Month: July 2004

Homestay, day 1
We got ourselves checked out of the hotel this morning and I found that calls to the US must be around $1/minute, as I’d called Ariesna a couple of times and hadn’t spoken all that long but the bill was rather high. After we were all checked out, we walked down to the language school. It was extremely hot out and there wasn’t a lot of shade. I noticed K was having problems, so I carried her bag for her to the school. Once we were there, one of the teachers brought us some drinks and snacks, but the A/C wasn’t working all that well and we were still frying.
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Today, we went to see the animation exhibit at Museum of Contempary Art Tokyo (MOT). It was a good exhibit but our translator was using a quiet voice while there were animated bits blasting out their music and voices, making her hard to hear. The exhibit covered Japanese animation from it’s very beginnings1 to the present day. Again for the most part, cameras were forbidden but towards the end of the exhibit they had a mock up of Lupin’s car from Castle of Cagliostro which they did allow you to take pictures of (but no flash allowed). In that same area, they also had some of the pre-production art and key-frame art from Porco Rosso, which was so damn cool! 😀
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Today, we had our last class where we could work on our original manga page. Thanks to E & SH allowing me hang out in their room and work on my page; I was able to finish it1. Unfortunately, I forgot to bring any of my omiyage gifts with me; so I couldn’t give one to Ueda-sensai or the assistants who were in there2. The assistants and ???-san3 came with us to the hotel and later to Ghibli museum; so I was able to give them their omiyage then.
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Today we had a different instructor, Koshikawa-sensai, for our manga class. She demonstrated some more advanced screentone techniques and then they turned us loose to we could get started on our original work. I should note that during the previous night before falling asleep, I’d worked up a manga name (rough draft on normal paper) of what I thought I might like to draw for my original work. I did this because they kept encouraging us to use as many of the techniques that they’d taught us as we could. However I wasn’t too keen on the idea of trying to draw (and ink and apply screentones and cleanup and finish) a full strip in 2 days. So during class when they mentioned that we could do do just a character sketch if we wanted; I figured I had my out and set the manga name to the side to get started on the character sketch.
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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.
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