History

Nippon Cinema was launched with little fanfare in July 2006 as an outlet for two of my major interests/hobbies: Japanese films and web development. Ideas for content were nonexistent, so the early days consisted of a whole lot of Japanese movie reviews. Basically, anything I could get on Netflix or track down a bootleg DVD of got reviewed in a long-winded, fairly clueless fashion. Later that year, I started getting interested in web video and decided to roll my own video archive for viewing trailers. At the time, it was still fairly uncommon for small sites to host their own video players, so that idea was a bit more ambitious than it may seem today.

Sometime in mid-2007, I started getting a bit more intellectually curious, searching Japanese-language sites for any sort of info I could glean on projects involving some of my favorite actors and directors. This eventually led to an expansion of the site’s coverage, as I began posting new trailers and whatever little bits of news I could manage to translate from Japanese (typically, at an excruciatingly slow pace and riddled with contextual errors of varying ridiculousness). Hopefully my skills have improved since then…

Advertising

I do not offer custom advertising campaigns or negotiate directly with advertisers about placing banner ads in specific locations, so please don’t be offended if those kinds of inquiries go unanswered. You can always create a campaign on Google AdWords and set up a managed placement to specifically target ad locations on this site. It’s a whole lot easier and less tedious for everyone involved. Best of all, the pricing is completely automated by algorithms that are significantly smarter than I am about these things.

If you have an idea for a more specific set of pages you’d like to target, please feel free to contact me and I’ll see if I can set up a new custom ad channel to fit your needs.

Content Management Software

The site is run entirely on the proprietary ExpressionEngine content management system. It’s one of the most flexible and powerful options out there because it gives you the ability to alter base functionality through PHP-based plugins and custom database queries. However, WordPress, MoveableType, and Drupal are all perfectly viable free options.

Hosting

Nippon Cinema is currently hosted across two Linodes. The site is running on a LEMP stack under Ubuntu Linux. Low-level control, effortless scalability, and not having to worry about my resources being monitored made this decision a no-brainer once the site outgrew shared hosting options.

Protip: When shared hosting providers advertise their budget plans as “unlimited”, what they actually mean is “We’re not telling you what the limit is, but we’ll shut you down when you reach it.”

Copyright

All movie trailers and movie-related images on this site are the property of their respective copyright holders. It’s my sincere belief that their usage on this site falls within the fair use doctrine of US copyright law and helps promote general awareness of the movies covered. If any copyright holder would like something removed for any reason, please contact me directly with details and I’ll do my best to comply promptly.

Attribution

All written content on this website is original writing by me. As a general rule, I don’t copy and paste other people’s descriptions or news articles, and in situations where I do get a film’s description from another website, I always re-phrase their text and source the original article. If you use my content for your own blog, YouTube videos, or any other website you write for, all I ask is that you include a link to my article as your source.

The Future

Nippon Cinema is first and foremost a blog/fansite run by an enthusiastic fan of Japanese movies (me) and I have no ambitions beyond that, nor will I attempt to force expansion by actively recruiting additional writers. I am by no means a film historian, expert, or industry insider. That being said, as I continue to learn more about Japanese film, I will expand the site’s coverage accordingly and it will hopefully continue to grow organically through that process.

Kevin Ouellette (kevin.ouellette@gmail.com)

Last updated: April 14, 2012