button counterparts).
Or take how any piece of writing that talks about resisting against social media and is for personal websites is immediately called a manifesto, simply because the Yesterweb people started tacking that title onto literally everything (including my own essay which I'm still not happy about, but whatever). As a result, people started adopting that term for their own sites, without anyone telling them to.
While I wouldn't say that there are massive differences between the personal sites we make here in the West compared to those in Japan, the subtle difference in conventions between the East and the West lead to our sites here rarely intersecting with the sites there; it's easy to tell whether a site is being run by a Japanese person or if it's being run by a Westerner (barring the usage of English or Japanese, obviously). Even though the concepts, the formats, and the services we use are very similar in usage and purpose, it's those small differences that add up into making what makes our site ours and what makes their site theirs.
Regardless of which Personal Web you reside in, there seems to be certain trends, and conventions, that people stick to, simply because it has been that way for a long time. When new people come in, they will use the sites that precede them as a reference point, and as a result it's no surprise that years down the line, something that one person does leads to hundreds, if not thousands of sites doing the same thing. It's something that has likely happened with these Japanese sites which caused such commonality between them, and it's something that you can see develop in real-time in places like Neocities, where services such as status.cafe and other community-driven concepts like webgardens start becoming more commonplace. Regardless whether some of these changes are ones that you like or not, it's something that you can actually influence.
I guess what I'm trying to get at is that these differences and commonalities are actually kind of arbitrary. There had to be an origin point for all of these conventions and differences, and really, they could've been kickstarted by anyone. If you don't like something about how personal sites are being run in the West, then maybe take a page out of these Japanese sites and adopt it for your own site. If there's nothing there that you're interested in adopting, then create something completely unique to your site. If it's done well, and it's presented in a way that's appealing, then people may start adopting it, and before long, you'll be the change that you wanted to see in these spaces, as opposed to resigning to the fact that you're in a place that you don't want to be in (unlike, uhh... a very familiar-looking individual who wrote two essays doing exactly that).
Something that shouldn't really surprise me (but it did) is how normal the Japanese side of the web is. Honestly, I'd say it's more normal than what we have here in the West. The sites themselves are not designed in garish ways—sites that blow your head off with autoplaying music or trigger some sort of photosensitive epilepsy. In contrast, the sites over there are often simple and minimalistic.
Another thing is how a lot of these sites are very much solitary. Outside of the search engines that link to them, a lot of these administrators don't have explicit communications between one another on their sites. Explicit associations with other sites are not that common either. Link pages exist, but more often than not they're not linking to other people's sites (and if they do, it's very little)—most of the time it only holds the site's own banner so other people can link to it, and that's about it.
In Neocities, some people hoard 88x31 buttons to the point where you have to wonder whether these people have actually properly looked at the sites they're linking to, not just taking buttons because they look cool, or because the site looks cool. It's definitely not the first time someone's been surprised by a person that they're linking to, despite the fact that said "controversial" content that this person was hosting has been sitting there for a while now—they just never bothered taking the time to look at their site properly.
In any case, it's nice to see sites that were somewhat different for a change. As I said, I've basically exhausted everything Neocities has to offer—and since the norms there are established to some capacity, it's not surprising to find that new sites coming into that space are going to be very much derivative of the sites that are already present there.
Though, I wouldn't say that the Japanese part of the web is immune from this either. Even with the relatively little amount that I've browsed, I began to see various trends and patterns that a lot of them adhere to. So it's not going to be different for any space out there, I don't think.
The main thing I took away from this is the reassurance that there is plenty more out there to stumble upon—that there are plenty of personal sites out there, completely independent and floating in cyberspace, waiting to be discovered. The language barrier is being broken through the use of translation applications, so the only thing really stopping us from finding these sites is whether you or me are willing to put an effort into finding them.
Posted: Nov 15 2023 • Updated: Dec 6 2023