Japan Day 3 « CoffeeBear.net

Japan Day 3

Posted by Mark | Filed under Travel

Hello there! If you are new here, you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed for updates on this topic.

Again I woke up before our alarm phone¹ went off. I got up, dressed and enjoyed a breakfast of mizo soup and rice cakes with some strong Japanese coffee. I love the soup, the rice is okay but I’ve gotten used to it.

After breakfast, we headed over to the school and Ueda-sensai taught us a bit about using a manga drawing pen as well as some basic screentone techniques. After spending half a day trying to follow the instructions that Ueda-sensai gave us; I have a whole new respect for professional manga artists. Straight lines are easy, but curves are massively hard. They havea technique to create texture and shading where you basically draw 5–6 short straight lines close together to make a square and then draw more, similar squares at an angle to your original. You can then later and go back to draw lines perpindicular to your original ones to make a darker area and keep doing this until you get the shade you want. This allows for some gradual shading and is a nice effect but takes a very long time to do. Speed lines (used to show quick motion) are another technique and are faster to draw but much harder for me to draw neatly. I usually end up using various levels of pressure and have trouble keeping my pen parallel to the ruler, so my lines turn out like crap.

After the pen, Ueda-sensai moved onto the screentones which are a quick way to fill in a large area a color to create texture or shadows. We got some basic instructions in this which showed us the power of the technique but this too was difficult for me; since I tend to use too much pressure with my knife when trying to cut out the parts of the screentone that I want.

Then Ueda-sensai had us make a snowman manga². I was feeling a bit tired and rushed when doing this, but several of the sensai’s assistants liked my snowman’s hat — a basic stocking cap, which they took to be a Santa hat and I didn’t argue with them –. This took the rest of the class day and then I went with L to MosBurger for lunch. They didn’t speak English and I didn’t know the words I needed in Japanese but thanks to picture menus and a VERY patient waitress; we were able to get some food without too much of a problem. I think what I ate was a terriyaki chicken burger, but there was so much mayo on it that I can’t really be sure. The kora³ was just like you would expect. Then we headed back to the school for our next Japanese lesson with Sato-sensai.

And that’s when he taught us how to order food and took us on a field trip to.… MosBurger! wheee. *grin* I ended up ordering an iced coffee (aisu koohii) which was amazingly strong, even after adding a bit of creamer. After fooling around in Mosburger for far too long; we went back to the school and finished our lesson. Though there was a surprise waiting for us at the school. Bryon was back from Akihabara, where I had been expecting to go find him after class to meet him and AWelkin (with L along) to do some shopping. Apparently AWelkin had some heat exhaustion and he dragged her back to the hotel to rest; however he was still willing to drag us geeks out to Akihabara. So L, A and I followed him there and we did some shopping. The rest of them spent a lot more moeny than I did; as all I got was some anime postcards including some⁴ that I think Ariesna will like. The heat while we were there was aboslutely miserable and I was wondering if I was going to end up with heat exhaustion myself but a quick can of Dr. Pepper⁵ and some freezing cold A/C prevented that tragedy.

Shortly there after we headed back to the Nishi-Kasai (district of Tokyo where our hotel is). Getting back was quite the experience, as we ran into the famous sardine-can-scenario on the train where people were oacked in so tightly that you didn’t need to hold onto anything to remain standing. After we were back in Nishi-Kasai; Bryon headed straight to the hotel while the rest of us stopped at a convience store to buy some dinner. Then it was back to the hotel to eat and sleep.

¹ The room does not have an alarm clock, instead you program your phone for a wake-up call.
² It was just a small, single page with a snowman in the middle and a small amount of background.
³ kora means Coca-cola or something like that anyway.
⁴ No, I won’t tell you what they are that would ruin the surprise!
⁴ I need to remember to post the pic I took of it because it looks nothing like the cans back home.