Back in Sweden

Yo!

I am back in Sweden, arrived on the 1st of April and that day I was horribly tired.
My total flight time was almost 17 hours and then add a 3 hour transit on top of that. But everything went well and I have nothing to complain about.

My flight left Japan in the middle of the night which gave me the chance to hang out with 2 friends during the day, they gave me support and help til the very end of my stay in Japan and I am forever greatful.

When I returned my apartment keys to the representative they gave me back a rents worth of money, since I had payed for 1 month too much. So that was great news before the trip! I came home to Sweden with some extra cash! Now I am just worried that I didn't leave enough on my Japanese account to cover all the costs that will get taken in April... scary...

Anyway, since coming back to Sweden I have been applying for a few more summerjobs, and have been trying to get back on track with studying.

As usual I caught a cold when coming back. It's not bad but it makes me feel constantly tired, which doesn't really help the studying. That's just an excuse though, and I should get a grip and stop watching Netflix! :)

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My three years in Japan were great and I will never forget the good times I had and the friends I made.
I am so thankful to MEXT for giving me the opportunity to go to Japan and Osaka, and for everyone else who helped me along the way! This is not the end, you know! We are not even halfway there :D

Next stop: University!

Packing it up

 (Don't make multiple blogs, cuz I have been posting stuff abt Japan on the wrong blog -.-)!!!



 Today as well as yesterday I have been packing boxes to ship to Sweden.

I chose to ship my stuff with an international shipping company called "Japan Luggage Express" because they seem like the cheapest option that I could find, and people seem to be satisfied with their service.

Still, it's kinda nerve-wracking to leave all your precious things in the hands of unknown people, and have them take them all over the world for several months (because since it's by boat it can take around 2 months to get my stuff to Sweden).

I can only hope my boxes do not get lost at sea...

Anyway, turns out I could fill a lot more boxes than I thought, though the boxes weren't that big after all.

Also, I have 2 big items for which I could not find boxes for, so I bought several boxes, took them apart and taped them back together to make 2 big boxes of the perfect size. These boxes are not the most beautiful and I do worry that the shipping company won't agree to ship them.

I have also finished "calling" all the companies to cancel internet, electricity and gas and such, turns out they would rather have you cancel through their websites than their phones. Which is something that usually doesn't happen in Japan.

I did it though, with a few mishaps, because when you cancel you also have to write the place of your new adress, but I do not have a new adress! I had to make up an adress, one that people would know were fake when they saw it. Was expecting to get a few confused phone calls about it, but so far so good.

After coming back from Korea I got sick though, and I still am not completely well, but atleast now my eyes aren't RED anymore. Creepy...

I went to the kuyakusho for something, and at the same time got my paperwork done for leaving Japan. Or atleast that's what I think, I haven't read about anything else I need to do, so I really hope that this is it.

Last thing would be to leave my Residence Card at the airport, and everything is done.

My life in Japan, over.

Now that most of the work I need to do is over, let's hope I get well again, so that I can enjoy my last few days in Japan to the fullest. Yey!

Non-achiever

I have a friend who has a lot of big plans in life, they want to go to all these places and achieve all of these things. This friend wants to work for some cool company, like Google or Microsoft or a successful gaming company.
They thought they could achive all this by going to school for just a short period of time, and then all this would magically happen!
My friend is truly an optimist, to the point of their dreams just being fantasies.

My friend has barely any education, and never did that well in school. They have not made any effort to try and reach all these dreams, they did not go travel or study or what not, even though they had all these elaborate plans.

Now my friend still lives with their parents, with no education or job experience.

My friend is a non-achiever, and there are several reasons for this, just one being mental problems. Don't get me wrong, they aren't menally ill, they are still a fully functioning human being, with no problems in the thinking department. But ya know, depression and such are also mental issues.

Of course personality also plays a big part. My friend likes to complain, and only look at the bad side of things. They have been given lot's of things in their life, and a lot of help and support from loving parents, but it's not helping.

I have lost hope for my friend. If it continues on like this, they will never have a job and will end up living alone in the small town where they grew up, living on government support.

I consider myself quite a high-achiever. Sure, sometimes I lack willpower, but I always push through in the end and I fight for what I want to achieve. So talking to this friend doesn't really give me anything, being with them doesn't motivate me to become a better person, or strive higher in life. They just leave me feeling confused as to how people can be like them, not striving for anything, never really accomplishing anything.

Maybe it's bad of me, but I want to surround myself with people who have goals they want to achive, goals that they try their best to reach, goals that aren't just childish dreams. People that work hard and inspire you. I feel like this friend is not one of these people, this friend is only a negative.

And I feel bad for feeling this. One part of me is saying that "It's not their fault!" while another says "They are responsible for where they are in life!".

It makes me feel like a bad person, but after talking to them only a little while ago, I feel like this is the kind of friend I might leave behind. Let them live their life in this pitiful state of blaming others for what they cannot do or achieve, and you live my life surrounded by the kind of people that don't drag you down.

Not sure why I am writing this here, but a Freakonomics podcast about Grit just got me thinking about this and I had to get my feelings out, because I feel kinda guilty for having them.

I wish my friend the best of luck in their life, and hope that they can get out of the destructive mindset they have been in all this time, because grit, as they said in the podcast, isn't something you are necessarily born with, it's something you can create within yourself.

"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.