Haisai and welcome to the pop.internet-okinawa.com remix of OkinawanMusic.org! The idea that powers this site is to make available Okinawan-related pop culture news for the masses (i.e., it's all available in English). I started this off a couple of years (and designs) ago as a discography site for Okinawan artists that covered J-pop (Japanese pop music), O-pop (Okinawan pop music), minyou (folk music), koten ongaku (classical music), and the other genres of music.
Before pop.internet-okinawa.com, I had a website called 'OM.org', or Okinawan-Music.org (notice the difference between the new domain name is the absence of the hyphen), and even before that there was 'O.M.P', or the Okinawan Music Project which was a spin-off of my original journal site (now my web directory), called 'tUP', or the Uzagaku Project. The Uzagaku Project (which is currently the name of my personal weblog) was the title of my online column over at Donna's (Internet-Okinawa.com's Jedi web master) legendary site on all things Okinawa, Okinawa.com. (Actually, although it's still there, I'm unsure as to whether my column first appeared on that site or on the now long gone Okinawa.ws [not to worry since Donna has all the old columns on the main site] domain.) During the time my column was on Okinawa.ws (we're no longer affiliated with that domain), I started O.M.P which was a site dedicated to Okinawan music discographies and other things that I didn't cover on my column. (Btw, May 13, 2002 is O.M.P's launch date & OM.org has been a part of Internet-Okinawa.com since January 11, 2003.) The combination of OM.org and i-O.com (Internet-Okinawa.com) was seen as a way to bring the pop culture of Okinawa to a larger audience and I'm happy to report that I've received many emails of support from fans throughout the globe.
The power of one. This website is a work of love by me (Richie Yamashiroya) and I've been a fan of Okinawan pop culture for more than 10 years (and a fan of J-pop music for even longer). Most of you probably know me by my nickname 'Riccin' from my Uchinâ (what locals call Okinawa) pop culture column (or UPzine) over at Okinawa.com. Being from the generation of Star Wars, Madonna, and MTV (I'm talking about being there from the beginning), I've always been interested in pop culture. My connection to Okinawa is through my mother who was born and raised there so throughout my life, I've had many opportunities to experience the rich culture of these islands. I'm also a student of Ryûkyû minyou and I'm currently under the tutelage of Kiyoshi Kinjo, Ryosei Oshiro (they are the directors of the minyou group I belong to called Nidaime Teishinkai Hawaii Shibu) and Grant Sandaa Murata. My interest in Okinawan pop culture spun out of my fascination with the pop culture of mainland Japan (which through my many years of music retail gave me easy access to all types of media) and the coming of such artists as Namie Amuro, The Boom, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Southern All Stars (the last three artists are from mainland Japan and some of their music have been influenced by shimauta [island songs]). My goal for this site (and the others that I try my best to update on a regular basis) is to share my love of Okinawa's pop culture and to make friends along the way.
This website is best viewed with a web browser that supports the W3C web standards and a screen resolution of 1024x768. Although this website can run on browsers old and new, I strongly suggest using these browsers: Mozilla Firefox, K-Meleon, Opera, Camino, Safari or OmniWeb. For more information on choosing the right web browser, check out www.browsehappy.com.
Everything on this website is made on a Mac. CD album covers and other images are scanned with a Canon CanoScan N1220U (I'm set to upgrade soon) which is hooked up to an iBook G3. Pictures are taken with a Canon PowerShot S110 (the 'Digital Elph') or a Canon PowerShot S40 and transferred to my Mac via a Lexar USB 2.0 Multi-Card Reader (I also use the company's CF media). Everything else is done on a G4 'book running Mac OS X (v10.3 'Panther'). For XHTML editing I use BBEdit, CSS is edited with CSSEdit, images/graphics are edited/created with Adobe's Photoshop CS, email is masked from sp@mmers with Enkoder, my FTP client is Transmit, the weblog is powered by Movable Type and entries are posted with ecto (now available for Windows users).
The fonts that are used on the images are Jason Kottke's Silkscreen and/or Tenacity from minifonts.com. The cool little micro icons are from webgraphics.com 
. I must also thank these websites for guiding me through designing with CSS for the current version: SimpleBits and Kalsey Consulting Group. Last but not forgotten, to all my web mentors (as well as my favorite Apple/Mac sites) who keep me inspired, thank you, mahalo and nifee!
I can be reached via email at or you can chat with me ('uzagaku') online on AIM, Yahoo or iChat. (I'll be on Skype soon too.)
Last update: Sunday, September 12, 2004.