Having begun in early 2006, the Tokyo Fox blog has reached its 2000th post * and is slowly but surely edging its way towards two decades of top quality fairly average content. Or is it? Will it even make it to the 20th anniversary?

* There have actually been more than 2000 posts but I deleted a few dozen of them earlier this year, and a load more around a decade ago!

In the modern day, blogging is all a bit old-fashioned but 18 years ago was a very different time when social media and YouTubers weren’t really around or as prevailant as today. This blog started off as a fun pun-based place to keep an online journal to let friends and family back home know what things were like for me living and working in Japan. I was as surprised as anyone that I made it past a few entries (the first ever post was pretty awful!) and what followed for the first few months were observations of how customs and life are so different here. Of course I was fairly new to it all back then and was still finding my feet in this huge metropolis which has since become the place I call home.

The 1st 3 posts on Tokyo Fox!

The need to have something to write about has been a good motivator for getting me out of the house and travelling in and around Tokyo. Keeping Tokyo Fox going for nearly two decades really has been a labour of love and is basically a hobby which has reaped other such benefits though like freebies, invites, offers of work, interviews, and of course it’s been very nice to interact with those people who have been kind enough to post some lovely and wonderful comments over the years. Naturally, there have been a fair few negative and abusive ones too but that’s all par for the course I guess.

The switch from the amateur MSN spaces blog of old to WordPress in 2010 went pretty much hand-in-hand with the streamlining of the site to produce exactly ten articles each and every month. I kept that up for over 12 years with regular features forming a backbone of the monthly upload.

I’ve always had drafts or at least ideas of what would fill the following 3-4 months but I now find myself at a stage where that isn’t the case. Ideas for original content are diminsihing, I’m travelling far less, prefer to spend most free time with my dog, and I’m running out of energy to keep searching for interesting things in and around Tokyo.

Furthermore, my old computer is becoming less reliable as time passes, and I am still using a very old version of WordPress to write posts so that isn’t good for the future as one can’t always trust them to be around forever! With that in mind and the fact that many regular features have run their course I decided to reduce the monthly posts to eight per month from the start of this year onwards. I’m committed to that for 2024 but may well go back to the pre-2012 time of just posting on here as and when I can rather than getting something online every four days or whatever.

Now if you think this all sounds very pretentious so far then you’re absolutely right! Tokyo Fox is basically a niche site focusing on things which are not of interest to the masses (local sport, playground structures, etc) but has a fairly regular and loyal readership of about 3000 hits per day. It’s not too bad for an amateur blogger but neither is it hugely impressive either.

Maybe if I had taken more time and effort to promote the site or accepted sponsorships and promotions then things might be a little different. Very rarely does a day go by without getting an e-mail from some company or whoever wanting to publish their own material (subjects have included children’s bicycles, website apps and guns!) or promote their products on my site. I have turned down, ignored or not even seen (most of them go to my junk file!) almost all of them but I do occasionally wonder if this was the right decision.

This post was originally meant to be coincide with the website’s 18th birthday in February but I think I wanted to get a sports post on here whilst the iron was hot. That would’ve been the 2000th post so I decided to delete one post from the archive to ensure this would be the landmark one. However, I ended up deleting a few dozen old posts and so here we are five months. It may all come off as quite negative but nothing last forever. For now the Tokyo Fox blog will continue at a slighly reduced rate (quality over quantity is what people say!) and likelihood is that it’ll slow down a bit more after that. Time will tell I guess.

Click here to read ‘The A-Z Of Tokyo Fox Celebrating 15 Years of Blogging (Part 1)’

Click here to read ’15 Years Of Tokyo Fox: The Posts With The “Most” Hits For Each Year’

Click here to read ’15 Years Of Tokyo Fox: The Posts With The “Least” Hits For Each Year’

Click here to read ’10 Years Of Tokyo Fox’