Case Study 00 — Where This Started
Evolving an aging blog into a living cultural publishing platform.
Land Of The Rising Son is the bilingual (English/Japanese) cultural publication and podcast we run ourselves. Web Asset Succession didn't start as an abstract idea — it came directly out of living through this migration.
Where it started
Land Of The Rising Son ran on WordPress for years. As articles, images, bilingual content, and podcast episodes accumulated, the archive kept getting more valuable — but updating it, managing plugins, working within theme constraints, and keeping the bilingual and audio sides in sync kept getting harder.
The choice we made
Rather than abandon the archive or keep patching around the same aging system, we built a new platform from the ground up, designed around how the publication actually works. That experience — respecting what already existed while moving it forward — is the direct origin of how we approach every migration now.
What we preserved
- Years of accumulated articles and essays, in both English and Japanese
- The full podcast episode archive
- Images and visual assets
- The Four-Character Compound Protocol — an original editorial concept
- Category structure and editorial identity
The modern foundation
We built a structured, bilingual content system on Next.js 15 (App Router) and React 19. Content lives in Postgres via Supabase, images are stored on Cloudflare R2, and the site deploys through Vercel. Moving off a generic WordPress theme meant the frontend could finally be shaped around this specific site's identity instead of a template's constraints.
四字熟語
A frontend that carries identity
The homepage hero features an original animation where Four-Character Compounds — phrases like 公平無私 ("fairness and selflessness") and 最適行動 ("optimal action") — rise and fade over a hand-drawn landscape. This isn't decoration; it treats language itself as part of the interface, expressing this specific publication's editorial philosophy. It's a concrete example of what a generic theme simply can't do.
An admin panel built around the actual workflow
Instead of a generic WordPress dashboard, we built a custom admin panel matched to how this publication is actually run — managing English and Japanese articles side by side, hero artwork, podcast episodes, and publishing status, with nothing extra to work around.
About the legacy WordPress install
Whether the old WordPress environment is still reachable is something we're still verifying. Until that's confirmed, we're not publishing a visual before/after comparison — we're describing the migration in writing instead. We won't present a comparison that doesn't genuinely exist.
The real scale of it
Only verified numbers, no rounding up.
~795
Articles migrated
~2,800
Images migrated
362
Podcast episodes
Your site likely has the same kind of value sitting in it.
Just send the URL — we'll look at what's there now and what migration could look like.