» Site Info

Haisai and welcome to pop.internet-okinawa.com! This is a discography site for Okinawan artists and covers J-pop (Japanese pop music), O-pop (Okinawan pop music), minyô (folk music), koten ongaku (classical music), and any other type of genre that exists. The featured artist discography is called DotW (Discography of the Week) and is updated every Sunday. I only have listings for full-length albums (CD format) and some artist discographies may not be complete.

Pop.internet-okinawa.com also features a special on the Okinawa pop culture scene called pop.internet-okinawa.com Presents which houses the UPzine (the Uchinâ Pop! e-Zine) and my artist fan sites. There's also an Artist Directory (found on my Links Page) which includes URIs to each artist's website (official or unofficial), and a Reviews category (via the Yuntaku weblog) where I'm currently reporting on places to buy Japanese/Okinawan music (so far I'm only covering Hawaii and the web). For more on the history of this site, please check out: About This Site (below).

Pop.internet-okinawa.com is best viewed with a ("modern") web browser that supports the latest web standards set by the W3C, and a screen resolution of 800x600 or more (1024x768 recommended). I'm trying my best here to make this site web standards compliant so I use XHTML and CSS to create these pages. Older browsers (meaning those who use Win/IE 5x or Netscape 4x) may not display this site correctly. Some suggestions for browsers are (for Windows users): Mozilla Firefox, K-Meleon, or Opera. For Mac users, I'd recommend: Camino, Opera, Safari or Mozilla Firefox. All of the links that point outside of pop.internet-okinawa.com with this icon from Matterform Media webgraphics.com will open in new windows.

» About This Site

Haisai and welcome to pop.internet-okinawa.com (now part of Internet-Okinawa.com, from 1-11-2003). My name is Richie Yamashiroya and I'm a very big fan of Okinawan music (duh!). Most of you probably know me as "Riccin" from my Uchinâ (what Okinawans call "Okinawa") pop culture column (or UPzine) over at Okinawa.com. As for my first time visitors, please continue to visit my column and this site, you'll thank me for it (okay, I'm just joking, please come back!!!). Thank you for hitting that "back" button.

Before pop.internet-okinawa.com, there was "OM.org", or Okinawan-Music.org, and even before that there was "O.M.P", or the Okinawan Music Project. It was kinda sorta a spin-off of my original journal site (now my directory), called "tUP", or the Uzagaku Project, which used to be on dot-mac. The Uzagaku Project is kinda sorta a spin-off 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 back there now, I'm not really sure (read: I can't remember) if my column first appeared on that site or on the now long gone, Okinawa.ws (don't worry, Donna has all the old columns on the main site). During the time my column was on Okinawa.ws (a domain now owned by someone else), I started O.M.P which was (and still is) a site dedicated to Okinawan music discographies and other stuff that I don't cover in my column. Since May 13, 2002 (OMP's b-day), the layout for OMP has gone through a few changes (which normally coincides with my journal/weblog site's renewals) before becoming Okinawan-Music.org. Interested in seeing what the old versions looked like? Click here (176 KB) for v0.1 and here (156 KB) for v0.2, and don't forget OM.org here (180 KB). (v1.0 image coming soon.)

Everything you see here is made on a Mac. CD album covers and some of the pics are scanned with a Canon CanoScan N1220U (the company kinda sucks when it comes to developing drivers that work natively in OS X--buggers) which is hooked up via USB to my iBook G3 that still boots into Mac OS 9. Everything else is done on an iBook G4 running Mac OS X (v10.3 'Panther'). For XHTML editing I use BBEdit, for FTP'ing I use Transmit, Yuntaku (the weblog) is powered by Movable Type (2.6x), and entries are posted with ecto (now available for Windows users). What was "OM.org/O.M.P." and now "pop.internet-okinawa.com", was hosted on Its A Mac, an awesome place to host any site if you're a Mac zealot or just love knowing that your site is hosted on the most reliable equipment in the universe, Macs. I wish to one day own a Power Mac G5 and/or (can't blame me for being greedy) a 15-inch PowerBook G4, so, um, I'll be able to build a better Web site (you know what they say about more power). The fonts I use for my banner and some of my pictures are from K. Hatano's Gray Graphics and Jason Kottke's Silkscreen font. The cool buttons (as well as who their authors are) can be found on gtmcknight.com, and the cool little micro icons are from webgraphics.com or "QBullets" are *free* from Matterform Media. Last but not forgotten, to all my Web mentors (as well as my favorite Mac sites) who keep me inspired, thank you, mahalo, and nifee!

Last update: Wednesday, June 17, 2004.