About
What is eirtaku?
Eirtaku is:
- Straight from Ireland
- Totally unexpected
- Not kids stuff
- On right now, 24 hours a day!
Also an Irish anime and manga community. For the uninitiated, anime is a common term for Japanese animation and manga is the Japanese equivalent of graphic novels. Wikipedia has detailed explanations of both the meaning and history of these two art forms, much better than any attempt that could be made here.
Today, eirtaku forums the primary hub of experienced and dedicated staff members for the largest anime convention in Ireland and currently the only anime convention in the RoI, EirtaKon.
A brief history of eirtaku (contains a lot of names and jargon - and isn’t brief).
Eirtaku has existed, on and off, in one form or another, since around 1998.
The name is a pretty simple concatenation of the word “Eire” (Irish word for Ireland) and “Otaku”
(Japanese word associated with anime fans).
It was originally formed by a small group of people in Cork, and comprised of a pink website, an ezBoard and about ten members.
In January of 2002, Kenshin requested an anime & manga forum on boards.ie. Cloud, thought the forum would be better placed on his anime and manga website, aptly named, “mangatoanime.com” (now boards.jp). It was given the simple title “Ireland” and Kenshin and Mordeth were set as moderators.
In March of 2002 it became apparent that both the original eirtaku site and the new Ireland forum on M2A were in decline. The decision was made to merge the two communities under one banner; eirtaku, being the older community, became the overall banner, and the M2A Ireland forum (now changed to “Eirtaku”) became the centre of the newly formed community.
Both Kenshin and Mordeth remained as moderators, and Kago of the original eirtaku was added to the moderator roster.
From here on, people from boards.ie made their way over to the eirtaku forums every now and then, slowly trickling extra members into the community.
In January 2003, a chatroom, #eirtaku on Quakenet, was created as a branch off from the M2A chatroom on the same network.
Incidentally, the reason for the location on a gaming chat network was as a result of the origin of boards.ie being a single gaming forum for Quake. M2A spawned from boards.ie, and thus retained such roots.
This chat room remains a focal point for the community, though it is woefully underused by most new members.
In February 2003, Slydice, who was in the web development business, purchased eirtaku.com, and Kenshin took it upon himself to create a website for eirtaku.
The first of what would eventually be called “eirtakumeets” began around this time; with Kenshin, as committee of Trinity’s DUCSS, appropriating projector-fitted theatres in Trinity’s Computer Science wing for watching anime.
CuLT, who had become a member of the forums on M2A that same month offered to design a logo for the eirtaku website; eventually expanding into the role of general web designer.
By 2004, with the constant rain of 3/25th Irish-Amercians dropping in to the eirtaku forum from the rest of M2A to talk in Japanese smilies and marvel at all these genuine, bonified, Irish folks, the eirtaku community had had enough.
It was also starting to outgrow its original forum, and many didn’t want to just disperse into the rest of M2A for alternate discussion.
At this stage, all of the members of the original 1998 eirtaku group had dispersed.
On Fri Feb 27, 2004, the eirtaku forums moved to eirtaku.com, alongside the website.
Kenshin and CuLT became the forum administrators, with the rest of the older eirtaku members like Mordeth, Newtype, Dredz, Chowmein and Lex_Diamonds becoming moderators of various forums.
At this point there were still only roughly 30 members.
Mid to late 2004 saw the addition of many of the current eirtaku regulars, and the numbers increased steadily thereafter.
“Eirtakumeets” were adopted as a more frequent occurrence at this stage, with #eirtaku regular Diabolus/Domo-kun/DrPepper starting to host several of these events.
By the beginning of 2005 there were nearly 150 members, and by late 2005 it was roughly 250; with several of those who had migrated from M2A - which by now was boards.jp - having left.
On the 1st of September, 2004, Kenshin finally moved to glorious Nippon on an extended post-graduation holiday, and eventually found a job. He has been living and working there ever since, and has precious little free time for eirtaku or anything else these days.
As CuLT had begun a degree in computing that year, he slowly slipped into the role of developer as Kenshin eased out.
2004 also saw the creation of the Dublin City University Anime & Manga Society, with Art Wolf, Archeotech and CuLT as notable founders.
Art Wolf had founded the DCU AMS with a convention in mind, and with CuLT, began to plan for Ireland’s first anime convention. After some debate on boards.ie, and divided opinions, the convention name was decided upon. CuLT had suggested a quadruple concatenation, which still causes raised brows and mispronunciations to this day: EirtaKon.
2006 was mostly uneventful other than the 150% increase in membership.
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