Futaba Channel (ふたば☆ちゃんねる), or Futaba for short, is a popular, anonymous Imageboard and bulletin board system based in Japan. It is essentially the image board of the heavily popular Japanese mega-BBS 2channel; while it is related, it is not run by 2channel s founder, Hiroyuki Nishimura.
Futaba Channel was set up on August 30th 2001, after troubles on 2channel arose from excessive forwarding to image URLs (2channel automatically forwards all posted URLs to a dereferer).
Futaba s image boards usually do not distinguish between pornographic and clean content, but there is a strict barrier between two-dimensional (drawn) and three-dimensional (computer graphics and photographic) pictures. This seperation has been initiated on March 16th, 2002.
Futaba has a culture of its own, including
Toshiaki - the default name for anonymous posters on the Nijiura board (as of April 12th, 2003) and also all other isolated boards. The origin of this has to do with a certain self-important poster who called himself Toshiaki. Futaba users in general also often refer to themselves as Toshiaki when communicating outside of Futaba as well. Variations of the Toshiaki nomenclature exist outside as well as inside Futaba. For instance, the default name on Futaba s yuri board is Yuriaki .
Nijiura - kind of an anything goes -2D board on Futaba. There are actually three, although only the newest one is being linked from the frontpage. The first one was set up in March 2002 to seperate normal anime discussion from the growing trends towards posting of gag pictures and photoshopped images. From July 15th, 2004 to May 25th, 2005, names for users had been completely disabled on the respective default Nijiura board. The two older Nijiura boards are still retaining this custom.
Waha, Musu and Choia. The cute character Suzuran was featured in the eroge Suigetsu ; Toshiaki changed her appearance somewhat and called her Waha , after a common exclamation she utters in the game. Her sister, Musu, and her pet human , Choia, are original creations by Futaba artists.
Yaranaika Literally means Shall we do it As it does in English, in Japanese this phrase can have an erotic subtext. It was used in a homosexual erotic comic book Kuso Miso Technique , which was endlessly parodied by Futaba users.
Heika, aka His Majesty , a strange-looking man with a pointed helmet from the TV show Space Warriors Baldios, has been transformed from a murdered monarch into master pimp by Futaba.
Taicho, or the Captain , in reality Marine Sgt. Parish J. Harvey of Company L, 3/8, whose commanding visage has been mutated into countless parodies. Taicho s appearances are mostly concentrated at Futaba Channel s military related imageboard, even if the pictures he s in aren t.
Sadako-chan, a bishojo version of Sadako Yamamura from the Ring_(film) films. She is sometimes accompanied by a cartoon horse and a tall, attractive blonde version known as American Sadako-chan .
Saizensenkun, aka Mr. Front Line , a creepy-looking photographer from somewhere in Japan who is infamous for frequenting anime conventions. On Futaba s image boards he is spliced into warzones, crises, press conferences, and movies.
The OS-tans, a set of fan-made, cute mascots for various operating systems, the first one being ME-tan, posted for the first time on August 6th, 2003.
A gaijin yonkoma is a 4-panel comic with many variations, usually interspersing good and bad images with two stock reactions. The reaction pictures used show four attendees at E³, apparently a group of editors from IGN responding to news of a The Legend of Zelda series video game. One picture has the four sitting in chairs, with little emotion; the other shows a similar group cheering wildly. The images have also been used as models for anime characters drawn in the same poses, most notably Akane, Mitsuki and Haruka from Kimi Ga Nozomu Eien. An interesting thing to note is that some people have swapped seats and changed their clothing between photographs, whereas the comic form implies they re immediately sequential.
Some of the characters that appear on Futaba Channel have entered the real world in the form of various real-life goods, such as figures, dolls or images printed on pillows. Such items are mainly produced by Japanese dojin artists and groups.
The Futaba bulletin board system is so popular that it has a small American following. Since non-Japanese people are not allowed to post to the image boards, the Americans created 4chan , which is similar to Futaba except that the major board divisions are between pornographic and non-pornographic content as well as two-dimensional and three-dimensional content, and the primary language is English.
Non-japanese internet users sometimes refer to Futaba Channel as 2chan, due to the url of the site. Due to the ignorance of some of those using this term, it is frequently unclear whether this is intended to mean Futaba Channel or 2channel, and sometimes it even refers to both, as if they were a single website. To eliminate confusion, the names Futaba and 2ch are sometimes preferred.
= External links =
Note: some of these links may not be safe for work.
[http://www.2chan.net Futaba Channel]
[http://gaty.hp.infoseek.co.jp/kusomiso.html Kuso Miso Technique]