About Akemi's Anime World

What AAW Does, and Why

Akemi's Anime World is a site dedicated to providing a variety of information about anime, with in-depth analytical reviews and Japanese cultural information being our main features. Our focus is on older and less well-known anime, but there's a little of everything here. AAW is intended to be a family-friendly site; we cover titles ranging from children's fare to adults-only, but our reviews are intended to help kids, adults, and parents alike make informed viewing and buying decisions.

AAW is not the biggest, best informed, or coolest anime site in the world, and doesn't pretend to be. I initially created the site as a labor of love and a hobby (we all know everybody loves voicing their opinion publicly, so why not). Although that is still fundamentally what AAW is, it has developed into what I hope is a useful and fun resource, and one that will be here for a long time to come (8 years and counting, as of this writing).

Our Short History

If you're really interested, AAW was born as an idea for a for-fun anime review site sometime around the beginning of the summer of 1998. I wrote some reviews and fiddled around with designs for the next several months. Things began to take on a more finished look toward the end of the year, and we went online under the animeworld.org domain sometime in November. A bit later, we ended up with the animeworld.com domain through some luck, and we went public (started submitting to search engines) at the end of December. The site as you see it now basically went live on January 1st, 1999, so that's our official birthday. Between then and late 2006, it was periodically updated, a couple of new reviewers joined, our reviews got much more detailed, new features were added, and the site went through a couple of relatively minor cosmetic overhauls.

As of this writing, in 2006, we're in the middle of a relatively extensive overhaul to improve the look of the site and the usefulness of the information presented, but the transition of the older pages is a slow process. The new site was supposed to go live at the beginning of 2006, but was stalled through most of the year due to a severe illness that, as of this writing, I have yet to recover from.

Who We Are

In case you're wondering, the person writing this is not Akemi. I am Marc Marshall (aka "Makosuke"), and pretty much anything not labeled otherwise around here is done by me. Unlike me, Akemi really is Japanese, and she is also my wife. The site's name was, of course, her idea (though she denies it now), and if you're wondering, her name is pronounced "Ah-keh-mee" ("mee" as in the English pronoun "me"). The "picture" here is of us (or, if you'd rather see a photo, here's a Japanese wedding picture). The other contributors are Arcane and Legion, the two other hardworking official reviewers, Loretta, our esteemed editor who joined the team in late 2005, and Tachihohe, our skilled artist and graphic designer (you can check out his sketchbook here). Kayote, a dedicated linkhunter and occasional reviewer from our early days also deserves a nod.

If you have more questions about the site, try the AAW Site FAQ--chances are we'll cover it there. If we don't, you can always write and ask. And lastly, I hope you see something on these pages that you find useful, fun, or at least amusing!

Privacy Policy

This is legal junk, but AAW's basic privacy policy is very simple: We don't collect much information from you, and anything you do decide to give us we never share with anybody else unless the government tells us we have to or something (hacking) totally out of our control happens. The rest is poorly-written legalese.

We require you to submit no information to access any section of this site except for posting in the forums, which also require no personally-identifying information other than an e-mail address. Any information that is collected will never be shared with a third party unless required to by law, and you may delete your information from our records at any time if you wish. The only e-mail addresses we collect are for account verification at the forums, or to receive occasional mailings about updates to the site; both may be removed from our system automatically using the appropriate systems, or manually, if you request such in writing. Users are free to post whatever they want in the forums, and it is not our responsibility if users choose to publicly post personally identifiable information under their own volition, nor do we have any control over how this information might be used by third parties.

As with every website on the internet, AAW does log all page accesses with a time and IP address requesting the information. This information is used for statistical analysis or addressing abuse only, and is never shared with third parties unless required to by law.

We make every effort to secure our information against hacking and abuse, but in the event information is stolen from AAW we cannot be held liable for what is done with it. We are also not responsible for any information collected by third party advertisers on this site; we make an effort to only use advertising that collects no unnecessary information and provides a useful service to our readers, but we cannot control what advertisers might do with their ad space without our knowledge, due to the policies they may put in place to prevent abuse of their ad code.