Hello everyone,
It's been a while, hasn't it? 'Twas just before Golden Week that I posted! I went and had an amazing time in Fukui with my high school buddy, who's living there. Then I came home and was an a train the next morning with my CSU crew as we headed to Hakone, a world known hotspring town/area in Japan. We spent the night in an amazing hotel with an inside and outside bath. So fun to just chill in the bath with friends!
For those who are unaware of Japanese bathing manners, there are showering stations in the bathing area where you are supposed to shower and wash before entering the bath. Culturally, one showers off before taking a bath, even in Japanese homes. Bath water is shared with everyone in the home, hence why you shower then enter the bath. Also, baths are seen as tools of relaxation, not a washing method.
Anyways, that following Monday, we were back in school, with two more CSU day trips in May. These day trips were on back-to-back Sundays, so I basically went to church one week, was gone the next because of my Golden Week trip to Fukui, then back to church the next week, only to be gone for two Sundays in a row. This past Sunday and the Sunday before that were the first two Sundays that I have gone to church in a row since before Golden Week....
Anyways, back to the day trips. The first one was to the opening day of a huge Sumo Tournament!...Yes, sumo as in the fat man wrestling. It was glorious fun to watch! There was a...how shall I say it....compact Caucasian wrestler who dominated his match within just a couple of moves. His opponent charged upon the match starting, so the springy white guy nearly vanished off to the side of his charging opponent, did what is called a joint lock (which is a type of hold or grasp on the opponent's limbs that restricts and prevents movements), then threw him out of the ring. Totally crazy to watch, since Mr. Caucasian seemed like a twig compared to all the other wrestlers. Surprisingly, a large (hah! large...) chunk of the wrestlers were not Japanese. Having watched Sumo before on Japanese t.v., I was expecting a speckling of non-Japanese wrestlers, but there were many more than even what I had expected.
The following week we went to see Japanese Kabuki theatre. Kabuki theatre consists of a few plays of various genres and types (dancing vs. pure acting) in one package. So we saw a dance performance, then a tragedy play (which was the main performance), followed by a lunch break and then the final comedy act. This sort of performance packaging is also seen in the masked Japanese Noh plays, where in older times, going to the "theatre" to see a Noh performance consisted of...I believe...7 plays, one from each genre of Noh performances. But, that's another topic for another time. I just happened to have a Noh class last semester....
Since our day trips, life has been relatively quiet....until last week. Last Monday after class, I found out through my homepage, Anime News Network, about an International Manga Competition being held by Shonen Jump, the most famous of the manga publishing magazines. Manga, for those who don't know, are Japanese comic books. Most of these manga are not like the Sunday Funnies in the newspaper, rather they are known as visual novels, similar in many aspects to Batman, Spiderman, ect. That means each chapter leads directly into the next with each chapter ending on a cliffhanger. Unlike mainstream American comics, manga have a very structured story that have a definite beginning and end. They are also published in specialized manga magazines (such as Shonen Jump) that are dedicated to selling just manga. These magazines are usually thick magazines that are published either weekly or monthly, based on the magazine itself. And each issue contains the same series. So Shonen Jump, being a weekly magazine, publishes the same set of series each week. In other words, the manga creator (or manga-ka in Japanese) has to have a chapter ready to be published for each issue of the magazine his/her series is in.
Thus brings me to Shonen Jump's manga competition. Last week (or at the end of the prior week) Shonen Jump announced this competition for which the fans can submit a manga chapter (either 15-, 19-, 31- or 45-pages in length) in either Chinese, Japanese, or English for a chance to be published and receive a momentary prize. There are four winners; the Grand Prize Winner and the three best language-specific winners. All four winners receive the same monetary prize according to yen. The major difference is that the language-specific winners get published in their country's version of Jump (nickname for Shonen Jump).....Which brings me to me.
I have decided to try and enter a manga chapter into this competition. The submission deadline is October 1st. Due to my lengthy story-telling style, I am (comfortably) writing and illustrating a 45-page manga with brand new characters and stories (since the publisher of Jump will own rights to the submitted chapters). This means that I will have to be completing about 2-3 pages weekly in order to finish in time to submit it...Within just last week, I wrote the story, thumbnailed the chapter pages (thumbnails are the small rough drafts of a drawing or work of art), and designed the main characters. And, as of tonight, I have finished outlining my first page (outlining is drawing just the lines of the charaters and elements of each scene/panel) and have starting sketching out my next couple of pages. But the sketching and outlining processes together are roughly 6-8 hrs per page for me. That doesn't including time for adding shadows and actually illustrating the work. So....yeah...this will be interesting. I will have about 3 weeks between school years in which I will hopefully finish most of the chapter.
With that being said....life will be hectic for a while. School, packing and sending stuff home, final trips with friends and CSU, registration for next year (which I still don't have a date for....), general family stuff and catching up with peops, and now this competition. If you don't hear from me again...assume that I'm buried beneath a pile of schoolwork and manga stuff....
Until then, Later peeps!
