:This article is about the Japanese forum. See 2CH for the Sydney radio station and Futaba Channel for the website 2chan.net.
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2channel (2ちゃんねる, pronounced "ni channeru", 2ch for short) is thought to be the largest Internet forum in the world. With over 10 million visitors every day (as of 2001), it is gaining significant influence in Japanese society, approaching that of traditional mass media such as television, radio, and magazines.

Overview

2ch was opened on 30 May 1999 by Hiroyuki Nishimura, known simply as "Hiroyuki" (ひろゆき). Today, most moderation on the forum is done by a voluntary group, self-elected and picked from 2ch users. 2ch itself is non-commercial and run by banner advertisement fees and support from a hosting service company that provides specially priced inexpensive UNIX hosting.

What is unique about this website is its scale and management style. It has more than 600 active boards (Japanese ita) such as "Social News", "Computers", and "Cooking", making it the most comprehensive forum in Japan. Each board usually has thousands of specific threads, such as "Coming election in Tokyo: 4th vote", "P4 vs. Athlon: overheating 51 times", and "Best wheat for making Pizza: 3rd slice".

2ch operates on innovative forum software which is a major departure from 1980s bulletin board systems or 1990s forum software such as vBulletin. Most importantly, nearly everything is done anonymously and voluntarily. A posting in a thread will either "age" (bump, from Japanese "ageru", to raise) or "sage" (not bump, from Japanese "sageru", to lower) its position in the thread list; "saged" posts have no effect on its position. Threads may be "saged" if the thread is disliked, or to keep it from cluttering the main thread list, or to prevent idle browsers from flooding in and trolling the thread at the top of the list.

Each thread is limited to 1000 postings at maximum, and a new thread must be opened (by some anonymous user, self-elected during discussion) to continue discussion. This prevents the rotting of old threads and keeps active topics refreshed. It also saves bandwidth, which is a major concern on a forum as large as 2ch. Old threads are moved to a paid archive, then eventually deleted. This system is not seen on most Western boards, but a few such as GameFAQs do close threads automatically when a certain number of posts is reached.

With the huge popularity of this forum, the style of web forums with anonymity, index, and sage features is now known as "2ch-style".

Culture

thumb is popular on 2ch.]]

Due to its accessibility, chaotic nature and large size, it is difficult to describe or define this emerging community. However, because 2ch serves a similar purpose to Usenet, the culture and customs of 2ch contributors parallels Usenet culture. Several important or well-known organisations are known to have posted or lurked within this forum, even though the forum is considered by many to be "underground", despite its wide acceptance.

Frequent visitors of 2ch usually call themselves
"2ちゃんねらー" (meaning "2ch'er", pronounced "ni-chan-ne-raah", romaji is "ni channerā). Even though topics vary a lot between each thread or board, 2ch as a whole keeps its unity through its unique cultural backplane. "2ch slang", "2ch AA" (Shift JIS encoded ASCII art) and "2ch Flash" are examples of such culture. Many virtual characters, such as Mona, and Onigiri have evolved out from these creations, and are now acknowledged as mascots representing the whole community. The now famous Soy Sauce Warrior Kikkoman parody character was created by members of the 2ch forums, as well as its flash movies.

2ch members participate in various distributed computing projects such as the United Devices Cancer Research Project and SETI@home. 2ch is the current leader of the UD project, with the highest results and point total, as well as having the largest number of participants.

Anonymous posting

One of the most distinguishing features of 2ch is the complete freedom of anonymous posting. This is a great departure from most English language internet forums which require some form of registration, usually coupled with email verification for further identification of an individual. On 2ch, a name field is available but seldom used. Entering your name in the field either identifies you as a newbie who doesn't understand the forum, or an administrator, or someone attempting to be a Web celebrity, or you are typing in your name for no specific reason.

The reason for allowing anonymous posting was given in an interview with the founder of 2ch in the Japan Media Review:

:Q: Why did you decide to use perfect anonymity, not even requiring a user name?

:A: Because delivering news without taking any risk is very important to us. There is a lot of information disclosure or secret news gathered on Channel 2. Few people would post that kind of information by taking a risk. Moreover, people can only truly discuss something when they don't know each other.

:If there is a user ID attached to a user, a discussion tends to become a criticizing game. On the other hand, under the anonymous system, even though your opinion/information is criticized, you don't know with whom to be upset. Also with a user ID, those who participate in the site for a long time tend to have authority, and it becomes difficult for a user to disagree with them. Under a perfectly anonymous system, you can say, "it's boring," if it is actually boring. All information is treated equally; only an accurate argument will work.

Free Speech

Because 2channel is anonymous, the place is filled with every kind of hate speech imaginable. Apart from obvious and predictable examples of this, such as the Middle East board having at least one thread containing anti-Semitic or Islamophobic speech, and the East Asian board having several explicitly racist threads about the Koreans or the Chinese, there are some forms of hate speech which are peculiar to 2ch, for example:
* The football board having many anti-football threads started by baseball fans
* The motorbike board having threads derogatory to Harley Davidson owners or biker grous (who are often called Chinsouzoku)

The typical response to most of these insulting "troll" posts would be "You Too!" (オマエモナ,　Omae mo na in Japanese), and this eventually led to the creation of 2channel's mascot Monar, as a pun on this oft-said phrase. However, troll posts such as these are tolerated on 2ch, and are even treated like any other post; this is in contrast to most forums, where troll posts would not be responded to at all ("don't feed the trolls!"), and would be deleted on sight by a moderator. The only type of posts which are not allowed are vandalism posts (for example, spamming and flooding) and posts which could be classed as defamatory under Japanese law, and could result in legal action being undertaken against 2channel. Also, posts which declare intentions to commit a crime would be referred to the police, due to events such as the Neomugicha incident.

Incidents such as this have happened in the past, an example of this being a women's mahjong league and the controversial activist Arudou Debito (Debito's reaction to the thread critical of him can be found on his website: http://www.debito.org/2channelsojou.html#english ). However, Hiroyuki, the owner and the creator of 2ch, has yet to pay compensation to Debito even after a successful prosecution by Debito. Because of this, there have been several attempts to seize Hiroyuki's asset (such as his bank account) by Japanese bailiffs.

However, even though incidents such as those described above have resulted in legal action against 2channel, these same incidents have also resulted in 2channel gaining a huge amount of publicity though mass-media coverage of these incidents.

Korea and 2channel

As mentioned above, the users of 2channel have a conflicting relationship with Koreans, as the majority of 2channel contributors are Japanese (cf. Japanese-Korean relations). On the other hand, many 2channelers are interested in Korea, so there is a Hangul board on 2channel for academic discussion of the Korean language and Korean culture; this board, however, is rife with racist trolling. An example of this anti-Korean trolling is Nida, which is a modified version of Mona made to resemble a caricatured Korean. Nida has pointy cheeks and is always complaining about discrimination and mistreatment by the Japanese. He also has an explosive temper, which is somewhat inaccurately described as Hwa-Byung in 2channel. He is also usually found harassing Mona, or attempting to become more popular then Mona. The popularity of SJIS artworks such as Nida grew to such a level that a separate SJIS board named Nida was created solely for anti-Korean humor.

In April 2001, a sit-in demonstration was held in front of the Japanese Diet to protest against alleged whitewashing of Japanese history textbooks. Kim Yeong-jin, a member of the National Assembly of Korea, attended and held a placard which said Nippon wa hanseishiru (日本は反省しる); the phrase is nonsensical but can be approximated in English as Apolojuice, Japan!. The placard was meant to say Nippon wa hanseishiro (日本は反省しろ, or Apologize, Japan!); the kana for ro has obviously been miscopied, being very similar to the one for ru (compare る ru and ろ ro). A photograph of him and this sign was taken and published on the webpage of the Korean newspaper Dong-A Ilbo. Many members of 2channel found this quite amusing, and attaching shiru to the end of sentences is now quite common on threads concerning Korea. On Western Internet forums, such as 4-ch, the phrase placard is often quoted as saying "apology juice."

Terminology

These terms are used both on 2channel and on its Japanese and American spinoffs.
* AA - Abbreviation of "ASCII art", usually referring to common Shift JIS art characters.
* A-bone (Jp. あぼーん (abōn) ) - "To delete a post". Posts are deleted in two ways: Normal A-bone and invisible A-bone (Japanese 透明あぼーん). Any posts deleted as normal A-bone are replaced by a special post, whose subject, date, and body are all "あぼーん".
* Age (pronounced "ah-geh") - From Japanese ageru (上げる "to raise"), refers to replying to an especially noteworthy or neglected post in order to move it to the top of the topic list (equivalent to the English bump)
* Capcode - A special, custom tripcode used by website administrators and especially famous people chosen by the webmasters; in Japanese, simply "cap".
* Fixed Handle - An online nickname (as opposed to anonymity); in Japanese, Kotehan, from Kotei Handle Name
* Mona - An ASCII art character
* Giko Cat (Giko neko) - Another ASCII art character--the unofficial mascot of 2ch.
* Off Kai - An offline meeting by anonymous posters
* Sage (pronounced sɑge ) - replying to a post using the word "sage" in the email field, which keeps it from bumping.
* Tripcode - A cryptographic hash created from a password, used to allow a user to "sign" their posts while remaining anonymous; in Japanese, simply "trip"
* ">>" - Often followed with the numeral of the intended post to mean reply or follow up. 2ch automatically makes a link.
** >>1-san (>>1さん) - An ASCII art character, representing the poster who started the thread it appears in.

Common abbreviations and phrases

* Burakura (ブラクラ) - "Browser crusher", one who posts links to sites designed to crash users' web browsers.
* Chu or Chubou (厨房) - An intentional misuse of kanji for "中坊" (a middle school kid), it refers to those posters who post without reading any rules, also to those who engage in flaming and spamming.
* Natsuchu (夏厨) - Someone who appears in the summer break and makes ridiculous posts, acting like Chu
* Fuun (（　´_ゝ`）ﾌｰﾝ ) - a kaomoji for indifference; the word 「フーン」 is the Japanese equivalent of the English "hunh." The fuun face is the basis of the Sasuga Brothers AA.
* Fuyuchu (冬厨) - Same as natsuchu, but for posters appearing in winter.
* Haahaa ((*´Д`)ﾊｧﾊｧ) - a kaomoji indicating that one is breathing heavily. Generally due to being excited, in most cases connected to lust or sexuality, However, someone "Haahaa" does not imply masturbation or negative connotation by default. It may also indicate nervousness (for an example of the latter usage, see Densha Otoko).
* Kami (神 or ネ申) - A person who is considered a "forum god" for especially useful posts or an interesting ID hash; see Kami
* Kita!! (ｷﾀ━━━━━━(ﾟ∀ﾟ)━━━━━━ !!!!!) - Literally, "I/It came!", it is generally used as a big exclamation mark (equivalent to the Japanese term yatta). The face in the center is named jisakujien.
* Kopipe (コピペ) - Copy/paste. A text passage or piece of AA that is frequently recycled and reposted.
* Nurupo (ぬるぽ) - A parody of the Java output "NullPointerException". Usually followed up with "GA(ガッ)!", the sound of a hammer hitting the "nurupo" poster, because of a meme started in this thread .
* Tsuri (釣り) - Trolling; a literal translation of "trolling" as a method of fishing.
* Uho! (ウホッ!) - Originally from a gay manga, used somewhat like Haahaa and Kita!! but when the post is macho
* ｗ - A single letter substituting for "warai" or "laughing", added to mean that the poster is joking or thinks he made a funny remark, basically the equivalent to "LOL"; putting "ｗｗｗｗｗｗｗｗｗｗｗ" at the end of something is the same thing as saying "LOLOLOLOLOLOL". Also warota (ワロタ) from the Kansai-ben past tense of warau. Warosu (ワロス) is one of the recent derivatives of warota, from the thread s (ワロス　のガイドライン, Guidelines for warosu), where endless word-chanting of warosues is going on. Nowadays 'terawarosu' (ﾃﾗﾜﾛｽ) can be seen too. It means something like ROTFL.
* orz (orz, OTZ) - the image of someone bowing down in despair and hitting their head on the floor. The "o" is the head, the "r" is the hands and the body, the "z" the legs.
* ki gasu (希ガス) - 2ch for "ki ga suru" (I have a feeling that...). Depending on the kanji used, this can also mean "noble gas."
* moesu (ﾓｴｽ) - really really loveable. Moe is a term in Japanese that means something like "endearing". On the flip side, kimosu (ｷﾓｽ) means "really creepy." Anything with a ｽ at the end means OOOsugi (way too OOO).
* more (漏れ) - an intentional misspelling of the masculine pronoun ore, meaning "I"
* Nenchakuotsu (粘着乙) - Someone who revives old threads or topics, or sticks to one topic too long, and it bothers the poster. Is meant to be rude.
* kwsk (kwsk) - an abbreviation for "kuwashiku," or "detailed"

English Offspring

There have been some attempts by various internet communities to form their own, more English or internationally-oriented message boards in the style and tradition of 2ch. The first and most notable has been the now defunct world2ch, administered by Taichirou Kosugi ("RIR7") and abandoned in late 2003. Two boards have been put up to replace world2ch, but neither has become anywhere near as popular.

* 4-ch , historically following world2ch, is an English website with discussion boards for English speakers and also contains a board where Japanese 2ch users can talk in Japanese. However apart from the 2ch format which 4ch uses, the original ideals of 2ch such as lack of over-familliarity with each other and respect of each others ideas fail to be seen in this 'pakkuri' or copy of 2ch.

2ch phenomena

Densha Otoko

Between March and May of 2004, an anonymous user posted in a sub-forum for single men to decry their woes. His post detailed an event that had happened that day as he was riding the train. According to his account, he was sitting on the train when he noticed an attractive woman. Suddenly, a drunken man entered the car and bothered many passengers, who did not offer any resistance to his disturbance. This man then began to sexually harass the woman, and seeing no-one else coming to her aid, the poster told the man to stop bothering the woman. The two struggled for a short time while the other passengers used this distraction to call the conductor, who took control of the situation.

This poster was an extremely introverted, socially inept otaku. Never having done such a thing before in his life, he was amazed to find that the woman was thanking him deeply for saving her from harassment. They exchanged addresses and parted ways. The poster, upon returning home, began talking with other posters in the thread and was nicknamed "Densha Otoko" ("Train Man") for his bravery.

A bit later, Densha received a package from the woman he had saved. This package, originally thought to be a generic thank-you gift, turned out to be an expensive tea set. Flabbergasted, he turned to the 2channelers for advice: he was convinced that such a gift was too expensive to be a mere thank-you gift. Densha then contacted the woman and began meeting her regularly, all the while posting updates on 2ch and discussing the matter with other posters. Following their collective advice, he got a haircut, purchased new clothes, and began to come out of his shell. After seeing her for a while, his personality had changed for the better and this culminated a few months later in Densha confessing his love for the woman. She accepted and when the 2channelers were informed of this there was a mass celebration; posts began flowing in congratulating the new couple.

Because 2ch has an enormous impact on net culture in Japan, this story quickly spread throughout the media and became an instant hit. Its almost fairytale-like simplicity and emotional power drew people to the story, and a copy of the original threads relating to the story was published in a book. Since then, there have been four manga adaptations of the story; a feature film which reached #1 in the box office upon its release; and a hugely popular TV live-action drama aired during 2005. According to Densha Otoko and Hermes (the nickname of the woman; named after the brand of the tea-set she sent him), they are still together.

Masashi Tashiro

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In 2001, 2ch users voted en-masse for Japanese TV performer Masashi Tashiro as Time Magazine's Person of the Year. This act was soon dubbed the "Tashiro Festival" (Tashiro Matsuri, 田代祭) by 2ch users. Tashiro was infamous in the Japanese media for committing several crimes, including peeping up a woman's skirt using a camcorder, using stimulants twice, peeping in a male bath and causing a car accident. 2ch programmers developed many scripts such as "Tashiro Cannon" (Tashiro-hō, 田代砲), "Mega particle Tashiro Cannon" (Mega-ryūshi Tashiro-hō, メガ粒子田代砲), "25 repeated blows Tashiro Cannon" (Nijyū-go renda Tashiro-hō, 25連打田代砲) "Super Tashiro Cannon" (Chō Tashiro-hō, 超田代砲) to be able to vote repeatedly. "Super Tashiro cannon" was so powerful that it crashed Time's server. Due to the votes of 2ch users, he got to the No. 1 position temporarily in on December 21, 2001. However, Time's staff realized that something was unusual, and Tashiro was removed as a candidate. Since this incident, he has been called "Tashirock" (タシロック), "God" (神) or "God of Laughter" (笑いの神) in 2ch since then.

IRC@2ch

There's also an IRC network called 'IRC@2ch', whose main IRC and web server are both hosted on irc.2ch.net . The network is rather small with two servers, no services, and relatively few users. The chat in most channels is in Japanese, using the ISO-2022-JP encoding. The network maintains a list over what channels are currently the most active on its web page.

See also

*Shift JIS art
*Mona Font
*Imageboard
*Masashi Tashiro
*Futaba Channel

References

External links

* 2ch.net - The 2ch site
* 2-Ten ("ni-ten") - 2ch reference (also available as a book from Amazon.jp )
* English list and navigation of 2ch boards at 4-ch.net
* The Dynamism of 2channel - a sociological study by Naohiro Matsumura et al. presented at the "Social Intelligence Design International Conference 2003"
* "The Youthful Face of Japanese Nationalism", Kenta Tanimichi, Far Eastern Economic Review, November 2005
* IRC@2ch
*2channel post 1 .2 .3 . 4 .- Watashi to Tokyo (Blog)

Footnotes

*
Category:Virtual communities
Category:IRC networks
Category:1999 establishments
zh-yue:2ch