I’m going to Yakushima and it’s all thanks to my tags.
Tags, as most know by now, are what you add to a post – any kind of post like a photo upload, blog post, or even comment – to help people find your post when they search the Internet for information or photos about something. Let’s say you upload a photo of Tsurugidake in the Kita Alps. You could add tags like, “Tsurugidake,” “MountTsurugi,” “Kita Alps,” “Japan Alps,” “Japanese mountains,” “Japanese nature,” “mountains,” and so on. When someone searches for any of those topics, your photo will come up in the search somewhere, hopefully on the first page.
I have another blog here on WordPress where I post about my published work, interviews, newspaper appearances, etc. I started it because I thought that when my name is in print somewhere, Japanese people can’t find much about me on the Internet except in English. Since the purpose of the blog is to provide more information about me, I use tags using my name in Katakana, tags about a foreigner in Japan who climbs mountains or makes photographs, and tags related to the posted topic. As WordPress comes with a nice stats feature that allows you to see how many hits and visits you get per day, what those people saw on your blog, and what they were searching for, I always like to look at those stats during the week or two after my work has appeared in some publication. It’s interesting to see if the number of hits has increased during that post-published period and if people are using my name in their searches. If they are, then it means they are exactly taking interest in me, be it as a photographer, a climber, a foreigner or whatever.
I also like to see what people are searching for on all my WordPress blogs so I can see if they are finding what they are looking for when they come to my blogs. Because I often post with the purpose of sharing information (see my 100 Famous Mountains of Canada blog for an example), I want to be sure that what I post about is being found by those who search for that topic. Are the search engines just bringing people to the home page or is the actual post of the sought topic coming up? It also lets me know if I have to add tags to specific posts to help seekers of that topic actually arrive at the post about that topic. Don’t you hate it when you search for a topic and click on a hit only to find yourself scrolling and scrolling through someone’s blog wondering how deeply buried the relevant post is?
Back to my Japanese WordPress blog, as I was recently published in Nippon Kamera magazine, I wanted to check if people were searching for my name (if they were then that means they noticed my photographs). Looking back over the last couple of weeks, I saw people searched not only for my name in Katakana and alphabet, but also for topics like “Foreign photographers living in Japan,” “Photos of foreigner families,” “Nihon Alps Foreigners,” and a bunch of others (all in Japanese of course). I actually prepared a list for a post on this topic, but the other day my 2-year-old daughter brought my list to me and asked what it was and I told her to put it back on the desk and now I can’t find it. Anyway, one search item caught my interest: “Japanese mountains foreign climbers”. I wondered, as I often do when I see some of the search topics, who is doing the searching and for what purpose are they searching. Two days later, I found out about that one.
During a break at work, I checked my email and saw a message from a company called KAFKA. They are a production company for TV programs, and the sender informed me that they produce an English program for NHK called Journeys in Japan. Each program features a travel destination in Japan with a foreigner visiting and experiencing the local delights – scenery, food, warm hospitality. KAFKA was looking for someone who could climb Miyanouradake on Yakushima and take photos of Yakushima for one of their upcoming shows. Could I do it?
This was perhaps on of the most exciting messages I have ever received. After a further exchange of messages I found that they needed someone tough enough to climb the 1,935 metres (no problem) and someone who had not been to Yakushima before. There was some festival that I would have to attend, too. We agreed that I would come to their office in Shibuya on June 24th.
So, yesterday I went and met with the producer and the man who will be directing the shoot. The reasons why I was what they were looking for were not only that I am a photographer and climber who has never been to Yakushima but also that I have not yet been on TV in Japan before (other than a three-second clip of me talking with a Japanese friend during a show about homestay in Canada on a local cable station in Yokohama 14 years ago) seemed to be a plus and that I was very enthusiastic about going.
We discussed what I will have to do and what they expect. It seems very straight forward: I will just have to react naturally to my experiences. In the week prior to meeting them, I read a fair bit about Yakushima and they were rather impressed by my knowledge, but more importantly, that I was so eager. And why not be? Yakushima is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, a national park, and an ecological reserve, and Miyanouradake is a Hyakumeizan. There are the oldest and biggest cedars in Japan and some fantastic granite boulders in the sub-alpine area. The forest should be amazing as some areas have never been logged. In addition to all the wonderful nature, I may have a chance to see loggerhead sea turtle babies making their way to the sea after hatching. NHK is picking up the tab and paying a modest fee for my “reporter” services. This is really a kind of unexpected dream come true. The weather is most likely to be pretty wet but I don’t mind so much. I’m from the Pacific Coast of Canada and I’ve hiked a lot in Japan in the rain. I am used to being bedraggled.
So, there you go. Be very wily when choosing your tags for your posts. It could just get you an offer of a lifetime.
Tsubakuro's Blog 