Perfect Dark Guide

Perfect Dark was first released by 会長 (Kaichou, Chairman) in 2006. It was clearly based on Share, and uses the same method of pasting in an encrypted node list to connect to the network. While Share required clusters and triggers, the built-in Perfect Dark search engine can find files straight away, so search is much simpler. The interface can be displayed in English or Chinese.

The Perfect Dark network apparently hit its peak size of 50 000 nodes in 2009, but has declined to a little over 6 000 nodes today. It is still one of the biggest Japan-based peer-to-peer networks along with Share and Winny, and probably uses more bandwidth than these two. The official client for Perfect Dark requires 40 GB of hard drive space to set up a unity file, and a minimum download speed of 100 KB/s which explains why it is the heavy users who gravitate to it. There is a cracked version though which eliminates these restrictions, and even the mainline client seems to work on slower connections.

You can download either the official client or the cracked version at:

P2P ファイル共有ソフトノード登録所

1.23 was released by 会長 in December 2015, and is the latest version subtitled 'Intolerance.' クラック済み translates as 'cracking carried out.'

You can run a speed test of your internet connection at Speedtest.net. When you start up Perfect Dark for the first time, it will take you to the Settings dialog box, and you can select your download speed from the dropdown menu. Copy the port number, and then in your webbrowser, open up your router settings, navigate to NAT, and open that port number TCP in and out. I don't think Perfect Dark supports uPnP, so you will probably have to do this manually for any firewalls you are running. If you are running Windows Firewall, make sure the ports are open there as well.

Next click on Information, and then 'Add ip address/port.' You then go to one of these sites, and copy the Node list to your clipboard, and then paste it into the 'Add ip address/port' dialog box where it says Encrypted text.

P2P ファイル共有ソフトノード登録所

Perfect Dark Evolution

PerfectDark-jp

Click on Add, and now Perfect Dark will try to connect to these nodes, and add their own nodes to its database. Close the dialog box, and at the top of Information it should say 'perfect dark is online.'

On the search tab, type a word or phrase into the blank box, and then click on Add, just below. Perfect Dark will begin searching the nodes to which you are connected, gradually spidering out gathering more and more search results over time. You can nest search terms within other search terms by first clicking on the head term, and then adding a new search term underneath. Click New if you want to set up a separate search header.

In the search window, 'Review' is the rating assigned to the downloaded file by users. According to Kaicho, 'count' increases the more times a file has been downloaded. 'Sign' is the username of the original uploader.

Most of the searching is done within PD itself, but there is one Russian index site:

PerfectDark.org

You right-click on a file, and select 'Copy information to clipboard' if you want to check the translation on Google Translate.

Select 'download' from the same menu to download. Click on the download tab to see your progress. In the official client, you may need to let Perfect Dark run for a while, so it can build up a unity of 2 GB's before any downloads will start. The size of your unity is listed under the 'information' tab.

To upload, just click on the Upload tab, then 'upload file,' and browse to the location of the file you want to upload. It will disappear from the Uploads window once it has been uploaded. I believe any files you upload are probably added to your unity.

Board(ボード) and gather(ギャザー) are bulletin boards that can be downloaded, and contributed to. Under the information tab, flow is where people post notes that soon disappear. There is a Perfect Dark thread at AnimeSuki Forums.

One Click Direct Download Sites

One click direct download sites are a fairly popular way of sharing files in Japan, just as they are in the west. There are one click hosts in Japan called アップローダー (uploaders, eg. Doraupload), but western hosts such as Mediafire are arguably more popular.

- The Download board on 5 Channel currently has a thread 海外アップローダー総合 which deals with overseas uploaders general topics.

- The western site 4shared is notable in that the interface can be displayed in Japanese, and it has a search engine that can locate the files its hosts.

- Akiba-Online is a forum with links to many Japanese adult videos and some anime and manga hosted mainly on Filejoker.

- Anime-sharing is a similar forum with a focus on hentai manga, but also links to related anime, games and magazines.

- Ulozto.net is a searchable Slovakian file host which hosts some Japanese pdf's, torrents and videos.

- Dl-zip.com is a blog with links to raw (i.e. untranslated) manga, Japanese novels and other books and magazines.

- Jpfiles is a blog with links to Japanese books, music, movies, tv shows, anime, magazines, etc.

- Chomikuj.pl is a searchable Polish file host.

- Book Share ZIP is a blog with links to Japanese books, magazines and manga.

- Blogjav.net is unsurprisingly a blog with links to JAV.

- JAV Library started out as a database with pictures of actresses and DVD covers, but members sometimes post DDL links in the comment space below an entry.

- Doramax264 is a blog with links to Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Thai and Filipino TV dramas. Project Restoration specializes in to old Japanese drama TV shows.

- Japan Share Blog has links to just about everything: books, games, manga, movies, music, software and TV shows, while Raw-zip is a blog linking to mainly manga and photobooks.

- Pdf-giant, Pdfmagazinesclub and Storemags are western blogs with links to some Japanese magazines.

Bittorrent

University of Buffalo student Bram Cohen released the first version of Bittorrent in 2001. Initially, Bittorrent had relatively little impact on the Japanese p2p scene, as first WinMX and then Winny and then Perfect Dark seemed to get the most use. Eventually though, western and Chinese developers released Japanese versions of their clients: Bittorrent, Bitcomet, qbittorrent, Deluge and Transmission. Qbittorrent has no ads, is lightweight, and is perhaps the best-regarded of the current crop of torrenting programs on the English web.

While programs like Perfect Dark try to provide anonymity, the IP address of a user is clearly visible in most torrent programs, so some users turn to anonymizing addons (e.g. i2p, Tor), clients (Tribler), proxies (Cybersyndrome), seedboxes (Seedr) or virtual private networks (Hide.me) in an effort to preserve their privacy.

The number of Japanese users on Bittorrent may be smaller than other networks, but by 2013, the bandwidth being used in Japan by torrent clients had apparently surpassed all other p2p networks.

I don't think there are any torrent trackers based in Japan, but there are quite a few trackers and index sites in the rest of the world that link to Japanese content.

- Nyaa is the largest Japanese tracker, and focuses on anime and music. It does have some manga and live action tv shows, often with an anime tie-in. Nyaa has an associated site for adult videos at Sukebei.

- Tokyo Toshokan　東京図書館 is a torrent index of adult videos, anime, games, hentai, manga, music and TV dramas. The torrents are often tracked on Nyaa or Sukebei or the other trackers listed here.

- Akiba Online is an English Language forum with a huge number of Japanese Adult Video downloads hosted on Filejoker, but it has a sizeable torrent section covering JAV, Idol and Hentai as well as more mainstream manga and anime.

- Rutracker is a tracker/forum completely in Russian, but it has a surprising amount of Japanese movies, books and CDs, often labelled in Japanese.

- Avistaz is a private tracker with Japanese, Chinese and Korean movie and TV drama torrents.

- Bt4g appears to be a Chinese torrent search engine compiled by scraping Distributed Hash Tables, and thus has torrents with Japanese content. BTDig, Solidtorrents and Bitsearch are western DHT torrent search engines. Torrentkitty is a Chinese/Singaporean torrent search engine with a Japanese interface. - Javbus, Onejav and Javjunkies are blogs where the webmaster posts torrents for Japanese adult videos. - The Download board on 2channel is one of the main forums for discussion of Japanese file sharing. At the moment, there are several Bittorrent related threads. The BTで拾えるエロ動画スレ thread deals with erotic videos that can be picked up on Bittorrent. The Nyaa thread is devoted to a discussion of torrents that can be found on the Nyaa tracker/index site. The BitTorrent総合スレ thread covers general Bittorrent matters. There are also now threads on Akiba Online and Javjunkies.

- Nipponsei Music Fresh from Japan is a torrent tracker/index of music, mainly anime soundtracks and J-pop.

- Jpopsuki is an invitation-only private torrent tracker for J-pop.

- Anime Sharing is a forum focused on links to direct downloads for hentai manga, but it also has a torrent section with hentai anime and games, and there is a smattering of music and magazines.

- Anirena is an English anime torrent tracker/database.

- D-Addicts was at one time a tracker for Japanese, Chinese and Korean dramas, but now it is just a forum where torrents are not allowed to be posted. it has some subtitles though, and lots of information about file sharing in Asia.