Iwa ni Hana

A few people have emailed me to see if I am doing okay, as I have not updated for a while. There is actually a reason for this.

In the English law of tort, there was the leading case of R. v Ireland in which the defendant made a large number of silent phone calls to his victims. I think I have been experiencing the cyber equivalent of that in the past few months.

I use Google Analytics to track my site traffic. Since the beginning of 2010, someone from Del Mar (which is apparently an American town with a population of around 4000 people) have been using the search term “what happened to iwa ni hana” to reach my blog. This was repeated for about 40-50 times, sometimes more than once a day. I found it annoying, but let it be for the time being.

And then a few weeks ago it got scarier. The same person from Del Mar began to use the search term “iwanihana suicide” to reach this blog. This has been repeated for over 10 times so far. I wish that person would stop as it is seriously disturbing.

That was also when I began to worry about personal safety. Iwa ni Hana is only a blog about personal hobbies – manga, anime, books, films, languages etc. I never get involved in any kind of flame wars with anyone. It is not even like I have some extreme message in politics or religion to deserve this sort of fanatic attention. And although I still have a ton of stuff to write about, I had to stop and think about what to do with this blog. To be honest, I cannot say I have come up with any good answer. I can only say that I no longer feel comfortable to blog in English, so I will stop that for a quite a long while. In the meantime, I will continue to blog in some other language sphere and see what happens.

I apologize if this is disappointing news to anyone. Please understand that I receive this sort of mental harassment every day. In the mean time, I always welcome emails.