poppochan | [180830] Asamack - Asamaru's 11th Anniversary (Reply)

(originally posted on fyeahkosan @ tumblr)

Asamack celebrated Asamaru’s 11th anniversary!

TL;DR: A Nicodouga history lesson by Asamack, featuring first meetings with utaite over the years (PointFive, Gom, Soraru, Amatsuki), the early days of the utaite world, and a little bit of Asamack history.

Asamaru's first upload was on Aug 30, 2007, but he’s deleted/privated that upload orz. He mentioned during his own stream slightly earlier in the day (lv315359956) that he wanted to delete more of his old covers, which got complaints from listeners w someone said for every cover he deletes, he has to upload a new one w

Asamaru was late to the stream w When he came on, he sounded a little sleepy and said he’d just taken a one-hour nap w

Jack asked us if we had our drinks on hand, and reminded us that water was not allowed www so people were replying “hojicha” and “milk” among other things.

We did a toast to Asamaru’s 11th anniversary!

Then they started musing about how there are a lot of people celebrating their 10th anniversaries this year, mainly because 10 years ago (2008) was when people started gathering on NND. Asamaru called it NND’s 黎明期 (reimeiki; basically the dawning of NND).

The utaite community as we know it today started around February or March 2007, so all those celebrating 11th anniversaries this year have been here since its earliest days. (eg. Anima, ASK, Asamaru, Kogeinu, YU, Aomofu, Gom, Isaji, Nodoame, halyosy, etc.)

Asamaru mused a little about where all of those pioneers are now. He mentioned that Gom - the leader of the utaite - has gotten big (because of HoneyWorks).

They jumped from topic to topic throughout the stream, so instead of a chronological report I’ve organised the various interesting things they talked about into different topics.

2channel

In those early days, they got to know each other on 2ch’s oketa (オケ桶, one of 2ch’s message boards, focused on singing, something like a subreddit).
All of the kosan utaite are oketa veterans, a lot of them started using oketa in 2002 or 2003.
Asamaru started on 2ch in 2004, but he wasn’t on oketa, he was on gakki (instruments).
It was also then that he made his first upload.
He got know Jack around 2005, and they got bored of oketa after a year w
Then mixi came along and most of them started using it to keep in touch with each other.
Gom and Jack were famous on oketa

Early days

In 2007, the community was still small so it was easy to meet and get to know people.
Marutan said he used to be a bocchi and was very lonely, and he thought: if he could make music by himself and befriend new people, wouldn’t that be really cool?
But from the sounds of it, that didn’t come true at first and he was quite insecure about it, to the extent that he asked for Jack’s opinion on his singing. Jack said it was alright.

Netraji

Near the end of 2008, they started hosting Asamack Radio. Back then, niconico users weren’t allowed to host namahousou yet. Instead, they used another streaming service - Netraji (from what I can find online, it seems to be ladio.net now)
Their first Netraji had 30 viewers
On the edition where they got Choucho on as a guest, the stream got 80 viewers
Dasoku used to really like Keisen back then. He would flood comments with her name wwww Asamack said this is Dasoku’s dark history, but it’s alright for them to say it as long as he doesn’t know they talked about it www
Soraru - they called him ima daininki no Soraru-kun, cute... - used to frequent Netraji as well. Marutan taught him about mixing and about namahousous; subsequently, Soraru would also host his own Netraji housous.
They set up their current namahousou community on Jan 30, 2009, and have been hosting housous on NND ever since.

The people they met through their time on NND, and their memories of them

amu: Asamaru said amu started around the same time as he did? But amu just celebrated his 10th anniversary last month so I think he might be misremembering...? Unless amu started under another name that we don’t know of.
Nodoame: Back then, since he was younger, Nodoame had an insane uploading speed. It felt like he was uploading once every three days. Asamaru called him a monster w
Mi-chan: Asamaru met him through mixi in 2008. Mi-chan asked him for opinions on his singing? Marutan said his impression of Mi-chan hasn’t really changed over the years, so he’s always surprised whenever he sees a picture of Mi-chan www Mi-chan used to be really skinny and lanky, but he’s become really buff recently wwww he said that whenever he sees Mi-chan’s pictures now, he gets shocked and thinks, “Eh, what happened to your body Mi-chan?!” wwww
Asamaru met PUPI and madamxx through mixing
PUPI: After Choucho’s Last Night Good Night cover was uploaded on NND, Luschka’s cover was too. Asamaru listened to it, and found the mix very cool. He saw that the song was mixed by PUPI! But he doesn’t remember how he first got in touch with PUPI… it was most probably mixi message w listeners told him to ask PUPI if he remembers.
Jack doesn’t remember how he met PUPI.

Spring 2009, Nico Nico Bunkasai

This was where Asamaru met many of them in person for the first time.
It was held at Differ Ariake (ディファ), and a lot of people from the community - from 2007 to 2009 - attended. Chouchou was one of the performers.
Asamaru was in a Spiderman mask at the time, apparently?
Dasoku came up to him suddenly and said, “How have you been recently?” Asamaru got startled, and said “The same as usual…” and he was really confused because Dasoku hadn’t introduced himself yet w (this is mentioned in the PointFive interview with Gero this year too w) and when he realised it was Dasoku, his first thought was “Ah, Keisen-san’s Dasoku.” wwww
This was also where he first met clear and presumably PUPI, since he mentioned in the PointFive interview that he met clear and PUPI at the same live where he met Dasoku.

The Phone

Jack didn’t attend any events, so his first time talking to a lot of people was through the phone. He met the other members of PointFive, Dasoku, amu, clear and Mi-chan, through the phone at various live shows.
Marutan went for many live shows. He would use Skype to call Jack who was hosting Asamack and ask various people in the NND community to greet Asamack Radio listeners - Luschka, Pokota and amu were among the people who did so. (Listeners said the sound quality was terrible w)

Kurikku

Jack’s first nama partner was actually clear! Back in the Netraji days, late 2008
He found clear’s Netraji community very interesting so he made his own
They even hosted a Netraji together, where they did serifu reading w (Jack said it’s definitely a black history for clear too w)
Asamaru heard it and thought both of them were amazing because he definitely wouldn’t be able to do it w
Listeners asked them to do it again and both Asamack said it’s muri w

Winter 2009, Osaka, Dogeza Live

Asamaru didn’t name the live, just said that it was held in Osaka. But according to the PointFive interview, it was at the afterparty of Dogeza Live where he met Gero...
He noted that Tourai was performing at this live too
Gero was there, but he wasn’t performing. It was his first time meeting Gerorin, so he didn’t know how Gero looked like or which person was actually Gero ww.
Anyway, at the afterparty, he was using his phone and trying to Skype Jack. Gero got mad and said something like, “Don’t use your phone! There’s important things to do! Talk to people!” and Marutan was like, “Sorry, sorry, please wait a little www”

More first meetings

Even if they didn’t know each other personally, they knew the names of people in the community
Gom: The first time they talked, Asamaru was asking Gom for a signature. He gave his name as Asamaru, and Gom’s reaction was “EHH? ASAMARU-SAN?!” Marutan was surprised and said, “Eh hai, hai” ww
Even after all these years Jack has never talked to Gom before, but Gom follows him on Twitter (Asamaru was shocked to hear this w)
Kogeinu: They met through his solo performance of under the darkness, probably during the under the darkness matsuri that Asamack held in 2009 which involved a lot of utaite

Some of the many people who came onto Asamack before they got famous

Choucho: She was the first one to go pro
Amatsuki: They actually got to know Amatsuki before he became an utaite. He was an assistant at Gacharaji. Gacharaji, hosted by Gacha and Ryouchou, always had a steady stream of guests and therefore each shift had allocated assistants. When Asamack were guests on Gacharaji, he was an assistant, in charge of managing questions for Asamack.

Jack: I guess most people wouldn’t have known this w
Listener: the Amatsuki-san who successfully held a live at Budoukan???? Jack: *laughing* Yes, that Amatsuki-kun was a namanushi assistant before he became an utaite www this is definitely dark history.

Soraru: there was a time when his videos were full of unko, and there was once, when he was yopparai, he said something like “Jack-san talks about unko with his listeners” (once again, dark history)

More about Asamack’s history

They mused about how they used to have so much energy (a listener pointed out that they used to be able to do 6 hour streams every day w)
Around 4 years ago, work started getting busy for Asamaru and he couldn’t make it to Asamack as regularly (daily Asamack ended in 2015)
Jack has only met 9 people over the course of his decade in NND: Marutan, Tourai, PUPI, SunaP, Foo-san, Choucho, Keisen, Keito (their illustrator) and Kyushu no Hito (Faneru).
Listeners said it was just as expected of him, the tsuchinoko w

Foo-san (twitter)

The flutist whose music plays whenever a douga fails on NND
Asamack’s ‘benefactor’
Doing namahousous back then was very simple. Each housou slot was 30 minutes only, and hosts had to reserve it. And every slot cost 500 yen. Super expensive!
Foo-san is an employee of Dwango. Back then, one of his superiors wanted to make NND’s namahousous livelier and better. So Foo-san would go around watching various streams, identifying which ones were popular and going in to find out what they talked about.
One fateful day he visited Asamack and commented on it. When his name appeared, all of them (Asamack + listeners) were shocked… Foo-san being a “higher authority”, they couldn’t believe he was in their stream w.
After that, they gave Foo-san feedback on some of the features they wished namahousou would have.
They really really wanted something that would allow entry even past full audience, ie. what we know today as Backstage Passes
NND namahousous back then were limited to 1000 viewers per stream
Premium users get priority in housous, normal users generally get kicked out when the stream is full. But for Asamack, even premium users couldn’t get in after they had started the stream LOL.
Back then, Asamaru was the one reserving the housou slot and hosting the nama from his account, so Jack always had to fight with all the other regular viewers to enter the housou even though he was actually hosting it too www
He often ended up in the Tachimi instead of the arena (Listeners: a VIP among us)
It got to a point where they ended up hosting mirror streams, I think, where both of them had to reserve slots and host housous www
This overwhelming popularity proved to be a significant problem because on Marutan’s birthday stream, which Jack hosted, Marutan himself couldn’t get in LMAO. They were like, “This is the end” www
In order to get the BSP feature plus other tokutens eg. extending live for free, they had to level up the community. So they would host interesting streams, and invited interesting people regularly wwwwww they even had a schedule for guests who would be visiting their streams wwwwww
They feel indebted to Foo-san, because of all the things he’s done for them. Marutan was able to do Nicoraji with Asakura Daisuke, whom he’s looked up to since he was young, and Foo-san also got a personal autograph from Jack’s goddess Namie Amuro to Jack (with a heart shape) www
Listeners and Asamack agreed that Foo-san’s power is amazing www

(Trivia, not from the stream) Known holders of Asamack community BSPs

Asamaru
Jack
Keisen
Tourai
Faneru

After they’d finished their reminiscing, Asamack were pretty awed that all of these had happened in the last 11 years. They’ve made a lot of friends and done a lot of things, and had a lot of fun together.

The rest of the stream was them showing the gifts that fans had made for Asamaru - Asamack dolls, two roll cakes, one pound cake, one nougat glace, one illustration from Tama-san - and a discussion about Asamaru’s upcoming utaren live and what he’s going to do.

And now, onwards to 12th anniversary for Asamaru!