#kitayume

Hey so I was gonna do a grander (and more coherent) update for this, but I’m at the end of a very long day of doing some last minute archival work. It’s almost midnight EST going from Saturday 3/30 to Sunday 3/31, but it’s already halfway through Sunday in Japan.

In less than 12 hours, about midway through Sunday 3/31 EST, Geocities Japan will shut down it’s servers, and Kitayume will go offline for good. Himaruya has archived most of the original Hetalia comics over on his new wordpress blog, and the old fc2 bamboo thicket blog will continue to remain online as well. However, while myself (@barjonabombers) and @jammerlea of @hetarchive have been working the past six months to archive as much material as we can on the Hetarchive and Kitayumeverse websites, inevitably some stuff is gonna get lost. Kitayume and thousands of other Geocities Japan sites represent a huge chunk of Japanese internet history and culture that is about to be lost for good, and it’s very disheartening.

In the end though, what I’m going to be left with the time I’ve spent on the site over the years, refreshing to updates for events, shifting through comics and artwork, and discovering old orphaned content dating back as far as fifteen years ago, long since hidden and forgotten.

Hetalia Kitayume redraw

Bad news, everyone. It was announced today on geocities.jp that they will be shutting down their web services in March 2019. This means that Kitayume will be losing its home. We have no idea if Himaruya will move its contents to another web host, so @barjonabombers and I will be trying to backup as much as we can of Hetalia, Barjona Bombers, Kitakou Broadcasting Club, etc. just in case, so that we may archive the content on Hetarchive and Kitayumeverse if Himaruya doesn’t back it up elsewhere. But we wanted to let everyone know in advance about the news, so no one will be surprised once geocities.jp shuts down in March next year.

While this is still a (perpetual) work in progress, I’m pleased to announce the official launch of the Kitayumeverse website. While it’s sister site Hetarchive compiles all things Hetalia, Kitayumeverse compiles content from the non-Hetalia works of Hidekaz Himaruya.

This includes webcomics predating Hetalia (Advance! Kitakou Broadcasting Club, Barjona Bombers), published works (Chibisan Date, Taishō Roman Oni-san Yameteeee!!), and even old fancomics (Live A Live) and comics about animals (Bubutan, that infamous Alpaca comic).