Category: Kirainet

Today, 7 years ago, I started blogging; and last December it was 4 years since I started blogging in the English version of Kirai: A Geek in Japan. When I started my Spanish blog I was 23 years old and I was finishing university back in Spain; now I am almost 30 years old. During these years many things have happened and many things have changed in the world, on the Internet, in this blog and in my life.

Thanks to you all for walking with me in this journey to have a better understanding of Japanese culture and continue learning together. During these 7 years, you have visited my blog 45 million times (almost 1 million times the English version), I have written 2635 posts in Spanish and 978 posts in English, and you have made 118,000 comments in Spanish and 4,900 comments in English. I uploaded 13,000 pictures to my Flickr, I started a new photography blog (in Spanish) and I twitted 6,290 times. I also wrote two books Un Geek en Japón (available in Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese and German) and Momentos (which includes texts in both Spanish and English) based on the contents published in this blog. More than 20,000 units of the books have been sold all around the world. I say thanks 20,000 times to you all!

At the moment I am finishing up a new book in English published by Tuttle Publishing, that includes rewritten contents of my first book in Spanish as well as brand new chapters. It is already available for pre-order at Amazon!

Pre-order A Geek in Japan

I will keep writing in my blog for many years to come!

If you are a new reader of Kirai: A Geek in Japan, these are some of the articles I wrote that I particularly like that will give you a good grasp of the blog:

• Kancho
• 10 tips to travel to Japan
• Kappa
• Sony timer
• Sex in Japan
• Ninja restaurant
• Real money disappearing in Japan
• Japan financial crisis
• Crisis, danger, opportunity
• Hiro Nakamura’s katana
• Yakult and lactobacillus casei
• Perseverance
• Learning Japanese
• Kawaii
• Casio reinventing itself with every change
• Masturbation World Record, 9 hours and 33 minutes non-stop
• 10 Japanese movies
• Vibram Fivefingers
• Japanese sleeping
• Things that happened to me the other day and probably I am the only one who cares
• Hideo Itokawa and Hayabusa
• Uchi-Soto
• Honne and Tatemae
• Red Bull strategy in Japan
• Tweetup Japan 2010
• Heike crab
• Furoshiki
• 8bit cafe
• Sony “secret” labs
• Trash cans for adult magazines

It’s been more than one year since I started writing my blog in english. I’ve improved a lot my english writing skills and met many new people who also writes about Japan in english. During the first months of this English version I had around 100~300 pageviews a day, right now it’s always between 4.000 and 6.000 pageviews a day. Not bad, but still far away from the Spanish version with more than 30.000 pageviews a day. By the way, I very happy with my Spanish, next week my book, writen from my Spanish articles will be launched in Spain and South America.

The people who made more comments in this english version are:

• Jamaipansese
• Neil Duckett
• Pepinismo
• Brad Stephenson
• Alafista

Thanks so much!

And the sites who drove me more traffic are:

• Japanprobe
• Dannychoo
• AkihabaraNews
• Otaku.fm
• Tokyo Times
• Q-Taro

Thanks so much! I was thinking to do also a Japanese version, but I think I’ll spend more time translating into English some of the Spanish long posts which I’m always procrastinating.

It’s been six months since I started translating posts from my Spanish blog into English. Good things are: I improved my English and started to know the English blog community in Japan, that means meeting new people and making new friends. Bad things: it is very boring to translate something you have already written.

This English version had 255.209 pageviews in six months, not bad, but ridiculous compared with the Spanish version that has now more than 11 millions pvs. I translated 133 posts, the most commented post is this one, you guys made 498 comments, that’s more than two comments per day. The visitors who made more comments were: Sheerblade, Jamaipanese and Brad.

Thanks a lot to all the people who made comments or participated in this blog’s conversation from their own blogs.