"Black people are scary!"

Yesterday my teacher was walking around talking to different students in my class, and he started talking about his trip to France, where apparently he met a lot of strange people.
I wasn't really listening all that closely, but he mentioned something about black people there and said that "Black people are scary!"

I was quite shocked, to be honest, because it was so offensive! I was wondering if he would've said the same thing if one of the students present had been black. What if they do get a black student in the future, will my teacher be scared of this student??

It just goes to show that some Japanese people are still quite uneducated about the world, even if they travel abroad.
My teacher just happened to meet some strange people that were black, which reinforced this idea that black people are inherently this way.

Most of us know that this isn't true, there are no genes or what not that make a certain group of people of the same skin color more prone to violence and bad behavior or w.e.
But some people just can't help but dragging all people of a certain group through the same comb.

My teacher also said that "While you're young you should travel abroad at least once", which kinda tells you about how often Japanese people travel abroad, doesn't it?
I mean once in your life?? That's nothing! I've been abroad to so many countries so many times, since I was a kid! Maybe not every single person in Japan or where ever is interested in traveling, but I think most people are, and it pains me to think that some people might not even do it once.

And even if they do go abroad, most Japanese people still seem to travel with "tours", because they don't speak any English. Tours may be convenient, but you would probably learn more if you traveled by yourself.

Anyway, my teacher is of the older generation and the world becomes more and more integrated all the time, so I would think most people here wouldn't agree with his statement that black people are scary.

But it still got to me, it wasn't really about me (since I'm not black) but I still felt affected by it, it made me wonder what they think about me as a caucasian(?) as well as about other foreigners here.

3 years became 3 months

Now it's only 3 months left til I leave Japan!

I cannot believe it but three whole years have turned into three short months, and so my life in Japan will soon come to an end.
I've had my ups and downs in Japan, because of homesickness it wasn't always easy to be here, but most of the time I was fine and had a great time!

Three months go past like no time at all and if I think about how it all will end so soon I freak out a little. I wonder how I will like it in Sweden, now that I've been away for so long in this big town!
Mostly I think about how I will lose contact with my friends, or about the daunting task of moving from Japan back to Sweden. There are so many things I will have to do during that last month before I can leave, and it's all stuff I have never done before, so it's a bit scary.

I have to try and stop thinking about the day I leave, or else I will just be worrying all day!

Anyway, as a last little get-away before I leave Japan for good, me and a friend will go to Korea in the beginning of March. Something I thought I would not be able to afford, but thanks to my parents and my own savings it will now happen! Cheers! Cya in Hongdae!

Manga making - Digital VS analog!

Hello there! Recently I have been working pretty much every day on my last manga for school. This time I have finally been able to make my manga semi-digitally. I say semi-digitally because I did most of the line art the old fashioned way on paper and then scanned the papers. But after that I have done everything digitally.

I wanted to work digitally on my previous manga as well but since we hadn't started that class yet I did not feel comfortable venturing out to the digital manga making world all by myself. But now, after having just had a small number of classes I am already well prepared for what the digital brings!

The program we are using at school (which I also bought so that I can use it at home) is called "Clip Studio Paint", but in English it's usually referred to as "Manga Studio". This program really is fit like no other to deal with the making of comic books and manga in particular and it has a lot of functions that programs like Photoshop and Paint Tool SAI just don't have. I really like this program and I would definitely recommend it to anyone who wants to draw comics digitally!

I knew things would be a lot easier and go a lot faster with this program, rather than doing it all by hand the original way, but I was still surprised about just how efficient it was. It did not take long for me to never want to cut out another tone by hand again. Digital is great!

It's not just that putting the tones on the manga goes much faster, but also, if you made a mistake in your lines while drawing them - no problem! You can erase and delete and copy and redraw as much as you'd like once you've scanned the page!
Just today I when I was working on a page I cut out the head of a character and made it smaller, then put it back, and voila! Suddenly a drawing that I had hated (because the head was too big) had transformed into a nice-looking dude!
I have also, made atleast one drawing bigger for more impact (it seems like in Clip Studio making drawings bigger does not changes the quality of the lines, it just makes them a lil bit thicker). And I have changed the eye-sizes of many characters, and so on effortlessly.



Something good about putting on tones by hand though is that you have a lot more tones to choose from. Even though I have downloaded probably more than a hundred tones into Clip Studio, there are still many times when I wish I had a particular tone, and I cannot get it because it is not in the program.
But it is a minor problem and I can live with it.

So now I just wanted to show you some of my previous manga pages compared to the manga I am making now (the digital manga) (though I don't yet have any scans of my previous manga so there are just shitty pictures):

This one I made during my first year and has almost no tones!

This manga I made during my second year and I tried to use a lot more tones

Digital:

Maybe it's hard to compare since the quality of the photos are sooo bad compared to the computer-made manga. But when using the computer I have added a lot more gradation tone than I would have otherwise (for better or for worse) and I have also colored the characters eyes with tones and not just markers even if the eye is small. The characters also have more shadows on them, even if they are small.
(Sadly it seems like after turning these files into PNG's to upload them some of the tones faded and have disappeared and some you can barely see. The original files have a lot more depth.)

I still suck at manga, but digital sure is getting me another step in the right direction!

Mental stages of creating a manga

 

A piece from my last manga

 

I am at the last stage of finishing up my last manga for the year (at my school we have to write two each year) and I am probably further ahead than anyone!

I made sure to get this one approved as quickly as possible and then get to this last stage as quickly as possible and now I am far ahead compared to many people. There are still people that haven't even finished their first manga for the year and I really do wonder how it will go for those guys.

If you don't finish 2 mangas before the 20th of December you will not be allowed to graduate, which means you kinda spent 2 years on this education for nothing!

Anyway, that is not what I am here to talk about. I was thinking the other day about how much I hate my manga and wish that I never had to lay eyes on it again. Which is weird because when I came up with the idea for this manga I thought it was going to be my best one so far and that it was a great story (even though it's very short).

That is also what I tought about all my previous mangas (except for the first one cause I never really liked that one)! For all my mangas I really loved the plot in the beginning and was really excited to draw it, but somewhere halfway I just started hating it, thinking "This is the worst crap ever why did I write this? I should have gone with this story instead!". Why do I have this recurring patterns for all my mangas? I wonder if it's because they really are bad or just because I got tired of it.

One of our teachers said that you write manga you have to be fast, especially if you are writing comedy, because "neta ga kusaru" which means "the story will begin to rot". So if you write a joke in your manga and you think it is the most awesome thing ever, just wait a little bit when you have been around that joke for a while and you will wonder why you ever wrote something that dumb in the first place.

I suppose even if it's not comedy, a story will begin to rot if you stick around it for too long. But I still think it is odd, since I've written many novels and never had this problem.
Maybe it is because when it comes to manga, I also have to look at my own characters and see the reality of how my drawings turned out, and they never turn out as good as hoped.
When I look at the drawings in my manga I feel like I've failed, because this is not an acceptable level for a real manga: Granted I am not trying to sell my manga or anything, but still. We all want to feel that we have created something great, so when you see that it's not turning out great you want to quit.

Now I am at the last stage, just a little more and I will be done, and hopefully this will be my best manga so far, even if I hate it.

Don't wanna work!

Hello there! This post has nothing to do with Japan, it is just gonna be me talking about my future!

Here is the basic gist: I don't wanna grow up! I don't want to have a job where I have to wake up at 7am (or earlier) and be at work at 8, and do not get to leave until atleast 9 hours have gone by. Plus, there might even be some overtime in there, eh.

This is not the kinda future I want. A future where you work 8+ hours a day 5 days a week, with only a 5 to 6 weeks holiday each year. Think about it if you could choose would you choose a life like that?

When I come back to Sweden I want to study something to do with programming and I think I found just the program for me. It is not at the university I first wanted to go to, but it is still a program at one of the top uni's in Sweden.

Thing is, I do not really want to study programming just for finding a job, I wanna study it because it seems like a lot of fun and I want to be able to make my own little games in the future.
Buuuut of course if you study programming (well, software engineering, really, but let's just call it programming) that is what you are going to be working with in the future, right? There are loads of programming jobs and the salary is quite good!

Yes, working with programming seems like it could be lots of fun but it really depends on the company. One company may work with programming for wheel chairs (like where my dad works) while another creates games. The chance that you will get to work in a gaming company though seems pretty low. Everyone wants to work there! (I think?)

Anyway, with programming it doesn't really matter where you work, you will probably have to work overtime. Not always, but if there is a product supposed to be delivered at a certain time you have to pull through and get it finished or else you have failed the customer and the company you work for. Therefore - overtime!

I don't want to work overtime.

Even now, going to school here in Japan where I only have six hours of school every day, I come home some time before 17.30 and more often than not there are a lot of things I need to do, cooking and cleaning and homework etc. I have barely no free-time left to just do what I want to and it really gets to me sometimes. I think about my future and how I don't want it to be but there really is nothing to be done...

What I can hope for is a job that is so much fun that it doesn't even feel like work. But how can I know what such a job would be when I don't even know what I want to work with in the future?

So for now I am really looking forward to going to university, but dreading working life.
Sorry for complaining, haha.

Teachers wise words?

It was last week or something that all the students in our class had a one on one chat with the teacher about their grades. When it was my turn I first got shown my grades and stuff and my teacher asked me how I liked school and so on.

Then he went on to small talk and asked me "you don't drink, right?" and I said that I don't. My teacher said that when he was around 20 like me he didn't drink that much either, but now he wouldn't be able to live without alcohol. "Nai to muri" he said, lol.

"So maybe that will change for you too" he said, and I smiled and said yeaa maybeeee...

So he thinks that I will probably start drinking and then when I am 40+ like him I too will not be able to live without alcohol?

I guess he didn't realized how sad what he said sounds! Who wants to end up like that? Saying something like that just makes me wanna keep away from alcohol even more. Don't wanna end up feeling like I need alcohol to keep going, that just seems like a very sad life.

Cat Island Ainoshima in Fukuoka, Japan

Last month I went on a small trip to Fukuoka, and on the last day I went to Ainoshima, which is the cat island of Fukuoka!

I have always wanted to go to a cat island and I didn't even know there was one near Fukuoka, so good thing I checked right before leaving.

I had totally forgotten how awesome just hanging out with cats is! It was the best day of the trip and the best day I've had in a long time. Just sitting down anywhere you want, with a bunch of cuddly cats around you, is something I truly wish would be possible in my daily life.

Even though being with cats is pretty much the only thing you can do on this island, it is more than enough. The time went by so fast before I suddenly had to leave all my new friends, and for days all I could think about was cats, haha.

I had a great time on the island, and even though I didn't bring food with me there were several cats that seemed happy with just attention and cuddles. One kitten even slept in my lap for a while.

Some of the cats look sick, and some are really skinny, but there are still many that are in quite a good shape for strays. Still, if you are like me, you will probably feel bad for the cats and want to take them all home with you anyway! 

One thing good to know is that the people who live on the island seem to like the cats, I saw a fisherman sitting by the port fishing, petting a stray cat next to him. It looked like a really nice moment.

There were some tourists there, but it was certainly not crowded. Most of the time I was alone with a few cats at a time, so you don't have to wait for your turn to pet them etc most of the time.

All in all, had a great time, wanna go again. Time for pics:

This one was my first cuddle-buddy! Haha

I decided to walk around the island, but I don't really recommend it, there was nothing to see (then again I didn't have a map) and I felt like I missed quality time with the cats from this trip.

This snot faced skinny baby was super tiny, but really cuddly and playful. Wish I could've taken it home with me..