CoffeeBear.net

Japan Day 2

Posted by Mark | Filed under Travel

It was obvi­ous that I hadn’t adjusted to Tokyo time yet, because while I didn’t have to be up and ready to go to class until 9:45am; I was awake by 5:30. My room-mate (L) and I got up and went out for a look around. Being really early, there weren’t many peo­ple around yet, but a few business-men and office-ladies were hur­ry­ing off to work. I think it was when we were about a block away from the hotel when it really hit me that I was in a for­eign coun­try. Some­thing about there only being one another white guy around and no Eng­lish to be heard or seen any­where around. It was just a small but impres­sive moment for me.

Any­way, L wanted to find the McDonald’s; so we wan­dered around for a while and found the train sta­tion & a KFC but not the McDonald’s. We headed back to the hotel because the heat was start­ing to get to us and now the hotel’s cafe was serv­ing the free break­fast. We ate and then AWelkin–sen­sai, A & Bryon came in for break­fast. After we all fin­ished eat­ing AWelkin-sensai took us out to show us around the area a bit and help L find the McDonald’s. She also pointed out some banks for us (use­ful for exchang­ing traveler’s checks) and showed us the inte­rior of the train sta­tion.

Then we headed back to the hotel¹ and met up with every­body else to head out to TCA². This is a much shorter walk than the Jikei build­ing was. After we got there Yamada-san (sp?) gave us a short introduction/oreintation to the TCA and then turned the class over to Inaba-sensai who gave us an out­line of Japan­ese manga. He mostly cov­ered the method that he uses to cre­ate a manga:

3 things to keep in mind
1. YOUR READERS³
2. The num­ber of pages you want to use to tell the story
3. The con­cept or idea of what you want to draw

Then he cov­ered his process of actu­ally pro­duc­ing a manga:

1. Plan the manga
2. Cre­ate a rough out­line of the story
3. Cre­ate a rough out­line of the main characters
4. Firm up your story and rough out some of the sup­port­ing characters
5. Work on story struc­ture & com­po­si­tion as well doing a review of each episode that you want in thr manga to be sure it will advance the story
6. Review your char­ac­ters again in light of h0w the story is developing
7. ‘Manga name’: this was basi­cally described as work­ing up the rough sketches of what the manga will be like, but doing it it on nor­mal paper rather than ‘real’ manga paper
8. Revise & clean up rough sketches
9. Begin real pen­cil­ing of manga
10. Draw in frames around sketches
11. Ink char­ac­ters, start­ing with their speech balloons
12. Back­grounds: use faint lines for emphasis
13. Fill in fab­ric & sound effects
14. Fin­ish­ing 01
15. Fin­ish­ing 02: use screen­tones and clean up any spots or smears

Inaba-sensai didn’t speak Eng­lish and so he was mostly trans­lated by Keki-san who did a won­der­ful job (though she did seem ner­vous about it).

Then we had a lunch break. I ate a rice ball/cake and some sort of sushi roll thing with some orange crude to drink.

After that we had our first Japan­ese les­son with Sato-sensai and he’s quite the ener­genic char­ac­ter. By the end of the day, we’d cov­ered how to do some basic intro­duc­tions, includ­ing telling peo­ple what our hob­bies were. At the very end of the day, he had us work on writ­ing our names in katakana and then showed us how to write other inter­est­ing words.

In the evening, a bunch of us went out to look around and get some­thing to eat. Unfor­tu­nately, there was a book­store right near the hotel and every­body went in there first. It took about half an hour to get them out of it. Then they had to notice all the flip­pin’ manga out­side the store and it was another 15 min­utes before I could tear them away from it to go and get some­thing to eat. Then we walked down the Metro⁴ and almost stopped to eat sev­eral times. Even­tu­ally our group, of about 10, split up. I went with E and KO to eat at a tem­pura shop, while every­body else went to var­i­ous places. The tem­pura was divine and I don’t know if I’ll be ble to eat the tem­pura back in the US again because this was much, much better!

Then we wan­dered around a bit more and KO went back to the hotel but E wanted to go look at some more manga/bookstores; so I went with her. After about another hour of look­ing around, nei­ther of us had bought any­thing and we decided to call it a night.

¹ Our hotel is part of the Toyoko Inn chain.
² Tokyo Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Arts col­lege (I think)
³ This was stressed repeat­edly.
⁴ It’s a long row of shops that runs under the train.

Similar Posts

• Japan Day 4
  Today we had a different instructor, Koshikawa-sensai, for our manga class. She demonstrated some mo ...
• Japan Day 5
  Today, we had our last class where we could work on our original manga page. Thanks to E & SH allowi ...
• Japan Day 3
  Again I woke up before our alarm phone1 went off. I got up, dressed and enjoyed a breakfast of mizo ...
• Japan Day 8
  Homestay Day 2 We slept fairly late and then R & M made us brunch. A massive salad with tomatoes and ...
• Japan Day 10
  Today, we hit 3 temples over in the Kamakura region. And since I'm feeling lazy, I'm just going to p ...