I played around on this website for way too long. Thanks to Cscout, I came across the website kyokasho.net, which allows you to choose from several school subjects, and then doodle all over the pictures of historical figures. I remember those days. They weren’t all that long ago. I would ignore the teacher (maybe that’s why I became a Japanese Studies major?) and do all sorts of horrible things to my textbooks. One thing I remember doing was erasing numbers in my math books (those pen erasers were good for this) and rewrite the numbers in the same font so the poor sap who got my book the next year could be as confused as I was. When I wasn’t feeling like such a horrible person, I’d doodle on the faces of historical figures. This is exactly what this website allows you to do. Some folks get pretty ridiculously creative. It’s great.

When you go to kyokasho.net, you’ll see the most popular additions, as well as the most recent. If you scroll down to the very bottom, you’ll see different classroom subjects. If you click on one of these, you’ll get a gallery of pictures to choose from to do whatever you’d like with. When you finally choose an image, you’ll be able to use a graphite colored pen, a red pen, or an eraser. It’s amazing what some people do with such simple tools. It certainly beats my tie fighters flying in to knock around George Washington, or whoever.

Once you’re done, hit this button to save it. You’ll even be able to view a start-to-finish of how it was drawn. Really cool for some of the really complicated ones.

Sadly, all the text that make up the “textbooks” are from Wikipedia (which I suppose makes sense when it comes to copyright issues). Textbooks in Japan are pretty universal across the nation. Usually you’ll only see a few different textbooks in a particular subject, so the Japanese education experience is often shared in areas all over Japan. I was hoping for a little bit of that, but it wasn’t meant to be. Still, don’t let that stop you from having some fun. Here, I even made a Tofugu one.

And closer up…

Pretty lame. If anyone else wants to do one that has anything to do with Tofugu, I’ll stick it up in the fanart section of the site :)

If you’re not particularly interested in going to kyokasho.net, and want to stay here, I thought I’d collect some of my favorite images for you to view right here. There’s hundreds of thousands more on the actual website, though, so I suggest you go enjoy it yourself! Seriously, this website is one of those websites that would really only do this well in Japan.

I bet some of you are pretty creative. Feel free to link us your creations in the comments!