I am a french engineer who felt in love with Kutani ceramics when living in Japan early 1990's. I was working on a book on Kutani when I decided to take the opportunity of internet to share my knowledge with other lovers of Japanese ceramics. I then simply put online most of the data I had gathered from my research.

The site started in July 1996 at compuserve.com. In August 1998 I moved the site at gbouvier.com and is still hosted by the same provider.

Copies of the old site are now online and show evolution of the technology!!

In March 2003 as I was receiving so many mails asking for enquiries on Kutani, I opened a Yahoo's group forum on Kutani ceramic which was quite successful. The site was growing rapidly especially the virtual museum and it was getting too difficult to update. The site had around 1000 pages! I decided to change from static HTML pages to dynamic. I developed with the help of one of my friend a comprehensive database system. It took us one year and in July 2004 the first version of the database was uploaded.

However the Yahoo forum had limitations and in February 2005 I closed the forum and started to cooperate with Gotheborg.com which is the biggest site for information on Chinese and generally Asian ceramics. I became moderator at Gotheborg and took care of the Kutani section.

In October 2005 I started to control access to the database and required a membership.

Years after years the site has quite grown-up to the present situation where it is now the biggest internet resources on Kutani information and enjoy more than 1000 unique visitors per month.

John Wocher who is one of my old Kutani collector friends cooperate with me as a moderator on Gotheborg and also on the gbouvier.com Shopping, Opinion and E-mail notification.

For those interested by the technical side, the site is developed in Paris on Linux virtual machines hosting an Apache server, PHP and Mysql database. HTML/php/Java side is managed with Dreamweaver MX. Member registration is done using Needsecure software. Photos are arranged with Adobe Photoshop Element 2, Database synchronization is performed by Webyog soft.

The production site is hosted in California by a well known US provider.