As long as I can remember, Pink Tentacle has been one of my favorite Japan blogs out there, and is one of the few that I can recommend both to people who know a ton about Japan, and to people who’ve never even heard of sushi.

It sounds cheesy to describe the feel of a website, but there’s no better way to describe what Pink Tentacle is all about. Take some science fiction, mix it with a retro feel and a good heaping of art and design, and you basically have what Pink Tentacle is all about.

The site dives deep into whatever subject it takes on, finding obscure materials from decades ago. Pink Tentacle is the only place I know of where you can find an illustrated anatomy of Godzilla enemies, post-apocalyptic landscape illustrations of Tokyo, and vintage PSA posters from the Tokyo subway.

After the horrific 3/11 earthquake and tsunami, Pink Tentacle understandably began shifting its content more and more about the aftermath of the disaster. Instead of the sort of coverage of 3/11 that was typical from major media outlets, Pink Tentacle covered 3/11 in a very Pink Tentacle-y way, with art and mythical history about the disaster.

Then, on April 19, 2011, Pink Tentacle went dark. After regularly updating for five years, the site, and all associated social media accounts just stopped updating.

As far as I can tell, nobody knows what happened. Why did Pink Tentacle stop updating? There are plenty of theories: something terrible happened to the author because of 3/11; the author took up another cause in the wake of 3/11; the person behind Pink Tentacle just lost interest.

But nobody knows for sure. We’re all equally clueless.

I’ve tried to get in touch with whomever is behind Pink Tentacle, but haven’t had any luck. I’ve tried emailing Pink Tentacle to no response, and it’s been hard to find any other ways of communication. The site’s whois information is obfuscated, meaning that it’s extremely difficult to find any identifying information about who registered the site.

I miss Pink Tentacle a lot, but I take some comfort in knowing that I’m not the only one who misses Pink Tentacle, as evidenced by the numerous posts online begging for it to come back, and by the nearly 200 comments left on the last post on the site.

Pink Tentacle, where are you?

It’s heartwarming to see commenters on Pink Tentacle continue to leave messages for Pink Tentacle years after it went dark. On holidays, people wish Pink Tentacle a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

The domain pinktentacle.com expires at the end of this year, on December 31^st. It’ll be interesting to see whether the website expires and gets snatched up by a domain squatter, or if somebody, somewhere decides to renew the domain and let us all wonder for a while longer.