Originally, Definitely Not Tokyo was going to just be yet another little fansite, a place to declare love for CLAMP’s wonderful creation, but all that changed after the first few years.
Once there were a number of wonderful Magic Knight Rayearth websites just brimming with information. One of the most well-known, quintessential Rayearth links on any page was Primera’s Magic Knight Rayearth Page. Any information you could ever want, any image you wanted to find, was all to be found on this website. Unfortunately, a few years ago, Primera’s site was lost in the bowels of the internet, never to be resurrected.
There was another site. This one wasn’t quite as thorough in some areas but was still packed full of information. This was a site called Cephiro. Unfortunately, it too has seen the passing of time quite poorly. It is stuck in a state of perpetual construction that was never completed when it began in 1999. For a time, you had to bypass the welcome page and move straight to the menu, but all of the information was still there. Unfortunately, now even Cephiro has passed into the lost realm.
In the shadow of these wonderful sites, Definitely Not Tokyo is trying its hardest to become a source of information for new Rayearth fans. Every bit of data we can find is being catalogued and saved. Not nearly as much as should have been before Cephiro disappeared.
What’s With The Name?
The name Definitely Not Tokyo is pretty straightforward. It comes from Hikaru’s statement on the cliff in the first episode: “It’s Definitely Not Tokyo”. This is undoubtedly a perfect vague description of a magical world if there ever was one, and thus became the perfect name for a random little webpage, that was likely to have been forgotten.
Where Does It Live?
Definitely Not Tokyo is part of Psynos.net, a small fandom webspace. Psynos is hosted by Surpass Hosting and has been since its creation in 2005.
Before that, Definitely Not Tokyo was hosted on Geocities, and that version is now quite dead, sadly.
When Was It Created?
The site was originally created sometime around 2002 or 2003, but one can’t be sure. There are no updates from that point in time. The oldest ones only go back to 2005, around the time the site was rebuilt on Psynos.Net
How Is It Managed?
The Definitely Not Tokyo of today is managed using WordPress as its primary content management system. This means that the site runs much more smoothly than it ever did when the Administrator coded it.
Before that, each page was hand-coded in crude HTML by the Admin, who had a very basic knowledge of how such things worked. Most of the layouts were created as iFrames simply to make coding layouts easier.
The forum, Cephiro, is run using SMF, and has been since it was started. From time to time the admin considers moving it, but hasn’t yet.
Who Runs It?
Definitely Not Tokyo is run by Milieva, a strange woman with an affinity for cats and tea. She is joined in her project by a small handful of contributors. You can find out more about them on the contributor page.