CDs can be extremely huge catches in the world of fishing for digital treasure!

Similar to A Collection of Materials to SENSE UP your Homepage, searching for "homepage" on online second hand stores once again led me to another promising looking CD from the 90s - one that I hoped to be full of thousands of web images.

Today we'll be taking a look at Internet Homepage Material Collection - Japanese Style.

A scan of the CD for Internet Homepage Material Collection - Japanese Style

I thought that A Collection of Materials to SENSE UP your Homepage was pretty Japanese themed, with a lot of the images being focused around the different holidays and seasons in Japan, but this CD was apparently going to go all out.

Let's have a look what we can find!

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Using the CD

Launching the CD takes us to a local webpage made to help us browse through all the images.


The categories are displayed on wooden menu boards that you can commonly see in Japanese restaurants or izakaya, each one having the handwritten name of a category on the CD as opposed to food and drinks. Neat!

The category titles are similar to what we've seen before, with things like Cut (clipart like images), Icons and Backgrounds.


There are even some sample webpages put together to show you what you can do with the various files on the CD - some of them are very cute!

A sample webpage for a school class, with my browser automatically mistranslating a line about school graduation to "1 month left until demolition".

A sample webpage for two girls, featuring a cute dog gif.

A sample webpage for Haniwa fans, with a webring, dictionary, history page and email link for any and all admirers of Haniwa figures.

A sample webpage for the "Kobayashi Detective Agency" - a reference to the popular series Detective Conan?

And for a FilesFound! first, there were some music tracks on here as well:

Track 10 - Hometown

Track 31 - Warm Sunlight

Track 33 - Happy Ending

But, as I was going through the browser pages, it felt like there wasn't all that much on here… Was this just a fairly small collection?

The Animation category was particularly sparse, with it only featuring a handful of gifs:


But then the Animation page had me realize that the dog gif featured on one of the website examples from earlier wasn't listed... I decided to look through the files on the CD myself rather than with the custom browser.

…Which was a good idea, because there was so much more!





And these are only small screenshots of the contents of various folders! Internet Homepage Material Collection - Japanese Style clocks in with over 12,500 files! That's our highest yet! (although, a large part of this is to do with there being multiple file type versions of each image, for unique images it must be a decent amount lower).

Let's look at a handful of my favorites from each category! As usual, if you'd like to look through the entire collection yourself, my archive.org upload of the CD will be at the bottom of this article.

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Animations

I'm not sure why, but I get such a sense of fulfilment with finding cute little animated images like these. It's so nice! Like a magpie with shiny objects, I just like to see them…

It's cute to see the kitsune and tanuki pairing, and you can probably tell I have a bias for little animal images by now. I love to see a little pixel chicken lay an egg! I love to see a fish flop around!








We also have some animated line dividers here. I really like the ones where it's lots of little pixel people in a row, it activates some part of my gamer brain... Looking at the jump rope one is all the fun of playing a game, but with looking at an image!

You can mentally reverse and un-reverse the perceived direction of the dragonfly one too, since it's only a few frames. A fun bonus!

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Cut

Look how pretty the little landscape images are…! As well as animals, we also have my other favorite type of image to find - little foods.

Santa has appeared on both the homepage image collection CDs we've looked at so far, so that's some kind of streak we have going.

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Icons

So wonderful to see! You might want to zoom in on some of these since they're so small. You can go ahead and add "tiny electronics" to the list of things I'm most likely to feature from an image pack too. I feel like a lot of these would make good custom emoji…

I particularly like the tiny haniwa statues!

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Index

These are intended for adding links to other pages of your website onto, but as early 3D renders they're just fun to see. Imagine a modern website using any of these! Our modern online culture has become so lost…

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Lines

Lots and lots of really good line divider images here! I love how creative some of them are, like the arrows and the pencil. Fun to see a pair of chopsticks being used too, and so many animals…!

I'm glad all these images have survived this long for me to see them… And I'm glad to have a way to share them with all of you, too!


If you'd like to look through all of the content of Internet Homepage Material Collection - Japanese Style for yourself, you can download my archive.org upload here.