Have you ever wondered why this Japan-based online community is so full of English? Well, it's a long story.

We created ‘JguyUSguy’ as an Internet community, where Japanese and non-Japanese men could meet, explore possible relationships of every kind and share ideas, knowledge, wit, insight, encouragement and advice. This was way back in 1997. When the community was still small we used to translate members' personal ads if they requested it. I mean, we actually sat here on weekends and translated ads that users wrote - both Japanese-to-English translation and English-to-Japanese translation. After a while the community grew so large that we were spending an entire Saturday or Sunday every week doing this special favor for more and more members. Then our lives got busy and we gave up.

Around that same time we started looking around for either open-source or rental off-the-shelf community apps that were already bilingual (both Japanese and English). There were plenty of Japanese "dengonban" applications, but our non-Japanese users struggled too much with any Japanese board we would try. As it turns out, just as you'd expect, it's more reasonable to ask Japanese users to use English than it is to ask non-Japanese users to use Japanese. Anyway, we finally found Groupee and started using it in 2002.

It's possible for us to edit the user interface of the Groupee application. It can handle character sets from just about any language. Most online forum applications are like this. Just today I saw a Japanese translation thread on the MyBB forum. And, in fact, five years ago we did go into the Groupee control panel and painstakingly make each bit of text in the user interface bilingual (Japanese and English). Long time members may remember that. But one day we woke up and found half of the Japanese missing. Groupee had upgraded and was using different strings for various parts of the interface. We had put in weeks of work and it was half gone. We fixed it all. Then another day we woke up and the entire site was full of mojibake (garbled computer gibberish where there used to be kanji, hiragana and katakana). Groupee had upgraded the system again. This time we wised up and said, "Forget it." Since "gaisen" guys are so into foreigners, they ought to know enough English to navigate around, we figured.

Well, the same thing happened with email. We used to send out bilingual email (English and Japanese) from our Mac, directly. But when we started using Groupee five years ago we realized that the admin panel was great for sending email. You know, we love sending email (hope we don't annoy you with it). As soon as we started sending out bilingual email through the new admin panel we received messages back from Japanese users telling us that the Japanese was not rendering correctly. Mojibake again. The Japanese text came out okay in some mail apps, but not in Hotmail. At that time most members were using Hotmail. So, we gave up on using Japanese in email, too.

This points to a special limitation on our part. We're not techies. We don't love technology. We're not developers. We use out-of-the-box applications that are never exactly what we'd use if we had the ability to design an online community from scratch. All we really do is attract members, keep them entertained and interacting, maintain the database and point users to useful (yet imperfect) applications such as Groupee and Userplane. JguyUSguy is just an idea around which thousands of guys collect. The software and hardware is all rented.

Now that we have more and more users from Korea and Taiwan, it's almost a benefit that the entire site is in English. Well, it's true that any Japanese, Korean or Taiwanese web user who struggles with English and doesn't feel like trying too hard may just give up rather than join this community. But the ones who do join are able to connect not only with us English speaking natives but also with each other. Again and again lately we've noticed Japanese using English to communicate with Koreans on the site, or with Taiwanese.

So, anyway, like it or not, English is part of the main flavor of JguyUSguy. Some non-Japanese forum users lament the fact that we don't get much Japanese participation in the forums. But the truth is we have tried. Members have posted bilingual threads and those threads just die. Members volunteer as translators for this and that, but can't be expected to put in too much time or effort over the long term. It turns out that Japanese users participate heavily in the chat and in the personals. They know that the forums are there. We send out mail all the time and see these users clicking on to browse the forums. For some reason, though, the discussions are mostly Westerners talking to each other. So, that's apparently the way it is.

Thanks for reading all this!