Orientation! (Part 2)

Most of the Orientation was actually pretty straightforward and rather boring. If anyone has ever listened to a second language for a long time, perhaps they know what it's like, but I find it difficult to keep my concentration for too long. When someone is talking at me in Japanese for hours, it eventually just starts to drone into something like background noise. Maybe I need more coffee or something.

So admittedly, I spaced in and out. But I had my handouts and pamphlets with everything they were saying in written form so I don't think it was such a big deal. Eventually they brought out the teachers for the manga department - about 5 of them.

How can I describe them except to say, they were not really what I expected. Two of them were overweight middle aged men in suits who looked more like salarymen than manga-ka. They seemed to be the ones in charge of the department. One was a skinny guy wearing a vest and one of those NYC cab driver hats. You know the ones I mean? They kind of look like a beret, but they have a brim, and the hat part kinda falls over the brim. Anyway, he looked pretty goofy. The other two were kind of regular Japanese men in their late 40s or 50s wearing more casual clothing.

Except for Mr. Beret, who looked like a goofball, I didn't really know what to think of them.

After their introductions, which were just simple, "I'm so-and-so and I've been working here X years..." blah blah blah, they started to divide us into classes. The way it worked was a teacher would come up and call a list of students and all those would be in his class.

So, first up, Mr. Beret. He starts listing. After about 15 names are called, he stumbles for a moment. And then sort of, pauses another second.

Yep, you guessed it. He calls my name. (Though why it took him so long I sort of wonder. It's written in Japanese after all).

He calls a bunch of others and then we all head out to what will be our classroom for the year (except on Thursdays). As fate would have it, the chinpira is in in my class! Sweet, I thought, maybe this year will not only be packed full of study, but also have some fun and a chance to make friends with cool Japanese people!

We get into the classroom and Mr. Beret introduces himself again and dives right into another information session complete with handouts. At this point, I'm really exhausted. I just can not wrap my brain around Japanese anymore, and I really space out pretty hard- when the last thing I could possibly want is thrust in front of me.

A school survey. All in Japanese. Four pages long. Questions like, "Why did you choose this school?" "What manga do you like and why?" "Who is your favorite manga-ka and why?" "Did you visit the school before coming here?" "Do you have any medical conditions?" "Do you have requests for the school" etc. etc.

Man, I was struggling. Everybody was busy writing away and I'm struggling to just read through all the questions, let alone begin answering them. After about 10 minutes, I just gave up. I waited until the teacher started collecting them and then I went up to him - as low key as possible - and asked if I could take it home to work on since I was having trouble with the kanji.

"まー、それはしょうがないね。”

Basically, "I guess that can't be helped." Phew. At least he was a forgiving goofball.

But, after this huge mass of Japanese and the trouble I had getting through just a school survey, I went home wondering - am I going to be Okay?

Well, classes won't start until the next week, so I suppose I have some time to prepare myself. Nothing to do, but try my best. I'm a man with a dream, and I'll see it through to the end!

Is what I told myself, but to be honest, I was plenty nervous!

Orientation!

In my experience, (which is a vast and all-encompassing 24 years) orientations have always fallen into two categories. The business orientation and the summer camp orientation.

In the business orientation, everyone is professional, organized and appropriately nervous. There is either a long table which everyone sits around, or rows of chairs facing the front of the room. 9 times out of 10 you can count on some sort of projector or video set up. The orientations are usually long and boring affairs, and you are expected to take careful notes (which I rarely do) so as to remember all the vital information imparted in however many hours you are expected to listen.

The summer camp orientation, on the other hand, is a light-hearted affair, often held outdoors, or at the very least, somewhere the outdoors is easily viewable. People are split into smaller groups and encouraged to play teamwork building games, and activities focused on familiarizing ourselves with each other in a relaxed atmosphere.

I was wondering for a few weeks which type the Tokyo Animator Institute would have. On the one hand, it's a manga school, and like the college I went to, might have tended towards the summer camp orientation. On the other hand, I thought to myself, this is Japan. And Japan is serious business. Which would it be?

Either way, heading towards that first orientation, besides my idle musings over the type of orientation to be held, I had two big thoughts in my mind:

1) Exactly how OTAKU would everybody be?

2) How many other foreigners would there be?

I soon found out the answers. Very and None.

As I sat down in the lecture room, pointed towards the closest vacant seat to the front, (I had arrived a little early) I quickly scouted out my soon to be classmates - or at least - schoolmates. Which ones are in the Manga school? One student caught my eye. He had bright red hair, wore reasonably fashionable clothes and seemed slightly /chinpira/-esque.

For those who don't know, /chinpira/ [CHEEN-peerah] is that Japanese word for a young gangster, or any of those tough thug kids that are always the strongest most bad-ass ones in the high-school. Nowadays they are easily picked out by their long flowing mullets. Do a google search and I'm sure you'll come across some amusing photos.

I also saw my share of who you would figure to be the regular Otaku- some overweight, some skinny, most extremely shy. Very few people in the growing crowd were speaking to one another, and I definitely got the sense that this wasn't going to be an A+ social scene. Still, I myself was too shy to start up conversations with anyone, and not having complete confidence in my Japanese, I figured the longer I kept my mouth shut, the longer everybody might assume I spoke and understood Japanese perfectly.

After a lot of shuffling, people coming, and extended silences, things finally seemed to be getting under way. Papers were passed out. And a teacher took the floor. The long, boring, but definitely essential never-ending slue of speeches was about to begin.

Character Page #1

Well here is the first character design page. I'm not going to reveal anything about him, but he will be one of the main characters in the story. Some of the pencil parts might be a little light, but you get the general idea. Also the gradation didn't come out as well when I reduce the file size for the web in photoshop. I'll have to work on that in the future.

Quick Sketch and Tablet Practice

So I'm getting back into the swing of using a tablet. I thought I would just kind of doodle out a random girl and try to remember how to use all the functions on Manga Studio, so here is how it came out.

I think it's not terrible personally.

I'm an English Teach- No wait, I'm not

Despite what you may have read or heard about heading over seas to live in Japan, not EVERYONE who does it is an English teacher. OK, given, most of us are. And yes, when I first came I was too. What can I say, it's the easiest way to get into this country.

But I decided, somewhere between the "kancho's" and the gross junior high lunches that maybe teaching wasn't where its at. I've decided to embark upon a different path, a path that some have boldly claimed (and half ridiculed) to be the "Weeaboo Dream."

For those of you who don't know what a Weeaboo is, it's someone who likes Japanese culture; is into all the crazy, colorful and outrageous things this small island exports to the rest of the world. Me? I live near Akihabara and in April of last year I started attending a specialist school for Manga. So I guess, yeah, I probably qualify as a Weeaboo. As they say in Japanese, let's get along well.

The path to achieving the Weeaboo Dream wasn't easy. There were months of intense Japanese study, visiting schools, speaking with teachers (or at least attempting to) and trying my darnedest to figure out which school would be right for me, and which school would actually accept me! Yes, it's true that I received emails from a few schools after I visited saying (albeit politely) that they were not accepting foreigners at this time (or ever?). Most schools were willing to accept me, given I passed the JLPT 2, a super high level Japanese Language exam essentially proclaiming me fluent. That's where the grueling hours of study came in. If anybody ever tells you Japanese is easy, they are either a genius, or have no idea what they are talking about. Or maybe they are Korean.

Of course, when test time came around, I was nervous. I had studied my heart out, but was it enough? Prior to the 6 months of intense study before the JLPT in December of '08, I had almost no classroom Japanese. Maybe half a years worth. And this is the kind of test that native Japanese speakers don't breeze through. The odds were against me. And you know what? I failed! I failed by about 5%. Oh so close! My dreams dashed! My hopes crushed! Would I have to be an English Teacher forever? Should I go home? What to do!?

Tokyo Animator Institute, a famous school located near Tokyo Dome was willing to take me without having passed the test. I had sent them an application (which consisted of only drawing and no essay to my great relief) and I was accepted. And thus began my journey through the grand unknown, the mysterious and strange place called, Manga School!

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Quick note: When I'm not blogging about what it's like to be a foreigner in a Japanese Manga school, I'll be posting up some character sketches and concept work I'm doing for the upcoming web-comic. Of course, once I've settled everything and start drawing the actual pages I will be posting those.