The information available on Japanese animation before 1950, at least in English, is limited at best and conflicting at worst. The actual animated films themselves as well as records of who created what and when has mostly been destroyed. This is due to 1923’s Great Kanto Earthquake and later the American invasion of the islands. Aside from that, animation was treated as disposable entertainment, as was most animation in the rest of the world at that time. Thus, little has survived.

Thankfully, most of the animated work that remains has been preserved digitally and is available online! It should be mentioned that most of the silent animation presented in this article is “incomplete” in that it lacks benshi narration. When film began to spread throughout Japan, rather than accepting it as an evolution of photography as the west did, it was viewed as an extension of theater. Since kabuki, noh, and bunraku theater traditions all had narrators, naturally film needed one as well. Enter the benshi, a narrator who not only read the aloud the onscreen intertitles, but also described the film’s events in real time and gave voice to each and every character. Two of the films embedded in this article benefit from recorded benshi narration. The rest are “incomplete”.

While I will be sprinkling bits of information I’ve uncovered regarding the roots of anime, make sure to give special attention to the cartoons themselves. What awaits you is a moving history of initially simplistic paper cut-outs giving way to experimental art, funny animal cartoons, sing along-songs, chalk animation, traditional folktales, and full-length feature films. And this is all before Tezuka. Welcome to an often overlooked world. Enjoy yourself.

The Three Fathers (1907-1923)

Film first hit Japan in 1896 and had flourished into burgeoning culture by the 1910s, complete with film criticism. Along with the initial wave of films from the west came Western animation. It was only a matter of time before Japan, with its rich visual culture, began experimenting with its own animated creations.

The earliest example (speculated to be the oldest surviving anime) is Katsudo Shashin (Moving Picture, 1907?-1918?).

The boy is writing the kanji for katsudo shashin which translates to “moving picture” in English. It seems that in these early years, both Japan and the west were amused enough with the novelty of an image in motion.

In the early 1900s, animators experimented with inexpensive ways to bring their visions to life. Katsudo Shashin and many others were drawn directly onto the strips of film from which they were projected, making these animations one of a kind. This and other early animation techniques were pioneered by Oten Shimokawa, a political cartoonist for Tokyo Puck magazine. His first animated work, Imokawa Mukuzo Genkanban no Maki (The Story of the Concierge Mukuzo Imokawa, 1917) was long believed to be the first animated short made in Japan, though it is likely still the first short ever screened for a wide audience.

After creating only five shorts, chronic health problems forced Shimokawa into early retirement. His contribution, however, gives him the honor as one of the three fathers of early anime.

The second of the three fathers is Junichi Kouichi, who holds the honor of the oldest confirmed anime in existence (Katsudo Shashin could have been made as early as 1907, but there is no real proof as to its age). Namakura Gatana (Dull Sword, 1917) is a two minute short about a samurai attempting to test his newly purchased katana on innocent townspeople and failing miserably.

This film was thought to be lost until a copy was found in an Osaka antique shop in 2008. Kouichi animated this short using paper cut-outs laid out on a table which he moved and changed to create the characters’ movements. This was a technique that would later be taken to a level of artistic excellence by the Japanese animation directors of the 1930s.

Junichi Kouichi began creating political propaganda in 1924 and retired from animation in 1930.

The third father of this generation had arguably the most impact on the generation that followed him, mostly because he had the largest body of work and many animators of the 1930s were his students. Seitarou Kitayama created shorts focusing on Japanese folktales like Sarukani Gassen (Monkey-Crab Battle), Urashima Taro, and Momotarou. Aside from creating anime’s first commercials and documentary, Kitayama stood apart from his contemporaries as the only animator to found his own studio.

Kitayama Eiga Seisakujo opened in 1921 and gave jobs to a slew of talented individuals including Sanae Yamamoto. Sadly after only two years, most of Kitayama’s studio was destroyed in the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. He left Tokyo for a fresh start in Osaka the next year, but eventually abandoned animation completely for a career shooting newsreels.

Experimental Artists (1923-1939)

With the destruction of Kitayama’s studio, his team of animators struck out on their own to seek prosperity in personal ventures. But success did not come easily. Throughout the 20s, animation directors faced stiff foreign competition from larger, richer, and more impressive studios overseas. The imported cartoons had already made money in their home countries, so they were sold cheaply to theaters in Japan. Animation artists could not implement the expensive techniques used by Disney and still sell their cartoons at a competitive price. This made the paper cut-out methods introduced by Junichi Kouichi an absolute must. This limitation, however, led to some extremely innovative cut-out films by two men, Yasuji Murata and Noburo Ofuji.

Yasuji Murata began working at the Yokohama Cinema Shokai in 1923 creating the Japanese intertitle cards for imported western films. After seeing various western cartoons, he was inspired to create his own in 1927. He worked almost exclusively for the Yokohama Cinema Shokai throughout his career. His first work to get attention was Doubutsu Orimupikku Taikai (Animal Olympics, 1928) a cartoon about funny animals playing sports. However, one of the best examples of his range and artistic skill is Kobu Tori (The Stolen Lump, 1929).

Kobu Tori

Consider that Disney made Skeleton Dance this same year, and, though technically impressive, it is horrendously boring compared to Kobu Tori. In Kobu Tori, the contrast is moody, the characters are vibrant, the attention to detail more than makes up for the slightly limited movements, and most importantly it’s a story well told! Kobu Tori is a perfect example of what wonders Japanese animators could produce despite their lack of funding and resources.

Because foreign cartoons dominated movie theaters of the time, Japanese animation had difficulty finding a venue in which to be screened. A lot of anime from this period was screened in public shopping areas to generate interest. The Ministry of Education also encouraged Japanese animators to produce films that were educational or socially uplifting, thus allowing them to be screened in schools. This was the case with Yasuji Murata’s Taro-san no Kisha (Taro’s Train, 1929).

Taro’s Train

Taro-san no Kisha (Taro’s Train) is an interesting mix of live action and animation as well as a neat peek into the fashion and homes in 1920s Japan. Also, it teaches kids to not act like insane animals in public, which is a good lesson for children all over the world.

Murata’s film, Oira No Yakyu (Our Baseball, 1930) is a return to the sports setting he first utilized in Animal Olympics. This cartoon mixes the Western funny animal cartoon with Japanese elements, in this case the folktale Kachi Kachi Yama, a story of a fight between a tanuki and a rabbit. This particular YouTube video is a restoration of Oira no Yakyu by Digital Meme which includes benshi narration.

Oira no Yakyu

Oira no Sukii (Our Skiing Trip, 1930) is either a sequel or prequel to Oira no Yakyu, as they were both produced in 1930 and we don’t have exact dates for either. This film has a distinct advantage over its counterpart due to extensive magical transformations utilized by the tanuki and rabbits. Or at least, that’s what I think. This video also benefits from benshi narration.

Oira no Sukii

Murata was a master of cut-out animation with strengths in skill, quality, and consistency. Murata’s opposite was cut-out master, Noburo Ofuji, whose strengths were in innovation and the willingness to take creative risks.

Ofuji became the apprentice of Junichi Kouichi at age 18 and made his first film at age 24. His films are characterized by the use of chiyogami paper. Though this gives his films a distinct Japanese look, the choice to use chiyogami was more practical than artistic. Chiyogami was cheaper by far than drawing on expensive celluloid and made inexpensive paper cut-out animation even more affordable. Even after gaining success and resources, Ofuji continued to use chiyogami as his medium of choice.

Ofuji’s achievements went beyond his aesthetic superiority. He was also an innovator. Though films with synchronous soundtracks had been introduced in the United States and Europe in 1927, they had not yet reached Japan by 1929. This was largely due to opposition from benshi narrators who wanted to hold onto their star status. Though he lacked the resources to create a true “talkie”, Ofuji created the first “record talkie”, in which he put to film an animation that synced up perfectly with an existing jazz record. The venue simply had start the film and the record at the same time and the audience would see Japan’s first sound cartoon, Kuro Nyago (Black Cat, 1929).

Kuro Nyago

One of Ofuji’s most famous shorts is a prime example of the fun-loving spirit his chiyogami animations could create. Mura Matsuri (Village Festival, 1930) is a real treat. It takes the “follow the bouncing ball” sing-along motif and spins it in new directions. This idea was relatively new at the time, having only been introduced five years earlier by Fleischer studios. Ofuji makes his bouncing ball interact with the scenery, transform words into objects, and transform itself into character heads. The song in this film is one I gladly get stuck in my head on a regular basis.

Mura Matsuri

The following year, Ofuji released another sing-along, this time tinted pink and intended to teach children the importance of national symbols, namely sakura. It’s interesting to note that though Haru no Uta (Song of Spring, 1931) is very nationally-focused, the music is undeniably Western. The singer, Kikuko Inoue, was a singer from the Asakusa Opera, which was one of the major channels through which western music was introduced to Japan.

Song of Spring

Noburo Ofuji begins to stray a bit from happy sing-alongs and into more serious territory with Kokka Kimigayo (The National Anthem: Kimigayo, 1931). Made to play along with a record of the national anthem, this film begins to more closely mimic silhouette animation of German animator Lotte Reiniger. The silhouettes in Kokka Kimigayo are cut with amazing detail and the backgrounds are beautifully complex.

Kokka Kimigayo

HOORAY! Now we get into Ofuji’s cartoony stuff! Tengu Taiji (Tengu Extermination, 1934) is a great example of Noburo Ofuji’s foray into cel animation. It’s fascinating to see such familiar cartoon imagery repurposed for Japanese storytelling. This one is similar to a lot of 1930s cartoons, but has samurai, geisha, a cute doggy, and TENGU! I could say more, but you’re better off just watching it.

Tengu Extermination

Our final look at the work of Noburo Ofuji is the film that cemented him as a master of animation in the art world. Kujira (Whale, 1952) is a remake of his 1927 silent black-and-white film, Kujira (Whale, 1927). The 1952 version features cut-outs of colored cellophane arranged on a backlit multi-plane animation table. This allowed him to create intricate backgrounds and transitions. The story explores themes of greed, female suffering, forces of nature, and transformation. It’s a truly beautiful experience.

NOTE: The only upload of this film to the web at the time of writing is by a composer named Ufjar who has replaced the original soundtrack with his own score.

Kujira

Kujira was shown at Cannes in 1953 and gained significant praise from jury president Jean Cocteau and a certain member of the audience named Pablo Picasso. This began Ofuji’s wide acceptance in the international art world.

After Noburo Ofuji passed away in 1961, the Mainichi Film Awards named their prize for animation excellence the “Ofuji Noburo Award” in 1962. The first winner of the Ofuji Noburo Award was none other than Osamu Tezuka.

More From The Thirties!

The 30s produced a wide array of Japanese animation ranging from impressive works of art to weird crumminess. This section presents samples from all parts of that spectrum. In 1931, the first war cartoon Sora no Momotarou (Aerial Momotarou, 1931) was released, marking the beginning of a steady increase in war propaganda until it was serious propaganda time in 1939.

Chameko no Ichinichi (A Day in the Life of Chameko, 1931) was a record-talkie intended to play simultaneously with a phonograph of the same name. Chameko no Ichinichi was a popular song a year before it was animated. The animation is stiffer than Murata’s and much less charming than Ofuji’s, but it does feature the earliest example of product placement in anime. Watch for Chameko’s endorsement of Lion Toothpaste in the tooth brushing scene.

Chameko no Ichinichi

Kori no Tatehiki (Raccoon and Fox Trick Each Other, 1933) is another fun little romp. Certainly one of the best looking Japanese cartoons of the time, it borrows heavily from the style of Fleischer cartoons. It’s a tad more polished than Tengu Taiji and offers some fun gags as the tanuki and fox one-up each other with magic tricks and transformation.

Kori no Tatehiki

Yasuji Murata offers up another folktale in the same style as Kobu Tori with his film, Umi no Mizu wa Naze Karai (Why is Sea Water Salty?, 1935). Though this film hasn’t been preserved as well as Kobu Tori, you can clearly see how much more skillful Murata became in just a few years. The animation is incredibly refined and it’s nearly impossible to tell that it’s made using paper cut-outs. The entire film shines as a story clearly told by someone who has mastered the elements of visual storytelling.

Umi no Mizu wa Naze Karai

One of the first manga characters to gain widespread popularity was Norakuro. Created by Suihou Tagawa in 1931, the manga focused on a stray dog who joined the dog army, clearly an allusion to the Imperial Japanese Army. He began his army career as a bumbling private and eventually rose through the ranks to become a less-interesting sergeant. The manga, and the cartoons it spawned, did not start out as propaganda, but as the the war began and escalated, Norakuro became an obvious choice for propaganda-tainment. This particular anime adaptation, Norakuro Nitohei (Norakuro, Private Second Class, 1935) was directed by Mitsuyo Seo.

Norakuro Nitohei

Hecks yeah! Ninjustu Hinotama Kozo: Edo no Maki (Ninja Fireball Boy: An Episode in Edo, 1935) is a one minute adventure of ninja silliness. One source claims that it is a longer cartoon truncated for personal viewing, but we’ll never know for sure because this is the only copy in existence. Everything happens so fast, it’s hard to tell what’s taking place. It definitely involves a lot of ninja magic. Please leave your idea of what the heck is going on in the comments below.

Ninjutsu Hinotama Kozo: Edo no Maki

Obake no Taiji (Monster Hunt, 1936) is another dose of serious fun. It’s a tad crummier than Kori no Tatehiki, but what it lacks in technical presentation it makes up for in creativity. It’s rather reminiscent of Fleischer Studios’ 1930 Bimbo cartoon Swing You Sinners! in that it shows a lot of imagination in its setups, character transformations, and villains.

Obake no Taiji

Forgotten Artists

Toward the end of the 1930s, most cartoons began to lean in the direction of war propaganda. That, in itself, is an interesting study, especially since the quality of Japanese animation began to approach that of Disney. Furthermore, most all the anime from this period was directed by one man, Mitsuyo Seo. He directed the first feature-length anime, Momotarou Umi no Shimpei (Momotarou: Divine Sea Warriors, 1945), which was financed by the Japanese Navy.

In 1948, the Toei Animation studio was founded and began situating itself to become the Disney of the east. It produced a good number of interesting shorts and features which had a predominant Disney aesthetic. The 1950s were an interesting decade for Japanese animation because several creative forces were taking anime in different directions, and it’s fun to imagine what anime would look like today if something other than Tezuka had succeeded in capturing Japan’s collective consciousness. However, destiny chose Osamu Tezuka as the god of manga (and by extension, anime) and no one can say he doesn’t deserve that title. Anime’s characteristic big eyes came from Tezuka’s fascination with Disney’s Bambi, and its signature character movements came from Tezuka’s plan to temporarily limit animation to cut costs, a plan that eventually became permanent and was adopted by the entire industry.

There is a good reason that most retellings of anime’s history begin with Tezuka. What we know today as “anime” started with him. However, a history of Japanese animation is not complete without Kouichi, Kitayama, Murata, Ofuji, and many others. These artists are seldom remembered though they worked exceptionally hard to compete with well-funded foreign animation. All of them succeeded in creating Japanese art in an imported foreign medium, and a few of them succeeded in turning their practical limitations into artistic assets. These artists are mostly forgotten because the influence they have on our present is much less than the ongoing influence of Osamu Tezuka. But when you watch these early anime, try to imagine the affect it had on the people in the time it was made and how important it was for them to see samurai and tengu in the same medium as Mickey Mouse. Most entertainment and art we consume today will not be remembered in a hundred years, because people in that future time won’t understand our context. But that doesn’t make our art any less important. Nothing can devalue it for us. And nothing can change how important any piece of art was for people who saw it in days gone by.

Bonus Wallpapers!

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Sources:

• The Anime Encyclopedia by Jonathan Clements & Helen McCarthy
• Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics by Frederik L. Schodt
• A Hundred Years of Japanese Film by Donald Richie
• Nishikata Film Review by Cathy Munroe Hotes
• AnimeVice.com Encyclopedia
• Antti Alanen: Film Diary
• Pioneer of Japanese Animation at PIFan by Jasper Sharp [Part 1] and [Part 2]
• Japanese Animation Filmography Project by Cathy Munroe Hotes

2013. Yasufumi Ono made comments about the state of Japanese gaming at the Infinity Ventures Summit in Kyoto. Currently, Japan controls a mere 30% of the market share in North America and only 13% worldwide. The horn of plenty has become a trombone of self-doubt. Why isn’t the world buying Japanese games anymore? Has Japan lost its touch?

There are several factors at play here. When Japan swooped in to grasp the field mouse that was U.S. gaming, that mouse was dead. Thankfully Japan brought the mouse back to life and became the sole devourer of its innards. Today there is more than one falcon-country eyeing those rodent intestines, namely the U.S., South Korea, and Finland.

Also, Japan doesn’t make the games that western countries presently want to play, games in the “Call of Battlefield: Ghost Ops II” category. Japan makes games more along the lines of Dungeon Monster DX: The Fire! Time was, you could take your Dungeon Monster games and package them so your average Todds and Brandons would buy them. That’s been a challenge Japan has yet to surmount in this modern era. But why is this such a challenge if it wasn’t before?

Instant Connection

When we hear a story, our mind does its best to connect us to the story’s main character. We want to get to know that character so we can become the hero and experience the tale explicitly. In traditional storytelling, this is no easy task. It takes a witch’s brew of situation, exposition, and time to make a character connection with an audience. And few writers ever know what’s going to work in a given story.

Video games don’t have this problem. It’s a unique storytelling medium. The connection a game character has to the player is almost immediate. My go-to storytelling guru, Scott McCloud, best explains why, by summarizing philosophy first put forth by Marshall McLuhan:

When driving, for example, we experience much more than our five senses report. The whole car—not just the parts we can see, feel and hear—is very much on our minds at all times. The vehicle becomes an extension of our body. It absorbs our sense of identity. We become the car. If one car hits another, the driver of the vehicle being struck is much more likely to say: “Hey! He hit me!!” than “he hit my car!” or “his car hit my car,” for that matter.

So, in touching and controlling the car, your mind makes the car an extension of yourself. The same happens when playing a game. That touch of the controller and your control over the avatar gives your mind the same connection. The hero is a virtual extension of you. You become the hero as soon as you start the game.

This explains why games with subpar stories can still be great games. Your connection to the experience is immediate and doesn’t require a fantastic story to draw you in. If the game is enjoyable, you keep playing because you like your role as the hero. But what happens when you don’t like the hero you become?

Different Heroes For Different Hemispheres

Back to the Inifinity Ventures Summit (we were talking about that, right?). Some interesting statements were made by Sega/Sammy president, Hajime Satomi. Read below his hypothesis on why Japanese games fail to make an impact in the U.S. And Europe:

Europeans and North Americans like strong people, so the main character has to be a fully-grown, middle-aged man. On the other hand, in Asia, people like stories about middle or high school students growing up or becoming stronger. As you make games for more dedicated players, I think you have to be aware of those differences.

This makes sense when you consider characters from best-selling games in the U.S. from the past ten years: Kratos, Nathan Drake, Master Chief, Niko Bellic, Marcus Fenix, and that hooded guy from Assassin’s Creed. All severely grizzled, middle-aged combat types.

Compare that with some of Japan’s top character picks, plucked from a Famitsu poll of readers’ favorite characters: Link, Sora, Yuri Lowell, Sakura Shinguji, and Cloud Strife. All very ungrizzled and full of youthful optimism for the adventures of life (until they enter the job market).

There is some crossover, of course. Both east and west love Chris Redfield, Solid Snake, Link and Cloud. But there is something to Satomi’s ideas. There is clearly a difference in hero preference between hemispheres.

So if Japan once ruled the western gaming market, they must have created games with middle-aged heroes. Not necessarily.

Let’s Compare Some Box Art!

This is a simple exercise. I will present three games released both in Japan and the U.S. We will observe the in-game pixelated sprites that represent the main character(s) and the art on the boxes for the Japanese and U.S. releases of the game. Let’s begin.

DOWNTOWN NEKKETSU MONOGATARI vs. RIVER CITY RANSOM

The in-game character looks pretty cartoony. Could be any age.

Japanese Box Art:

The Japanese release of the game suggests the characters are young high school students.

US Box Art:

But the U.S. release suggests they are weird 36-year-old dudes! Despite that “River City High School” sign behind them, these two are clearly just there to pick up their kids from baseball practice.

ROCKMAN 2 vs. MEGA MAN 2

The age-neutral Mega Man sprite we know and love.

Japanese Box Art:

Japan gets some great art that actually looks a good deal like our robot friend on the screen.

U.S. Box Art:

America gets a welder with a broken foot and ray gun. He’s a weirdo, but he’s a grown-up combat weirdo!

DRAGON QUEST II vs. DRAGON WARRIOR II

Here’s the in-Game Characters – Japan & U.S.

These in-game characters could be impetuous teens or seasoned adventurers.

Japanese Box Art:

The art for Dragon Quest II features Akira Toriyama’s youthful depictions of the heroes, which have become a staple of the series.

U.S. Box Art:

The American release of Dragon Warrior II is, again, a band of fully-grown adults. These heroes promised each other in college that when they turned 40, they would reunite for a quest to Las Vegas.

Finding Ourselves

So what does this box art comparison mean, exactly? I’ll get to that in a second.

The heroes on our TV screens during the 8-bit and 16-bit eras were less defined and more iconic, and thus more easily interpreted. I touched on this in my article about Hello Kitty, so for a more detailed and Tom Hanks-oriented explanation of icons.

But there was another force at play, helping us interpret our pixel friends. That force is confirmation bias.

Confirmation bias is the psychological effect of your mind to favor information that coincides with your preconceptions. Traditionally, confirmation bias is used to describe how we gather information to make rational (or irrational) decisions. Recently, however, a young philosophy blogger named Sam McNerney introduced this idea:

If we are defining confirmation bias as a tendency to favor information that confirms our previously held beliefs, it strikes me as ironic to think that it is almost exclusively discussed as a hindrance to knowledge and better decision-making…With such a broad definition, I think it also explains our aesthetic judgments… Put differently, confirmation bias influences our aesthetic judgments just as it does any other judgment.

Since the pixelated hero images transmit so little information as to what they are, players needed the box art to confirm their bias of what they wanted to see, in this case, their bias of what they think, aesthetically, a hero should look like. Japanese gamers’ biases said, “this pixelated image is a youngling,” and the box art confirmed their bias. Western gamers’ biases said, “this pixelated image is muscular manbeast,” and their different box art confirmed their different bias.

Since video games, as we said earlier, offer an instant connection for the player, it is imperative that the player like that connection. Giving players the chance to connect to the heroes they wanted to be helped to ensure they would not put down the controller and, furthermore, keep buying games.

The Beginning Of The End

So that’s it. Everyone was happy, and all it took was paying two artists to do the same job. It’s easier to sell people what they expect than to challenge their perceptions. Unfortunately, this box art trick got harder to pull off as console gaming entered the world of polygons in 1995. Keeping the hero’s in-game appearance ambiguous got a little trickier.

Such was the case with The Legend of Zelda‘s transition from 2D to 3D. For the most part, early polygonal models could still be interpreted by both cultures as the heroes they wanted to be. And so it was with 1998’s The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on Nintendo 64. EVERYONE loved this game. The main character, Link, started out as a kid but later grew into an adult. But what kind of adult? A grizzled one, probably.

How old is this adult Link? Fifteen or thirty-five?

When the first Zelda game for the 128-bit Gamecube was announced, Americans eagerly anticipated their powerful adult Link to appear in new, beautifully rendered 12 million polygons per second! It was at this point Nintendo thought it would be a good idea to have Link represented as a very cartoony boy child in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. Americans went nuts. Angry nuts! Link had always been an elfin lad since the very beginning, according to the series’ story, but in pixel world and the American mind, he was nice and grizzled. For the first time, gamers were faced with a Link they could not interpret to their liking. Despite The Wind Waker being a gaming triumph, it sold a mere 3.07 million copies worldwide, compared to Ocarina of Time’s 7.6 million.

It was around this time, Japan’s control over the gaming industry began to wane. Of course, it was not solely due to the unambiguous heroes. The Xbox launched with incredible success in 2001, eating away at a large part of the North American market share previously held by Nintendo, Sega, and Sony. American video game companies, having learned from two decades of great Japanese games, started making games just as good or better. The spike in popularity that Japanese pop culture saw in 1999 was diminishing by the mid 2000’s, banishing anime from general acceptance back to the cavern of the nerds, which also meant the unmistakably Japanese video game heroes were banished as well (unless they were grizzled).

In our modern era, we have our two camps making games for themselves. American game companies churning out gritty power lunks and Japanese companies churning out sleek action teens. And we like it that way, apparently. Only a small fraction from each side is interested in games from the other.

The Sun Also Rises

2014. In a few months, the next Infinity Ventures Summit will be held in Sapporo and the Japanese gaming industry will gather once again to discuss the future, the past being a non-issue. The truth is, Japan will likely never again rule the video game world as it once did. The special circumstances of an evacuated market and technology that was easily localized is gone forever. Global competition and the advent of mobile/social gaming has changed the industry so nobody knows what to expect anymore. (BIRDS being angry at PIGS?! Nobody saw that one coming.)

But that’s okay. Industries change. When Georges Méliès and the Edison Trust dominated the film industry, it was only a matter of time before other artists from around the world said, “I want to do that, too!” Film expanded until people loved it so much that certain individuals began making films simply as artistic expression.

The Infinity Ventures Summit is a gathering of companies, so their primary concern should be how to sucker people out of money (using video games, hopefully). But games are made by artists, so I hope when these artists gather in May, they will talk, at least individually, about how to move video games forward as medium, how to push boundaries and make something people have never seen before. There will always be success in giving people what they expect. But there is a truer reward in creating something that changes peoples’ minds.

Bonus Wallpapers!

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Sources:

• Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art by Scott McCloud
• Why doesn’t Japan like first-person shooters? Old characters and World War II, says Sega exec, by Casey Baseel
• Confirmation Bias and Art, by Samuel McNerney
• LVLs. Cultural Anxiety Features
• Famitsu’s Top 50 Video Game Characters

What you expect: Classrooms filled with studious children, enthusiasm for English, tag team efforts with Japanese teachers, effective curriculum from your amazing brain, and a job well done each day.

What you find upon arrival: Classrooms filled with the screams of not learning, little interest in English, Japanese teachers with their own agenda, and gangs of yankis (bad kids) roaming the halls, telling you to shine (die) every chance they get.

Congratulations! You got placed in a troubled school.

And so did I. Unlike my peers who had great stories about their students’ enthusiasm for life and learning, I had stories about broken windows and broken dreams. When I told people in my town where I worked, they usually said zannen (too bad). In my school, there were 900 students, 24 homerooms, and only five of those homerooms were dependably well-behaved.

There are three ways to go when you experience culture shock this severe.

1. You can become bitter and hate Japan.
2. You can pretend nothing is happening and Japan is still perfect.
3. You can deal with your experiences and grow.

Sadly, I saw option 1 and 2 happen a lot, and they usually happened when the person did nothing. Option 3 is the hardest and is only achieved when you start viewing your bad situation as an opportunity for personal growth.

Easier said than done, right? Incredibly right. Below I will elaborate on 5 practical tips you can use in your tough situation. I admit I am not an expert in Japanese relations or classroom teachonomics, so please compare what I say here with the advice of other people in these situations

But to my credit, I was placed in the biggest school in my town, which also happened to be the most horrible (what luck!). And to speak of the psychological effects, I spoke no Japanese in the beginning and had just come from my first experience in Japan as a teaching intern at Kasukabe Kyoei, which is a high level school filled with well-behaved geniuses.

All that to say, I returned to the U.S. feeling comfortable with my infamous school and loving Japan less as a magic lollipop kingdom and more like an old friend. I hope the tips I used will help you accomplish the same.

1. Re-Define Your Goals

As a brand new ALT (Assistant Language Teacher) I had a few simple objectives: to have meaningful interactions with my students, make them all English experts, and teach them about the wide, wide world (specifically America). Realistically, this is impossible even at a good school. The advantage of a troubled school is that it will crush these dreams for you early on, like so much egg salad sandwich under foot. This is a good thing. You get the opportunity to realistically redefine your goals.

After fruitlessly pursuing my goal of “real teaching” for several months, I learned an important lesson. You can’t teach if it’s not a learning environment. And my school was not that. It’s hard to keep children’s attention when a student is riding his bike on the roof (even I wanted to see that).

The change came when I asked each individual teacher what they needed me to do. I was trying to be a one size fits all ALT for each class and that didn’t work with 24 wildly different homerooms. The Japanese teachers who were my partners knew these classes better than I did, so I became what they needed for each class. This didn’t solve everything. Some teachers wanted me to do virtually nothing, which was not what I wanted. But other teachers wanted me to do puppet shows and make PowerPoint presentations featuring Mega Man. I focused my efforts on them.

This may not seem like a big deal, but I felt better when I was useful. For one teacher, I was literally a bodyguard, batting down papers thrown at her and escorting students back to their seats. It was exhausting, but felt good protecting a sweet old lady from maniacs.

The point is, give yourself a role regarding each teacher and name it, like a job title (For Matsuda-sensei, I am pronunciation manager; for Katayama-sensei, I am a bouncer, etc.). Even if you don’t like the particular role, it will feel better knowing you are being a useful part of the team and give you attainable, satisfying goals.

2. Draw Out Your Good Students

I had two first impressions of my school:

1. My school was insane.
2. All my students were bad.

The first impression remained largely true, but the second was not. In my first week I met four exceptional students, one who is currently attending Waseda University! They were my saving grace, but if I was going to survive, I needed to find more of them.

If I had to guess, I would say my school consisted of 100 yankis, 600 neutral students, and 200 good students (and about three sociopaths). But even with only 100 bad influences, it was enough to keep the insanity percolator at full boil.

But the fact remained, there were 200 good students in there somewhere. Drawing them out was the challenge. Calling on good students or talking to them outside of class worked only sometimes. I eventually noticed they could write English very well, but rarely spoke it and loved passing notes to each other.

Enter: Michael’s Mailbox System. I constructed a large cardboard mailbox and explained the system to each homeroom. The response was overwhelming. I began corresponding with at least 30-40 of the suspected 200 good students and that was enough for me. It gave me at least a few kids in each homeroom I could focus my attention on. This may be seen as playing favorites, but I saw it more as putting my efforts to good use.

Other ideas might be to join a club (good kids open up when not in a classroom environment) or start an English club (you’ll attract the kids who care enough to learn English in their free time).

3. Build Your Personal Confidence

I was pretty nervous about teaching from the get-go. To make matters worse, after my self-introduction speech to the students (during which I mumbled Japanese words I had yet to learn the meaning of) I fell off the stage.

I slipped off the top step and slid down the stairs to the gym floor in front of 1,000 people. That was my school’s first impression of me.

Thankfully, a few days before that, I was sitting at an izakaya with a fellow ALT teacher who was giving me advice. The main thing I remembered her telling me was “freak out the squares.” Basically, fight loud and crazy with loud and crazy.

My glorious hiney slide in front of the 1,000 people was immediately followed by my first lesson ever. Talk about nerve racking. I was only three words into it when a student yelled an obscenity at me and the class fell into uproarious laughter. This was it, I had to freak out the squares. And freak out I did. “My name is…MICHAEL!” I yelled, clicking to my first slide, thankfully a wacky picture of me. The class reacted to my energy. I had them. I was all big noises and big movements. I felt small, but I acted big. When a kid yelled out of turn, I made him my ally in craziness. All in all, it was a fantastic first class.

Granted, this technique did not always work, but it worked surprisingly well most of the time. Recently I found out the reason why.

In a 2012 TED talk, Amy Cuddy exposes a simple truth: our stress and confidence hormones inform how we act, but acting confident reverses the process and informs our chemicals. I didn’t feel powerful, but I acted it and eventually became it (boosting my testosterone and lowering my cortisol). Doing this over long periods actually changes your behavior and your success rate. It’s not “fake it till you make it”, but rather “fake it till you become it”. Amy Cuddy explains it much better than I can.

I now consider being trapped in that crazy school to be one of the greatest blessings of my life. Because I took that first shaky step of power that day, I spent two years becoming a better presenter, which still serves me today.

4. Find Compassion For The Yankis

Yankis were the bane of my existence for a good long while. I mentioned them earlier, but allow me to elaborate here: they are the punks of Japan. Tall orange hair, baggy clothes, and an attitude. They always struck me as silly and never physically dangerous, but they were emotionally degrading and obnoxious. They interrupted my classes, yelled obscenities at me, and wouldn’t leave! They didn’t attend class, yet stayed in the school. That still boggles my mind. If you’re going to skip class, go to the mall! In a nutshell, they were the bad kids.

I hate to admit this, but for a time, I hated the yankis. They targeted me for ridicule, which I deflected but ultimately internalized. My turning point came when I began reflecting on problem students I went to school with and what (probably) made them act out. I didn’t know a lot of details about the yankis, but over time it became apparent that these renegade miscreants didn’t have much to look forward to. Their loud shows of bravado were mostly covers for what they did or didn’t have going for them outside of school.

This made them seem a lot less threatening and a lot more pathetic. And I mean that to say, it gave me sympathy for them.

Sadly, I never found a solution to the yanki’s behavior problems. If 65 teachers couldn’t keep a lid on the situation, it’s unlikely I could have. However, my perspective shift gave me more compassion for them. If they were harassing a student or teacher, I would do my best to stop it. But when they weren’t behaving badly, I didn’t treat them any differently than the other students and I even tried talking to them. It worked a few times. While most remained hostile and insane fools, I found a few good-natured yankis that, for whatever reason, just had no drive to succeed. I still think of them from time to time and hope they have found good things.

5. Understand And Make Peace With The Japanese Way Of Doing School

This goal was the hardest for me to achieve. After my first year, I had formed my conclusion about the Japanese school system: it was wrong and bad and awful! And it didn’t work. And also I hated it. Furthermore, I had the answers to fix all of their problems. But for all my “genius” fixes, I was powerless to change the system.

My anger at the school system had a threefold balm:

1. Many of my creative heroes are products of the Japanese school system, as well as some very wonderful Japanese people who have become my friends. So something was working somehow.
2. The system needed change before I got there, but it wasn’t going to change just because I showed up with my ideas. Even if the schools decide to change based on ideas from Western schools, Japan has to come to that realization and change in its own way.
3. I didn’t attend a bad school in the U.S. but maybe some things that worked for me in my good school were not working for other kids in bad schools. Maybe some changes need to be enacted in my own country’s school system.

Frankly, these epiphanies came to me and took hold very slowly. You will have to wrestle with your grievances against Japanese school yourself and take time to make peace with them. No matter the conclusion you come to, however, you will become a more well-rounded person for spending the emotional energy to deal with these objections.

Here are few exercises you can do to help you wrestle:

• Write down the things you don’t like about the Japanese way of doing school. Acknowledge that these objections are not frivolous. They are your convictions and they matter! Put them away somewhere (a book, a drawer) as an act of setting these grievances aside. You are not destroying or dismissing these feelings you have. That’s why you are keeping them. But you are putting them away in favor of accepting the system for what it is, so your grievances won’t get in the way of your greater mission as an ambassador.
• Read some articles about problems in your own country’s school system. How many were in your blind spot? How many of the problems in Japanese schools may be blindspots to Japanese people?
• Read Koichi’s article on the school system! It outlines what the Japanese way of school is trying to achieve. It helps to know how the system is supposed to work, even if it’s not working in your school.

In The End…

Let me add as I close, that even though my school was crazy and disturbing, I did not feel I was in any physical danger. The tips I outlined are not meant to help you accept or ignore a dangerous situation. If you feel you might be in danger of any physical harm, and this goes for any time in your life, get help or get out of there!

This batch of advice is just to get you started. Read other articles and forum posts by people in these situations. Even if you implement my suggestions, it will take a lot of patience, practice, and soul searching before you figure out what works best for you and your circumstances. You will still have bad days (those never went away for me) but you will deal with them and learn from them much more effectively.

In the end, if you can avoid denial and bitterness, you will find yourself to be a stronger and more holistic person than when you started. It sounds weird to say, but I’m glad I was placed in my insane school. It forced me into situations that built my self-confidence and life skills, as well as brought me face to face with a not-so-easy side of Japan. I was made to wrestle with things that made Japan seem less magical and more like a country filled with human beings. And that is what you will want at the end of your time teaching English, to know that you lived and experienced real Japan.

This ”Power Rangers” jazz was a huge success with American kids straight away. And why not? It was capitalizing off of a show that had been perfecting the art of firing lasers at aliens since 1975. However, few people at that time, myself included, had any idea that there was anything foreign about the Power Rangers. As I grew up and left this childhood show behind, I eventually discovered the show from whence it came, Kyouryuu Sentai ZyuRanger, and watching it was a total mind bender.

The monsters and costumes in ZyuRanger were cemented in my brain as mine, but the stories surrounding them were unfamiliar territory. Gone were the twenty-year-old teenagers of the American iteration, replaced with characters and plots that were actually…interesting! Or at the very least, weird.

But how do these two series compare? What was changed when the show was brought stateside? Remember, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers wasn’t your average localization. It was a re-filmed, re-edited Frankenstein project. So a lot was changed, not necessarily for the better.

The only way to properly explain is with a side by side compari-battle! Two shows. Five categories. One survivor. Which campy children’s TV show deserves your fanatical devotion?

Prepare yourself!

CATEGORY 1: SHOW SYNOPSIS

In the J-corner, a 170 million-year-old struggle between robotic dinosaur gods and the demonic hordes of a space witch.  In the A-corner, a 10,000-year-old struggle between a blue lava lamp and the demonic hordes of a space witch

Kyouryuu Sentai ZyuRanger

170 million years ago, five god-like robot dinosaurs sealed an evil witch, Bandora, in a comet and froze five warriors in magic tombs in case she ever escaped. She did and the robo-dino-gods revived the five warriors, bestowing them with five dino bucklers, legendary weapons, and control over the robo-dino-gods. Their gods allowed the ZyuRangers to pilot them and give them orders, but the ZyuRangers remained subservient to their divine wills.

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers

A man named Zordon and a woman named Rita Repulsa fought 10,000 years ago. At the end of their battle, he sealed her in a dumpster and she trapped him in a tube, resulting in a bizzare stalemate. Despite having no hands, Zordon built a robot and an entire command center in the middle of California. When Rita escapes her prison, Zordon, in his ancient wisdom, chooses five teenagers to wield unlimited power, since teenagers are well known for their reliability and stable emotional states. The teens begin an epic struggle against Rita and her space monsters! Also, two bullies trip and fall into plates of food. A lot.

Show Synopsis Verdict:

The plot of Power Rangers is a shoddy adaptation of its source material. It takes most of its substance from the ZyuRanger plot and slaps the most basic cliches from American superhero stories onto it. Average teens, chosen to have powers, ancient struggle, and so on.

ZyuRanger is no King Lear, but at least it’s original. And the fact that the heroes are from an ancient time and the giant robots they pilot are their gods, which they worship, is at least strange enough to be interesting.

Winner: ZyuRanger

CATEGORY 2: THEME SONG

In the J-corner, a symphonic rock ballad heralding the entrance of ancient warriors.  In the A-corner, the best workout music after *Rock You Like a Hurricane* (totally awesome for bench press).

Kyouryuu Sentai ZyuRanger

I really, really like this song. It’s orchestral with some smatterings of electric guitar. It’s catchy, fun and heroic. I memorized the lyrics just to sing along and learned some useful Japanese words too! (You never know when “eternal warrior” is going to pop up in a conversation.)

I really, really, really, really like this song, but…

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers

This song is AWESOME!!

The crazy metal riffs get my blood pumping! I am convinced that this, in conjunction with the fight footage, is what made Power Rangers so instantly popular. To this day, if I hear this song, I have the sudden urge to jump up and start somersault chopping at random, which has been unfortunate for many of my former desk lamps.

Theme Song Verdict:

I gotta give this one to Power Rangers. SPOLIER ALERT! Power Rangers isn’t winning any more categories.

Winner: Power Rangers

CATEGORY 3: HEROES

In the J-corner, tribal monarchs trained the art of combat!  In the A-corner, charisma-free high schoolers trained in the art of study hall.

Kyouryuu Sentai ZyuRanger

Our five heroes include the average one, the tall strong one, the limber one, the serious limber one, and the girl one. These warriors of legend never back down from a fight and are friends to all children. And I do mean all children. Each episode features a different kid with a disease/fear that the ZyuRangers cure/solve at the end of each episode/show.

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers

The American heroes include the leader one, the dancing one, the science one, the gymnastics one, and the kung fu one. In the intro, it is stated that these teenagers were chosen because they had “attitude.” However, their aforementioned attitude is one of civil service and and respect for authority.

Heroes Verdict:

At first glance, the Power Rangers are a bit more dynamic than their Japanese counterparts in that they have racial diversity and two female characters instead of just one. They have clearly defined character traits based on their interests (gymnastics, science, etc.) But actually, that’s as deep as these characters go.

The ZyuRangers, however, are very similar on the surface and have few obvious character traits or hobbies. But as the series progresses, each character gets several episodes focused on them in which they are put in tense, character-revealing situations. Again, not King Lear, but enough to show that the writers put some thought into who these characters are deep down in their squishy souls.

Winner: ZyuRanger

CATEGORY 4: VILLAINS

In the J-corner, a space witch and her team of gryphons, golems, goblins, vampires and leprechauns.  In the A-corner, a space witch and her team of gryphons, golems, goblins, vampires and leprechauns with annoying voices.

Kyouryuu Sentai ZyuRanger

The evil side of ZyuRanger is all western mythological monsters commanded by one fantastic witch. If everything else about ZyuRanger were awful, one element would make it worth watching.

Space Witch Bandora.

She lives in a moon castle, rides a penny-farthing through the sky, wants to kill all children, and gets her power from SATAN! (I’m not joking.)

Oh, and she sings her own theme song in her delightfully raspy witchy voice. This puts her high up on my list of dream karaoke duet partners, right under John DiMaggio.

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers

Each villain is the same as they are in ZyuRanger only renamed and redubbed. Poorly. Every name feels like it was the first thing the producers could think of. “That guy is gold. Let’s call him Goldar! This girl’s a scorpion. How about Scorpina? Genius!” Just another testament to the laziness of this localization.

Villains Verdict:

Checkmate.

Winner: ZyuRanger

CATEGORY 5: THE GREEN RANGER

WARNING! THIS FINAL SECTION CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR A 20-YEAR-OLD CHILDREN’S TV SHOW!!

In the J-corner, a ultra powerful older brother with a checkered past and a grim future.  In the A-corner, an ultra-powerful teenager whose dedication to practicing martial arts keeps him from using it until the last minute.

Kyouryuu Sentai ZyuRanger

Name: Burai
Title: Prince of the Yamato Kingdom
Giant Robot Pal: Dragon Caesar
Bio: Hated his brother, woke from stasis to kill brother, changed his ways, fought alongside brother, discovered he had only weeks to live, quarantined in a room outside of time, only leaves timeless room when necessary.
Likes: Hating his brother, changing his ways, loving his brother, solitaire.

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers

Name: Tommy Oliver
Title: Prince of the Juice Bar
Giant Robot Pal: Dragonzord
Bio: Moved to Angel Grove, got turned evil, got turned un-evil, fought alongside Power Rangers but only sometimes.
Likes: Martial arts, Kimberly, long hair, juice, helping the Power Rangers part-time (It’s a stop-gap job. Looks good on a resume.)

Green Ranger Verdict:

The whole saga surrounding Burai doesn’t end when he finally becomes good.  He finds out that he died while in suspended animation, so a weird god-boy named Clotho puts him in a Timeless Room with a green candle showing his remaining life span.  Every time he leaves the Timeless Room, a little bit of the candle gets used up.

This adds a lot of suspense to the the series not only in terms of battle, but also in the relationship between his brother Geki (The Red Ranger) and himself, making every moment between them brief and bittersweet.

Tommy’s character, on the other hand, was at the mercy of the localization team.  The drama of the bad-ranger-wrecks-up-the-place remains intact.  But after that saga, Tommy becomes kind of nonsensical.  If he’s so powerful, why isn’t he with the Power Rangers all the time?  Because *ZyuRanger* wrote Burai as a man living on borrowed time, Tommy is forced to constantly be “out practicing martial arts” or “giving his dog a back massage” until he’s called at the last minute.  None of this makes sense when a giant monster is crushing your city.

If you’re still not convinced about the superiority of the Burai story, it lies in the emotional culmination of his death.  After watching his life candle deplete over the course of twenty episodes, Burai decides to purposely use up the last of his life candle saving children (which he does by saving an unfortunate airborne baby!)  He dies in the arms of his younger brother Geki, to whom he relinquishes his signature golden armor and flute dagger.  This makes for more bittersweetness as the remainder of the series sees Geki using items from a brother he barely knew.

The death is so emphasized that there is even an entire episode featuring Burai’s sentient robo-dino-god, Dragon Caesar, grieving the loss of his master as he walks alone through a poppy field.

In the end, despite a letter-writing campaign from fans, Burai remained dead.  But his ghost appeared at the end of the series to encourage the ZyuRangers and use his ghost magic to open a dimensional gateway for plot device purposes.

Because of the absurdity of Tommy’s motivations and the purposeful thought put into Burai’s character arc, Burai is the better Green Ranger.  Sorry, Tommy fans.

Winner: ZyuRanger

FINAL CHAMPION: KYOURYUU SENTAI ZYURANGER

If you have a soft spot for Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, believe me, I understand. While screening episodes in preparation for this article, I felt pangs of nostalgia intermingled with my groans and cringing.

But nostalgia notwithstanding, ZyuRanger is the clear winner in terms of overall quality.

Let it be said that Power Rangers was a fantastic business venture. Saban had all the action footage and merchandising done before he started. All he had to do was fill in the blanks. But in light of this, one has to wonder, with so much of the hard work done in advance, couldn’t Saban have filled in the blanks a little bit better? The writing, especially the dialogue, is tired and contrived. It seems the show is just killing time until the ZyuRanger action footage could be inserted, leaving each episode feeling rather lazy and hollow.

If Saban was as smart an artist as he is a businessman, he could have put together something truly unique and interesting using someone else’s footage. But he’s not and he didn’t.

ZyuRanger is certainly campy and childish in its own way, but is thoroughly entertaining from start to finish. Even when it fails at what it’s trying to do, it still manages to entertain, leaving you watching long enough to eventually be surprised by its purposeful emotional pacing and technical attention to detail.

Comparisons aside, ZyuRanger stands on its own in terms of quality. At the very least, it’s an interesting peek at another culture’s nostalgia. At the very best, it’s an intriguingly genuine piece children’s TV with a mysterious charm factor. If giant robot gods and superhero melodrama are your thing, I encourage you to give the show a try. You may just find a bit more than you expected.

Bonus Wallpapers!

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A former English teacher himself, Martinson draws from his own experience to create a fictional account of a young man named Dan Wells. The story is often ambient and introspective, emphasizing the day to day events of life abroad. Our hero, Dan, is a passive character rarely found in American storytelling. Martinson expertly guides Dan through the story and keeps him balanced, so we can easily look down on his passiveness in one scene and sympathize with it in the next. This expertise makes Tonoharu more than a mere parody of teaching English in Japan. It is a purposeful tale of a fully realized character teaching English in Japan, which in itself is rare.

The art, of course, is what draws most people to check out the series in the first place (myself included). Martinson’s style is reminiscent of the Belgian artist, Herge. The intricate backgrounds contrast with the simpler designs of the characters, allowing the reader to inhabit the story’s environments. Of course, there is little I can say that the art itself can’t say better.

Image from Lars Martinson / Media

Lars Martinson studied East Asian Calligraphy for two years in Fukuoka after his initial experience of English teaching. His own personal style, compounded with his knowledge of ancient inking technique, really shows and the art alone is worth a purchase of both volumes.

A paperback edition of Tonoharu Part One is due out this summer. Until then, hardcover editions of both parts are available through most book retailers and Martinson’s own website: http://larsmartinson.com/buy/

For the tech-savvy, Martinson’s more light-hearted e-comics are available digitally: http://larsmartinson.com/e-comics/

I recently had the wonderful opportunity to correspond with Lars for an EXCLUSIVE Tofugu interview! Below are insights into his stories, his art, his process and, most excitingly, the future volumes of Tonoharu!

For those who may not know, who is Lars Martinson?

Image from Lars Martinson / Media

I’m an American cartoonist that has spent half of my adult life in Japan. For the past decade I’ve been working on a graphic novel series entitled Tonoharu.

What is Tonoharu about?

Tonoharu tells the story of a young American who moves to rural Japan to work as an assistant English teacher. It is based (in part) on my own experience doing the same from 2003 to 2006.

Because Tonoharu is fictionalized and not a direct telling of your Japan experience, what inspired you to tell this story? Did you have an “aha” moment?

I’ve always been frustrated by how hard is it to relate my experiences in Japan to friends and family back home. It’s sort of like when you try to describe a dream to someone. It’s fascinating to you because you experienced it firsthand, but it’s almost always tedious for the listener because they don’t have the same frame of reference. My inspiration to create Tonoharu came from a desire to bridge this gap; to describe the experience of living abroad in a visceral way.

You’ve mentioned elsewhere that your main character, Dan Wells, is not you but merely a fictionalized character. That being said, how do you as his creator feel about him and his decisions? Was he difficult to write?

I’m certainly more driven than Dan. I made much more of an effort to improve my Japanese abilities when I first arrived in Japan, and have a clearer sense of what I want to do with my life. That said, I share a number of qualities with him, so he wasn’t hard to write. Like Dan I’m introverted, and often struggle to form meaningful connections with people around me.

How much Japanese did you know when you went on JET? How did the language barrier affect your experience?

I knew very little Japanese when I first arrived. Just a little bit of hiragana and katakana, and basic grammar. It improved quickly, but even now I feel like I have a long way to go. I heard somewhere that you can become fluent in three European languages in the same amount of time it takes to learn Japanese, and I believe it. It’s a huge undertaking.

One interesting consequence of my mediocre Japanese abilities is I tend to be more forthright when I speak it. It’s easy to be evasive in English since its my native tongue, but in Japanese I don’t have the language skills to dance around the subject. So I’m forced to distill what I want to say down to its naked essence. There’s a Dostoyevsky quote that goes “Stupidity is brief and artless, while intelligence squirms and hides itself. Intelligence is unprincipled, but stupidity is honest and straightforward.” I feel like this applies to how I use English compared to how I use Japanese.

Your main character, Dan, goes through a difficult bout of negative culture shock in the first volume. Did you have a similar experience?

Image from Lars Martinson / Media

Most people who live abroad experience culture shock to some degree, and I’m certainly no exception. I sometimes worry that I favored those negative moments a little too much in the first volume of Tonoharu, because many people who read it seem to assume I had an unequivocally horrible time in Japan, which certainly wasn’t the case at all.

You went back to Japan to study calligraphy for two years after finishing JET. How did that trip affect your art and your relationship with Japan?

Before I really got into it, I had no idea how deep East Asian calligraphy is, both in terms of history and technique. I’m now convinced that it’s the most sophisticated line art tradition in the world, hands down.

When a cartoonist wants to improve their penciling, they usually study Western art fundamentals such as perspective, anatomy and composition. I would argue that Eastern art fundamentals are just as useful to learn comic inking. Practicing East Asian calligraphy has improved my inking more than anything else I can point to.

Regarding your calligraphy learning experience, was it more of a disciplined practice that enhanced the skill you already had or was there something inherent in East Asian calligraphy that got added to you? Do you have any stories about the learning experience?

The discipline was certainly a huge part of it. Art classes in the US tend to emphasize personal expression over technique, so student critiques can be vague and coddling. The calligraphy classes I took in Japan were the exact opposite. We would be tasked with replicating a piece of classic calligraphy as accurately as possible. We’d show our attempt to the professor, who would point out where we went wrong, and we’d try again. They were technical exercises rather than creative ones, but they helped me learn how to control the brush in a way I never would have if left to my own devices. These skills, in turn, benefited my creative work.

Beyond technique, East Asian calligraphy has a number of qualities that informed my development as a cartoonist. It’d be too lengthy to get into them here, but if anyone’s interested I wrote a few entries about it on my blog:

http://larsmartinson.com/thoughts-about-lines/

What inspires you as an artist in the realms outside of comics? Music, film, visual art, etc.

I’ve always been fond of stories told through pictures, so most of what inspires me has visual and/or narrative elements. Wong Kar-wai movies, Knut Hamsun novels, and Hokusai’s sketchbook collections spring to mind as sources of inspiration. For music I really like Scandinavian folk; Hedningarna and Triakel are particularly good.

Recently I’ve become intrigued by the narrative potential of video games. I played Persona 4 Golden on the Vita last year, and it’s taken a place among my favorite narrative experiences in any medium. It paints a surprisingly subtle and nuanced portrait of a Japanese school life for a game that features demon-summoning and serial murder.

What is your favorite manga or manga artist? What draws you to that manga/artist?

I read tons of translated manga when I was in high school. Favorites at the time included Masamune Shirow, Johji Manabe, and Rumiko Takahashi. Eventually my interests drifted elsewhere, so I have to admit I’m not too familiar with the current manga scene. My favorite manga these days is hardly cutting edge: “Sazae-san” by Machiko Hasegawa. I explain why I admire it in this comic:

http://media.boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/sazae_930px_1.jpg

http://media.boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/sazae_930px_2.jpg

http://media.boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/sazae_930px_3.jpg

What has been the reaction of Japanese people who have read your graphic novel?

Image from Lars Martinson / Media

More than anything Japanese people tend to be surprised by the format. The Tonoharu books are hardcovers with two-color interior pages, which is all but unheard of in the manga world. Manga is usually first serialized in weekly or monthly b&w anthologies, so creative choices such as page sizes and printing methods are out of artists’ hands. Conversely, anything goes for American indie comics, so there’s a lot more diversity in terms of presentation, use of color, and binding.

Many of our readers have expressed interest in moving to Japan to become mangaka. What advice would you have for them?

I’ve never actually worked in the Japanese comics industry, so I’ll refrain from speculating on that in particular. But in broader terms, I wouldn’t advise pursuing a “career” as an artist unless you can’t imagine being happy doing anything else.

By some measures, Tonoharu has been a massive success; it’s been covered in the Wall Street Journal and Entertainment Weekly, translated into French and Spanish, and has sold out two hardcover printings with a paperback edition coming down the pipeline. But for all that, I’ve never made anything even approaching a living wage off of my work. Granted, I don’t have many books to sell, since I work at a glacial pace (spending more than ten years on three books is pretty ridiculous). But either way, trying to make a living as an artist rarely makes financial sense no matter how productive you are.

That said, I’m certainly not trying to dissuade people from pursuing something they’re passionate about. Obviously I wish I made more money from my comics, but I don’t for a second regret creating them. I guess my advice to someone looking to work in the Japanese comics industry would be the painfully obvious; strive to improve your craft as much as possible, and become proficient in Japanese. And make sure you’re having fun doing it, because there’s a good chance it may not provide as much monetary compensation as you’d like.

Tonoharu Part Two ends with a cliffhanger. What is in store for Dan in the third volume?

With each book, I’ve tried to capture different aspects of the experience of teaching in Japan. Notably absent in the first two books is any sort of meaningful interaction between Dan and his students, so I devote a significant chunk of the third book to that. This makes for some of my favorite scenes in the whole series, so I hope readers enjoy it as well.

What is your opinion of Japanese cake?

Almost always disappointing.

While living in Japan, Hello Kitty was unavoidable. My fringe awareness became a full on, hyper-focused red alert of Hello Kitty presence. She was everywhere. And I mean everywhere like Christmas music the day after Halloween. She was on my student’s pen cases, my co-worker’s desk, my friend’s shoes, jewelry, cups, refrigerator magnets, smocks, spoons, hats, cars, everything! I was suffocating in Kitty-chan. But the suffocating wouldn’t have been so bad if everyone around me didn’t love the suffocation so much.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t begrudge a character just because it’s popular. But with Hello Kitty I couldn’t understand for the life of me why she was popular. And I had (at the time) two good reasons why she shouldn’t be.

1. Her design is too simple. White face, two dots, yellow nose. Boring! Great character designs like Bugs Bunny or Gundam Zaku have some complexity or originality to their form. They involve something substantial and imaginative you can hold onto.
2. She’s not _from_ anything. We western-types like our vacuous media characters to have a source, like how Mario is from a video game and Spider-man is from a comic book. A lot of characters I like are paper thin in their depth of character but at least I can say, “I really like the cereal they’re from!”

But despite having nothing to hold onto, a lot of people, many of whom I respected as individuals, held onto Hello Kitty for dear life. So what was I missing? Let’s address these gripes in order.

1. Her Design Is Too Simple

My first complaint was that Hello Kitty’s design was too simple. And therein lies the problem, right? Unless you consider what draws us to cartoon characters in the first place. When you strip an image of its details (shading, texture, etc.) down to its essential elements, it becomes less specific. It is no longer a picture of one thing but a representation of that thing.

This is clearly a picture of Tom Hanks. He may be mistaken for someone else, but generally, most people will know this picture represents Tom Hanks.

This still may be recognized as Tom Hanks, but if you look at it in a different way, maybe it looks like someone you work with. The realistic details have been stripped away and now the image may represent a wider range of types of people.

As we trim away the details, he becomes more ambiguous…

And more able to represent anyone.

Now we are about as nonspecific as you can get. A few dots, some lines and a circle. This is incredibly simple and anyone can draw it. But whose face is being depicted? Is it male or female? Old or young? Without the artist giving details about whose face has been drawn, it is up to the viewer to decide what is being seen.

The less specific the image, the more power the viewer has to interpret it. What do you see when you look at Hello Kitty? She is a simplification of a cat, but what kind of attitude or style is she emitting? Visual storytelling guru, Scott McCloud, has this to say about the cartoon form, of which Hello Kitty is a part:

“The cartoon is a vacuum into which our identity and awareness are pulled, an empty shell that we inhabit which enables us to travel in another realm. We don’t just observe the cartoon, we become it!”

More than likely, what you’re seeing is you! What does Hello Kitty look like to you? Is she cute or sassy? Grown up or childish? Fun or chic? It mostly depends on who you are and what you want her to be. Her blankness draws you in and allows you to interpret her, and then wear or own her in the style you choose.

But in essence, all cartoons can do this. This interpretation of representation is vital to the cartoon form. So what makes Hello Kitty different?

A Game of Cat and Mouth

Hello Kitty’s ability to be interpreted is taken one step further than, say, Betty Boop or Tintin. The advantage Kitty-chan holds is her lack of a mouth. The reason for this is summed up best by Yuko Yamaguchi, the current character designer (meaning “boss”) of Hello Kitty:

“[She doesn't have a mouth] so that people who look at her can project their own feelings onto her face, because she has an expressionless face. Kitty looks happy when people are happy. She looks sad when they are sad. For this psychological reason, we thought she shouldn’t be tied to any emotion – and that’s why she doesn’t have a mouth.”

The power of Hello Kitty’s interpretation now extends a layer deeper, beyond our idea of what she represents into our idea of what she is feeling. This gives her life in our minds, in a way that “mouthed” cartoons can’t. What Mickey Mouse is feeling at any given moment, not counting his situation or environment, can be clearly seen through his mouth. Hello Kitty, lacking this feature, could be feeling anything at any time! And thus whatever we may be feeling can and probably does get transferred onto her face.

2. She’s not from anything

What about my second gripe, the one where I say that Hello Kitty comes from “nothing”? Well, that too is remedied by her inane face. The same way in which she absorbs the interpretations and feelings of her viewer, she also absorbs the surroundings of the designs she inhabits. Put her in a pink dress surrounded by hearts and butterflies, and oh! She is so adorable! Put her in black and white on a designer wallet and how retro chic she becomes! Oh, and put her in a Godzilla costume. She looks right at home there, too.

No matter where you put her that’s where she belongs. And that’s why she can’t “be from” something. Her lack of definition works for her yet again. She’s from “nowhere” and “everywhere” at the same time.

INTRODUCING! Mr. Rounded-Edge Rectangle Head Man!

So there it is! I have unlocked the secret to the multimillion dollar success of Hello Kitty. Coincidentally, I am proud to announce my new character, Mr. Rounded-Edge Rectangle Head Man!

I’ll be putting him on cycling gloves and fanny-packs, so get ready to mail me all your money!

No dice?

Oh wait, I forgot. There is another pair of creations by Sanrio that are not nearly as popular as Hello Kitty:

Patty and Jimmy! Despite being simplified and having no mouth, these two are hideous and unpopular. But they got the formula down, so what’s the problem?

This Little Kitty Went to Market

Kitty-chan’s design, genius though it may be, was not enough to bring her billions right off the bat. Even though she had early success, there was a long process of good luck and good decision-making before she really started raking in the fanbucks.

Hello Kitty creator Yuko Shimizu was tasked with creating six characters for Sanrio in 1974. Among these was an unassuming white cat. Shimizu was keen enough to realize that simplicity was important for the characters she designed, but she didn’t understand the impact of removing Hello Kitty’s mouth.

“I couldn’t express the mouth in a cute way, so I decided not to use it.”

That was the genius move that set Kitty apart. A happy accident. The decision behind the defining feature of this iconic character was a lack of decision.

But Shimizu’s indecision was fruitful and her character was immediately successful among young girls. In the beginning, Hello Kitty was only printed on small gifts like stationery and watches, usually sitting on a couch or cutely flying a bi-plane. The following fifteen or so years saw a steady decline in popularity for Kitty-chan. She remained a mildly popular children’s commodity until the children began to grow up.

In 1994 Sanrio launched Hello Kitty’s “Face Series” to extend her appeal to an older audience. Sanrio had spent twenty years selling Kitty goods to children and had begun to grasp the power of her meaningless face. The attachment of kids to this character was strong and it would be foolish to let that attachment weaken as they grew older. The “Face Series” was Sanrio’s first attempt to market Hello Kitty products to teens and adults. Oh, and it worked. Big time. Biggly large time.

Sanrio continued its smartness in the early 2000s when it conducted research which concluded that one third of people shopping in the U.S. were over eighteen and shopping for themselves. Surprise! Five-year-olds have no money. This led to Kitty goods which encompassed more sophisticated items such as lingerie, guitars and designer watches.

At the present time, Hello Kitty has become empress of the merchandising world. Her malleable visage graces everything for everyone, from dollar bin tissue boxes to designer purses. She is bought by grown women with a sense for high fashion and young girls who “wike kitties.” This cat’s power is astounding.

The White Queen

Do I still hate Hello Kitty? Not at all. I’m not a fan in the traditional sense, but I find the unintentional genius of her design and the business acumen with which she was put to use utterly fascinating. The power of the consumer to mentally project whatever meaning they want onto your product means you lose control of your product, but gain control of the consumer. You basically have the power to sell consumer’s selves to themselves!

The concept of this kind of power inhabiting a modest white cat makes her seem so much more formidable. She has a great power to grant the comfort of her world built around one’s own wishes, but with it maintains the control of all who love her. She is no mere mascot, but a queen! Not dark, but beautiful and terrible as the dawn! Treacherous as the sea! Stronger than the foundations of the earth! All shall love her, and despair!

Or perhaps that’s just how I choose to interpret her.

Sources:

• TIME Magazine
• Buying In by Rob Walker
• Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud
• Wikipedia

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Bonus Wallpapers!

[1280x800 - Teal] ∙ [2560x1600 - Teal] ∙ [1280x800 - Red] ∙ [2560x1600 - Red]