John Leen lives outside Seattle, Washington, where he works for a little mom-and-pop software company and in his spare time scrawls cryptic prose which is translated into HTML by magical elves that live inside his computer. (His personal acquaintance with programmers on the Microsoft FrontPage team has confirmed rather than undermined this view of things.)
John is irrationally certain that Japanese console role-playing games like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest have some sort of deep significance, but he’s not sure how or what. He really does have a Tokyo rail map on his wall now, and only about half of his friends are worried about his sanity because of this.
Ryan Evans persuaded me to go to Japan in the first place, so really, this is all his fault. Jason Morrill told me what to see, and Chris Browne showed me a lot of it. Chris Mastrangelo critiqued an early draft of this hypertext, and convinced me to include a Japan Rail map, which I’ve stolen from JR East’s web site at http://www.jreast.co.jp/.
These HTML pages were produced in FrontPage 2003, with considerable hand-tweaking of CSS and some HTML post-processing by custom Perl scripts. (FrontPage still can’t produce curly quotation marks.) The photographs were taken on a Nikon N60 camera with Fuji Provia and Reala film, scanned on a Minolta DiMAGE Scan Dual III film scanner, and post-processed in Photoshop.