"A talk about my precious fan"

This is what I mentioned a bit here a while back. Today I'm finally going to tell you about it.

I'd say I'm quite a rare breed in this industry, who still doesn't have an official fan club! I really like give-and-take with you like this, distance between us like this, what can I say, our natural relationship, and I feel so comfortable with this feeling cause I'm not a sociable person at all. For example, some people read this board and email me but don't have my CDs - all sort of things like that. (lol) I'm happy to see various kinds of people here!

I'm a person like this, but there is, there was a person I'd like to send the "Fan Club Member number 0001," even now . . .

Besides this official homepage, there exist a number of unofficial Utada Hikaru fan sites full of contents, full enough to make me think "They almost defeat Toshiba(EMI), don't they??(lol)". The bigger the site gets the harder it will be to keep it on I guess, costing money and effort as well. Sometimes we find disputes arising on popular/active boards, and it's often up to the personality of the site manager if the site can create a cozy atmosphere. The site manager - who had been running one of the biggest, longest-established site among my fan sites all by himself which remains from when I debuted - passed away half a year ago.

I hadn't met him before. I hadn't talked with him before. But wherever I was and whatever work I was doing, I visited the site almost everyday. I sort of liked its mood and often checked the site's board worrying about the trends of it. The site encouraged the 16-years-old girl very much, who was shocked to find some boards on which heaps of slanders were written, when she just debuted. And for all that, I've never thought what the site manager - giving his name as WEBMASTER - is like, if the person is male or female, how old he/she is, what kind of work he/she does, where he/she lives, if he/she has a family. How come I haven't thought about it.

I got to know many things after he died. He really was a good site manager, giving advices to the people come and go, teaching them about the internet, supporting those who was interested in launching a site. And he died young, having kept his illness secret throughout. It might be self-centered of me to think of him like "Why had he spent his precious time on my support?" but this is a shock, I mean it's like, "How come you are that modest! How come all of these end up as a beautiful story! Why!". For me he was the person who had been doing wonderful things through the net where we couldn't see each other's faces, while there are a bunch of people who are doing irresponsible, stupid things by hiding behind the anonymity of the "same" net. But for that site, a number of other fan sites might not have started. Neither might this message section.

So, I just wanted to say thank you to him, rather than something like sending flowers to his funeral. I could say it anytime, actually.

Being able to tell what we wanna tell to the person whom we wanna tell it to - that would be the happiest thing of all. Then things like unhappiness and sorrow would be "being unable to tell," I suppose. It's sad if we cannot communicate with the person close by, you see, if our words cannot reach our family, if we have something we cannot to tell our sweetheart who is supposed to understand everything each other. We feel sad when someone dies, I wonder if it is because we notice we'll never be able to tell anything to the person, forever.

It's impossible to tell all our thoughts to the people around even if we cannot tell when we will be torn apart, but . . . we've got not to miss the time to tell. It's quite easy actually, as we can speak the same language.

Today I somehow don't feel like deliverying Yatterman's punchline! (lol)
Whew! Finally I wrote this! You see, I just wouldn't have to write this long and sloppy if I had told him "Thank you" when he was alive. Thank you for reading all of this.

WEBMASTER, thank you. WEBMASTER's mother, thank you as well. You are and you will be my emotional support of musical activities.

Hikaru


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(NOTES by Nuuk)
"Yatterman's punchline" ... Yatterman is a Japanese animation aired late 70's. Hikki used the punchline one of the characters often uses at the end of the last message. (Sorry it's technically almost impossible for me to explain the detail of this)
"WEBMASTER's site" ... "Utada Republic"