J-ENT

J-ENT is an abbreviation of "Japanese entertainment" (not to be confused with the website J!-ENT, which covers worldwide entertainment). It refers to popular forms of Japanese entertainment but more specifically a shortened term to encompass popular Japanese television dramas, variety shows and music shows from Japan. Also, to correlate popular Japanese music (J-Pop) with television shows and film. The term J-ENT was coined by entertainment journalist Dennis A. Amith on the BBS (Neo-Tokyo BBS) in 1993 and used on the J-POP Mailing List in 1995.
The term has been used freely to include import video gaming, anime and sports from Japan.
The History of J-ENT on the Web
Bonsai's J-pop Pages
Japanese entertainment (in English) was started back in the early '90s. The first website on the internet dedicated to Japanese music and Japanese entertainment was created by Byron Kidd of Australia who created the Bonsai's J-pop Pages website.
When asked about the creation of Bonsai's J-pop Pages, Byron Kidd said, "The JPOP Pages came to life in 1993 not for J-Pop, but as a project to help me to learn html. The web was just starting out, maybe fewer than 1000 sites. Personal homepages were unheard of. Anyway to make a homepage I needed a topic and I chose Japanese stuff in general. As the web grew keeping track of all things Japanese was impossible, I looked at the stats my J-pop pages were the most popular ones I had so I scrapped the rest and made it a JPOP only site. As people came online with their own sites they started mailing asking if they could put their link on my pages. They knew my site and knew if they had a link there they would get noticed, get visitors. In those days if you were online and you liked JPOP you knew Bonsai's JPOP Pages was the place to go but once the web exploded JPOP sites sprang up everywhere."
Byron Kidd who ran Bonsai's J-pop as a student in Australia to his adult career life closed the Website back in 2000.
The drama mailing list
In the early 90s, a large group of fans of Japanese television dramas (aka Dorama) watched Japanese dramas on their local international channel that featured the dramas subtitled in English or rented from a Japanese video rental store. As more and more people became excited about Japanese dramas, John Leo created the first mailing list which brought people around the world to discuss Japanese dramas. The drama mailing list was passed on to Rick Frankum in 1997 but with more and more country and language-specific mailing lists and message boards flourishing on the internet, the dorama mailing list closed down in 2000.
===J!-ENT===
In June 1993, Dennis A. Amith ran a BBS on Wildcat titled Neo-Tokyo 2099. The BBS was dedicated to anime and Japanese entertainment with a large Japanese entertainment area on the BBS called J!-ENT. Featured on anime publications and not able to handle the phone lines for user access, Amith created the J!-ENT website in 1996 to coincide with the popularity of Japanese dramas, variety shows and music shows.
J!-ENT has now become a Japanese and Asian entertainment and pop culture website that features news and information, interviews and articles with Japanese and Asian entertainers (in English) and remains one of the longest running, volunteer supported Japanese entertainment (in English) website on the Internet. Also, working with Japanese record labels, TV, film and radio companies to promote latest projects and working with event coordinators to bring and promote Japanese artists coming to the United States and Europe.
In Nov. 2008, the website J!-ENT has changed to incorporate worldwide entertainment and pop culture.
T's Kawaii J-pop Pages
Ryosei Takeda created T's Kawaii J-pop Pages back in the mid-'90s and was one of the intiial promoters of ongoing fads with Japanese fashion and pop culture in English on his website. Featuring the latest in pop culture on his website, Takeda went on hiatus to restructure his website at jpop.com - a portal to Japanese pop culture.
Eric's Tokyo World (AKA KidTokyo.com)
Eric Trammell, based in Florida, created this site in 1995 as part of the first-wave of English language websites which focused on Japanese pop culture. Its focus was broad, and included topics such as Japanese fashion, architecture, music, art, and more. He deliberately excluded anime from the content, since there were already a large amount of anime websites on the web. The site was not updated very often, but nonetheless attracted a large number of viewers due to the colorful graphics, descriptive text, and photos of Japanese musicians. Japanese pop and rock was downloadable on the music page in a RealMedia format, and eventually MP3.
The website underwent several interface changes over the years. Eric Trammell states "At the time, I was a fledgling graphic designer, so I used the site as a playground to test out everything I was learning. While many Jpop sites at the time were quite minimalistic and more content-based, I wanted the style of my site to reflect the intense style of Tokyo".
The final iteration of Eric's site was created in 2000, when the site was integrated into a content management system, and the interface was redesigned to appear more professional and futuristic. The topics of the site remained the same, featuring sections for music, style, fashion, architecture, and art. In the next couple of years, the site would eventually be taken down due to a lack of time on Eric's part.
Popular J-ENT shows on Television
Because J-ENT is about trendy Japanese entertainment, the following television shows tend to feature popular actors and actresses or Japanese music stars on the following shows currently airing in Japan].
* SMAP×SMAP (Fuji TV)
* Gakkou e Ikou (TBS)
* TETSUWAN DASH (NTV)
* (Fuji TV)
* Sanma no Sanma (Fuji TV)
* MUSIC STATION (TV Asahi)
* (Fuji TV)
* UTABAN (TBS)
* Count Down TV (TBS)
* (NTV)
* Music Fair 21 (FUJI TV)
* Channel A (syndicated)
Japanese Television Networks
* Fuji TV
* TBS
* NTV
* TV Asahi
* NHK
* TV Tokyo
* Kansai TV
* GyaO
* Fuji- TV - English subsidiary
* KIKU-TV - Hawaii
* Video Research - Japan source for television ratings
Japanese Music Labels
* Avex Entertainment, Inc.
* Sony Music Entertainment Japan
* EMI Music Japan
* Toy's Factory
* Warner Music Japan
* Pony Canyon
* Giza Studio
* For Life Music Entertainment, Inc.
* Victor Entertainment
* Dreamusic
* TAISUKE
* PS Company
* Sounday
* ORICON - Daily and weekly sales charts for Japanese music albums, CD singles, DVDs and more.

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