There’s no question that 2010 has been the biggest and best year on Gakuranman.com thus far, with over 200% growth in the average number of visits, several articles exploding with high traffic, a new haikyo niche gaining popularity and photoblog-style posts taking priority. Here’s the year’s highlights.

With over 70,000 views so far and by far the most popular post on the whole website was of course the tale of my expedition to the forbidden ghost island of Gunkanjima. The post still remains high-traffic and continues to capture the imaginations of people from many walks of life.

More recently, another secret haikyo location, the Royal House, also exploded with interest from Japanese websites. The discussion about the location continues on forums, as well as possible identities for the people who used to live there.

Anyone interested in pursuing the hobby themselves would do well to read through the haikyo safety article I’ve put together with the advice and experience of many veteran explorers.

Other posts that, rather less than surprisingly, drew large numbers of people included the Japanese Penis Festival and a short post on Sexy Japanese Buddhism. Both risqué posts, but not distasteful, in my opinion. It continues to reaffirm that sex (or at the very least suggestive keywords) do indeed sell.

2010 also saw me teaming up with Hikosaemon to make an educational video with a comedic twist about Arguing in Japanese. Hiko did an impressive job putting the final video together and it gained a lot of popularity from both English and Japanese-speaking audiences.

I also wrote a couple of articles for the Japan Times, one of which was about the issue of debating in Japanese and the other about SRS learning techniques.

Finally, the website received a big aesthetic overhaul throughout the year. You can read all about the evolution of the site’s design so far by reading this post.

If you’d like to run through an easy-to-browse list of all posts, just check out the archives page.

So here’s a big thanks to all the readers and people who leave comments. The growth and success wouldn’t have been possible without you. Here’s to another great year :).