While Sean is working like crazy from his base in Kobe to clean up, update and format the Digital Edition of Gateway to Japan, I'd like to tell you a bit about who "we" are. I am June Kinoshita, one of the original co-authors of Gateway to Japan. I've been living in the Boston area since 1990, bringing up two daughters (now in college) and enjoying a career in biomedical nonprofits. I still love and follow what's going on in Japan, but lacking opportunities to visit frequently, I've not been in a position to update the book.
So I feel incredibly fortunate to have been introduced to Sean Landis, a 2011 graduate in Japanese, and Government and Politics from the University of Maryland (where my older daughter happens to be; Go Terps!!). Sean has excellent language skills, software coding chops, a terrific design sense, and, most importantly, a passion for Japan. He lived in Hokkaido for 3 years and currently resides in Kobe (where he actually lived and studied in high school and university as an exchange student). He is done a fantastic job bringing Gateway up to date. This includes cleaning up the digital files, which were optically scanned from the printed third edition because Kodansha International at some point destroyed the digital files without alerting me. (Who destroys digital files? As though they take up so much space in the warehouse. Perhaps these types of business practices help to explain why KI did not survive.)
Gateway to Japan was a hypertext before hypertext existed. Our extensive cross-references and system of all-caps for the names of major historical and cultural personalities were our print-era version of hyperlinks. Now technology has caught up with that original vision. Digital publishing platforms, websites and social media have made this project feasible.
