Tokio Kikuchi
On 14-Jan-2012, Tokio Kikuchi passed away ( original Japanese) (English via Google translate). He was extremely influential in GNU Mailman's internationalization efforts in general, and Japanese support in particular. He contributed greatly to GNU Mailman, and also the Python and Apache communities. He is listed in the Mailman acknowledgement file as Tokio Kikuchi, Mailman's weatherman. Our gratitude, and thoughts are with him, his family, and acquaintances at this time.
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Comments
This is indeed sad news. When I first became involved with Mailman, Tokio was the primary maintainer of the 2.1 branch. He was very knowledgeable about Mailman and very helpful. In particular, he knew many idiosyncrasies of Japanese MUAs and the messages they produced and was very helpful in vetting changes that might affect them. More recently, Tokio was primarily involved with things other than Mailman, but he continued to make helpful contributions. I am sorry he is gone.
Tokio Kikuchi was instrumental in our early internationalization efforts. I remember testing out one of his early patches which enabled Japanese support in Mailman. At a Python conference years ago, I started the branch and was delighted to see the familiar Mailman admin pages come up in Japanese. Of course, I could not read it, but I happened to be sitting next to a native speaker who confirmed that it was indeed correct Japanese. That made me very happy, and I'm proud of his ongoing contributions to Mailman in general and internationalization in particular. He will be missed.