Mujitsu and Tairaku's Shakuhachi BBQ

I joined this forum nearly two years ago. Even back then this was a fairly busy forum with a handful of people taking part in every conversation. I just checked my profile and noticed that I was the user number 290. Technically there weren't that many people here talking before me as a handful of those early numbers were assigned to various people, often professionals, who never really posted here. Still, we can safely assume that there were about 250 people here before me who - more or less actively - took part in conversations on all sorts of topics.

I just happened to check and noticed that the most recent user at the time I'm writing this has the number 855. This means that over the last two year the population here has grown a lot. As most professionals had signed up early on, it seems likely that nearly all of the new members are beginners or at least not quite yet professionals. Most people who sign up here are not japanese which means that there is a fairly decent number of people outside of Japan who have found this wonderful form of art. At this pace it seems likely that we'll hit 1000 registered users soon enough. Not bad for an obscure hobby, especially given that often people seem to start this later in their lives and thus don't necessarily frequent Internet forums.

I made this post because I'm quite surprised how much this place has grown. Although we now have much more people talking and thus quite a few topics going on, the forum is still a very friendly place with interesting conversations happening every day. One of my favourite sayings is that you can often evaluate something based on the people who end up doing it. Shakuhachi community has always been one of the best places to be in. It never ceases to amaze me that you can end up talking to some of the best known professionals in the world and they actually take the time to explain things to you. Try doing that on a guitar forum. The people joining us in here have also been great and have brought up many interesting debates. It is interesting to see so many different people with very different backgrounds coming together to talk about something that they all love.

Hopefully we'll see even more new players joining the forum in future. My only regret is that I didn't join sooner - especially since I might have ended up with a more interesting user number than 290. Then again, I just noticed that I'm fifth on the list based on post count and all the people above me actually joined well before I did. That should count for something, especially since I seem to actually be ahead of Ken who actually runs this place. I'm not sure if that means that I've made a difference or that I should shut up for once.

I've gotten to know some of you better over e-mail but unfortunately I have yet to meet a single person on this forum. I'm hoping to one day get to meet all of those people who have helped me out more than I can say over these last few years. Thanks to all of you who got me addicted to this in first place. It is hard to say how things would have turned out for me if this forum didn't exist back then.