speach tree

Picking up again on the theme of sacrifice / ambition in March Comes in Like a Lion , escape/discipline is another theme that circulates throughout the series and closely mirrors the sacrifice theme. The main character's adoptive brother and sister failed to become high-level  shogi  players because of their lack of discipline. Instead they play video games and run away from home. Another main character, Hinata, becomes the target of bullies, lead by a girl named Takagi, who victimizes "losers" because she's afraid to work hard and test her own abilities. Some minor characters make fun of Shimada, the  shogi  player with stomach ulcers, taking cheap shots because they know they might never get to his level. These characters all provide the foil against which the main character and his friends' discipline and perseverance shine. All of this sounds trite when described in words here, but for some reason the illustration/animation make the story so dramatic and re...

7/24/18 Very quickly, while Ichiro is sleeping... I'm currently following Umino Chika's super-popular manga/anime 「 三月のライオン 」( March Comes In Like a Lion ) which has been such a huge hit despite some very heavy themes. During the first season, I was drawn to the main character's struggle with his status as both an orphan and a genius shogi player, who makes more money than his high school teacher as a professional player. This season though I am more interested in the work's theme of sacrifice. The show's more drab characters most clearly illustrate this theme. Particularly, Shimada Kai and Yanagihara Sakutaro. Kai is in his thirties and Sakutaro is in his sixties, and both have given up a lot to play shogi on their level. Kai has stomach ulcers, a failed relationship, early signs of aging. Sakutaro has many physical ailments, seems to be single, is the oldest active A-class player. As they square off, both have flashbacks to what they have lost in order t...

i'm beginning to realize that a big reason why i keep going back to art is because i feel like it's something i can control. i can create and adjust all the discreet elements and how they interact to create the right conditions for change. but life isn't such a small endeavor. i wonder what james cameron does when he's not inventing ecosystems and alien cultures? when i was younger, i thought that charlotte bronte was great, but of course she could create intricate social relationship dramas because she was shut up in a room all day. same goes for lady murasaki. and when i try to live life instead of escaping into my art, i flounder.

I'm really into Lupe at the moment. So much in fact, that I even designed one of my main manga characters off of him. Avery takes a page from many of my former students (mostly black male high school students) but he is supposed to look like Lupe. OK, so given the dearth of realistic black characters in the manga of my youth, i have to disclaim the unnatural look of my black characters... Hopefully I'll be able to throw up some samples so you can judge for yourselves. But yeah, with practice, hopefully...

i was talking to DW the other night about random things, and the topic of how to reconnect with our past selves came up. i mentioned that the manga project has done a lot to reconnect me with my past in a way that soothes the pain, even as it brings back painful memories psychologically, spiritually, and somatically. what that means is that as i sat at my old desk in my grandmother's house at the end of august, i felt myself being dragged into old patterns of thinking, behavior, even sitting - in short, i felt the cells in my body as i used to feel them when i would sit at that desk as a 5th grader, hating the summer homework that i was doing at the time, feeling estranged from any community, swatting mosquitoes... it feels good to be drawing again. it's something i've done almost since i could hold a pencil, and it allows me to write and escape and even confront old mistakes and tragedies. i'm not good enough to tackle anything huge yet, but i want to get there.

- music is essential - the drawing arm gets tired quickly at first, but perseverance leads to the development of new muscles - the quality of light makes a huge difference in endurance - weight loss (loss of muscle mass?) is not uncommon - characters evolve constantly but it helps to have a real-life model in mind (for me at least) - it's actually a lot harder than it looks to create flashy action sequences without common tropes like magic, tournament fighting, rival youth gangs, etc.

it feels like i haven't had such a long vacation as this in 15 years, but of course that is a lie. there have been plenty of winter breaks, or summer breaks where i couldn't find a job. oh and of course in 2004 i peaced out and flew to mexico for 3 months. what have i done this month? have i learned to chill and let go of control? not really... will i ever learn? probably not... i don't feel guilty though. i started the vacation feeling mad guilty because it was right after a huge mobilization for the anti-gentrification campaign in chinatown and because i hadn't really done anything for the break the chains campaign. but why feel guilty? it doesn't solve anything and it gets in the way of really appreciating the time that i do have. once i got over my guilt, i ended up outlining 50 pages of my manga in one week. i only have one regret, which is that i was so intense about my manga that i didn't spend much one-on-one time with my grandmother. she is like me in t...

My father just moved out of his rental and bought a house in Burke, VA. It's small. It is by a lake and the lake is very nice. I am excited about putting my new room together, but it is going very slowly and I have too many books. I want it to be a workspace for manga and story writing!!!! uh-oh my bro is home and i must get off his computer.

http://kinosei.wordpress.com/ I decided to make a separate, more "edited" (ie: censored) blog for the nitty gritty stuff and the stuff I want to show to people who... don't know me that well... The working title is "The Animator" Please take a look around - please also forgive the haphazard and the absurd in it. Definitely a work-in-progress. I hope you find it useful to your work in any way, and that you will share with anyone else interested in education and this particular manifestation of contemporary pop-culture.

Day 3: Kids' Day Sunday April 20 The NYCC blog (MediumAtLarge.net) reports a preliminary count of more than 64,000 attendees for the weekend. Pretty huge. I only made it to 2 panels today, but I met cool people and swiped a lot of SWAG so it was OK. I went to Harold & Kumar, where Kal Penn (who played Kumar), Neil Patrick Harris (who played Neil Patrick Harris), and the writer/directors sat and talked about making the movie, laughing at racists, and shipping in a woman with "the biggest tits in the world." Very enlightening stuff. Interestingly, the first movie did poorly in theaters but the DVD sales alone made it possible for them to make a sequel. Then I went to the Show Floor, where I met an art teacher in the Bronx. I was initially drawn to his historical/historical-fiction comic Bronx Heroes, calling for accurate representation of the Bronx and also for resistance to gentrification. We talked about lesson plans for students learning the art of comics, where to f...

A relatively small crowd patiently waits for the appearance of a perfectly coiffed Japanese pop legend. T.M. Revolution's fame in the U.S. is owed largely to a certain red-haired anime swordsman... 11:30am Arrive at Javits Center and meander to the events hall. I'm too late to get into whatever movie is being featured in the IGN.COM theater (the main stage) so I float around and eventually settle into Del Rey's panel. The Del Rey team announces its new releases for this year and the coming year. Some highlights: Fairy Tail by the creator of One Piece; a collaboration mystery/fantasy suspense by Dean Koontz and Queenie Chan; and Me and the Devil Blues about a (historical) legendary blues singer who is said to have been so good that he must have made a pact with the devil. 1:00 pm I peek into the "Comics Writers Talk about Writing" panel but it's a bunch of people I don't know and don't care about so I head over to the Show Room on the upper level. The S...

I guess I'll call it the Dave Chappelle Effect for now. I don't think that Chappelle ever came out and said that he left Comedy Central because he was uncomfortable with performing a black caricature for his audience of (by that time) mostly white people. I think he was a little more tactful, choosing instead to highlight the discomfort he felt about how his fame was affecting his private time with his family. But the effect I'm talking about is something best articulated in "YELLING AT THE SCREEN: An Open Letter From Dave Chappelle to His White Fans" (a parody by a blogger whose name I forget), and also in all the internet gossip about his conversation with Oprah after his return from South Africa... In any case, it's not just Chappelle. More than a few critics say that Chinua Achebe, Amy Tan, Nawal El Saadawi and a few other well-known and well-critiqued writers write more for the benefit of white audiences than for non-whites. Of course, I am no exception. ...

The New York Comic Convention is a 3-day annual pop-culture event attended by 1000s of comic/cartoon/video-game/anime/manga/graphic novel fans from New York and beyond. This is my first time attending, and I'm also chaperoning a group of 5 high school students from my Anime and Japanese after-school clubs. It's interesting to compare the Comic Con to last December's Anime Festival (both held at Jacob Javits Convention Center at 34th & 12th in Manhattan). We arrived at 3pm, in time for General Programs. (The morning activities were only for professionals and industry folks.) I attended bits and pieces of the following panels: America: Through the Eyes of the Graphic Novel a panel of white men talking about America. I (and my students) left after hearing that they were working on a bunch of projects on the "sad events following 9-11," and other projects commissioned by the Department of Defense for the repatriation of Iraq War veterans. I had been excited about...

For those of you just joining this thread, click on the "anime/manga" tag in the column to the right, to find out what I’m talking about. I just wanted to throw up my work in progress, so bear with me as I edit this over the next few days. This is maybe the 3rd major anime convention I have ever attended in my 23 years of life on this planet. The first two times, I went to the Baltimore Otakon 2000 and 2001 (I don’t remember the exact years) with some friends during high school. I find it kind of interesting to mention a few comparisons between Otakon at the turn of the millennium and the New York Anime Festival in 2007. *Disclaimer: This exercise is obviously problematic, since: Baltimore and NYC are totally different cities. Furthermore, Otakon had already become an established event in the DC-metropolitan area by the millennium, whereas NYAF - according to Show Manager Peter Tatara - is only in its first year as such (there has been an annual New York Comic Con for a while...

As promised, one down a half-dozen to go. But first, let's define some terms. "Shoujo" is a genre of manga with some or all of the following: a pubescent or adolescent girl protagonist heterosexual romance heterosexual tensions including a.) unrequited love b.) jealous female or male rivals c.) pheromone-drenched young male eye candies in multiples of 2 or 4, or d.) all of the above high school or middle school uniform with slouchy socks (late 90s, early 2000s) elaborate, melodramatic eyes fireworks, beach scenes, girls in yukata, and other summer fare the conspicuous absence of homework Of course, I am dating myself. Before the 80s, you would have seen a lot more European white girls with some aquarium-sized glistening eyeballs in the shoujo genre but for some reason no one really cares about Isabella or Claudette anymore. OK so. As some of you may already know, I am currently translating (at non-unionized wages) a shoujo manga called 3-Ai, which is not the real name of ...

Remember how I talked about the imagery and Christian themes in the first 20 episodes of Death Note? Well now I'm going to talk about the second opening, which has a soundtrack that is much less pop than the first one. "Hey hey human sucker, Hey human fucker" is a refrain, which, along with "convenience Banzai human" sort of sums up the whole song, I think. But the imagery! So interesting! Doesn't the opening reflect more of the international audience of Death Note? Do I detect a compositional reference to the Black Panthers? Does Amane Misa finally turn into a porn star? Is there a Matrix allusion? And is it just me or does Light seem to really lose it in the end? Below are some frame stop times for you if you want to take a look at what I'm talking about. (Just look up "Death Note 2nd Opening"on youtube and you will probably find a 1min20sec video with corresponding frame-times): 0:00 - 0:08, "Death Note" in a bunch of different lan...

Death Note Notes, Part 2 I finished watching the Death Note series on the internet over Turkey Break. My earlier observations remain with no major modifications. I don't want to spoil the ending for those of you who are still watching, but I do want to talk a little bit about a few trends that I see in Japanese pop media. #1 The Thriller. As I said before, this series masterfully juggles suspense, fantasy, and thriller elements into what I consider to be the epitome of good anime: It does what live-action movies can't do, it does what novels can't do, and it has a great soundtrack. So fun. On another note, I think that many viewers of this anime (myself especially) have been so thoroughly trained to consider the Greek Tragedy to be Good Form that we can't help but get sucked in. According to Greek Tragedy formula, Light is a Tragic Hero because he comes from a "good," noble family, is good-looking, smart, attractive, and has a Tragic Flaw : Hubris (in Engli...

Lately, I have been watching the anime series Death Note obsessively on youtube. Here is the premise, in my own words (you can also check out Wikipedia etc): Light Yagami, the smartest kid in school, one day finds the “Death Note,” a magical notebook that gives its owner the supernatural ability to kill anyone by merely writing the victim’s name in the pages of the book, while thinking clearly of the victim’s face. without both the name and the face of the victim, the owner of the Death Note cannot complete the killing. Light decides to create a “perfect world” by killing all criminals. Eventually the most powerful political institutions of the world appoint a mysterious genius detective, known only as “L”, to solve the mystery of why all the world’s criminals (that make it onto the nightly news) are dropping dead. (To find Death Note episodes free on youtube, look for “DN ep 1” or some other variation. If it’s overly obvious, the people who hold the rights to the DVD will pull it of...

DW found me an article by Michio Kaku (famous physicist on string theory and - apparently - sometime anti-racist cultural critic) anayzing the history of racist Asian imagery/stereotypes in U.S. comics! Amazing! and I am also reading a feature article in the Japanese magazine, PEN with New Attitude, about the history of world comics and its impact on Japanese manga! The analysis, to come.

I have been wanting to keep a log of all the movies I watch, since I keep track of all the books I read on goodreads.com. It would be nice to get better at critically analyzing the movies I watch, just because it's so easy to watch a movie but to think about what I've seen is complicated. So I will start today with a Japanese movie, made and released in 2006, called Boku wa imouto ni koi wo suru . My translation: "I fall in love with my sister." It stars Matsumoto Jun (he's in all the high-profile J-dramas these days like Gokusen and Hana Yori Dango , both of which were adapted from manga.) Not surprisingly, this movie is based on a manga of the same title, written by Kotomi Aoki and published by Shogakukan Publications, Ltd. Since I'm interested in social politics through manga as a medium, I'm going to talk about how the movie works in a social context. There are two different issues I want to talk about: Japanese geographic culture and Taboos. Geograph...