For those that missed them:

Part One: Self-Introduction
Part Two: Friends
Part Three: Midwestern Conflict

And here’s Part Four:

I’ve already started the next installment, and should be able to put it up in one or two weeks. So check back, or you can follow me on twitter or subscribe to me on Facebook as I’ll announce any new comics there.

For those that missed them:

Part One: Self-Introduction
Part Two: Friends

And here’s Part Three:

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Continue on the Part Four

(If you haven’t seen it yet, part one can be found here.)

The e-books in the previous installment didn’t get too many downloads, so I think I’ll skip making those for the time being. Though if people want them lemme know, and if enough people do I’ll put them up. Otherwise maybe once I have a bunch done I could package them as one big e-book and sell that on iBooks for 99 cents or something. We’ll see!

Anyway, without further adieu, here’s the second installment:

Continue on to Part Three

To all the HUNDREDS of THOUSANDS of people reading this, sorry this entry is so late in coming. Between moving/settling in/getting sick/trying to prepare for lessons, I just never had the energy to do much of anything other than what was strictly demanded of me. Even now after taking the last couple weeks off, I still only really have time to phone in a quick entry. Hopefully once I’ve settled into a routine I’ll be able to devote more time to describing my experience here in this blog, but for now I’ll just write a few paragraphs on borrowed time.

Things have been busy but pleasant (other than getting sick). Classes started a week ago Wednesday. I’m teaching at 11 different schools; two junior highs and a bunch of elementarys. Some of the elementarys are way off in the country; the hour-long commutes though pine-covered mountain valleys will probably be pleasant once I know where I’m going, but I have to admit I’m not looking forward to trying to figure out the routes to each school the first time. I have a few schools within walking/biking distance, but the rest require a complicated series of bus transfers and being picked up by teachers at different times and places. I can’t imagine trying to navigate it without Japanese reading/speaking ability. Again, once I settle in and know where I’m going it’ll be fine, but in the meantime it’ll be a bit stressful.

So far I’ve visited one of the junior highs and one of the elementarys, and have had a bunch of great classes so far. I’m sure eventually I’ll have a few nightmare classes, but so far it’s been great. It’ll probably be a few months before I’m *completely* settled into teaching again, but for the most part I already feel like I’m already back into the groove.

Okay! I’d like to write more, but I’ll have to save it for another time; I’ve got a really busy day tomorrow, so I need to rest up for that. I have two three-day weekends coming up back-to-back, so hopefully I can write more then. Cheers!

If you’ve read this entry, then you know that I’ve been lucky enough to be accepted to participate in the JET Program for a second time. I have just a month until I board that plane, and have a lot of preparations left to do… my departure has sort of snuck up on me. I have to admit it hasn’t completely sunk in yet.

One thing that’s helped to make the experience seem more real is I just found out where in Japan I’m going to be. I’m about 30-60min outside of Kyoto. I still don’t know exactly where I’ll be or what age groups I’ll be teaching, I gotta say I couldn’t be more delighted with the location. So for all your people who offered to buy me a beer, know that I’m coming to collect!

Oh, one more thing related to my departure: if anyone’s interested in getting a signed/inscribed copy of Tonoharu from me, place those orders now! Once I leave the US I won’t be able to do them for obvious reasons.

More updates to follow in the coming weeks!

Just wanted to mention that I’ll be speaking this upcoming Friday, June 10th, 2011 in Downtown Chicago!

I’ll be there as a part of an author’s panel devoted to experiences teaching English in Japan. The event is sponsored by the Japan American Society of Chicago and the JETAA Chicago Chapter.

This will almost certainly be my last public appearance before I leave for Japan in July, so if you’re in the Chicago area, come out if you can!

Event Details:
What: JETAA Author Panel: Experiences Teaching English in Japan
Who: Me, and authors D.H. Cermeño & James Kennedy
When: Friday, June 10th 2011, 6pm to 8pm
Where: Barnes & Thornburg LLP, 1 N. Wacker Drive, Suite 4400, Chicago, IL 60606 [ Google Maps ]
Admission: $5 JASC & JETAA Members/$10 Non-Members

Space is limited to just 35 attendees, so if you want to go, register now:

http://www.jaschicago.org/en/events/Default.aspx?eventid=184

It occurred to me that it’s been several months since I’ve actually posted anything original on this blog. Most recent posts have been links to YouTube videos and other filler. So I figured it was high time for an update of sorts:

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For two years beginning in 2008, I received a scholarship that included a monthly living stipend. It was juuust barely enough to get by on, but I gotta say, it was glorious. It confirmed something I’d long suspected. If I have a steady & predictable source of income and am able to do work that I care about, I can be quite happy, even when I’m hovering around the wrong side of the poverty line.

In March 2010 the scholarship ended, and with it went my steady income. The financial concerns I put on hold for two years ago returned to the fore. As I contemplated my cartooning “career”, I realized that one area where I dropped the ball was marketing & promotion. I had done a bunch to market my first graphic novel shortly before it came out, but almost nothing after that.

Many artist/writers/cartoonists eschew marketing, and I’m sympathetic with that point of view. It takes precious time away from the art, and can be a slippery slope. You write a couple press releases and hand out a few business cards, and before you know it you’re a hack that “creates content” that will appeal to the “18-34 demo”.

Okay, maybe that’s overstating the point a bit, but even artists that take marketing seriously probably see it more as a necessary evil than something they’re actually interested in. But having spent the past 18-odd months trying to market my work, I’ve actually sort of come to enjoy it, the networking aspect in particular.

“Networking” is of course just another way of saying “meeting people”, which is something I enjoy, despite the fact that I’m somewhat introverted. So I’m glad that I had the pretense of “networking” to force me to get off my butt and go out there and meet people. This has enriched my life both professionally and personally.

All-in-all, my efforts have been successful… relatively speaking. Unfortunately, “success” in the world of alternative comics rarely reaches the opulent heights of “living wage”. I make money off my comics, it still isn’t enough to sustain me, and my savings are getting pretty meager. So I’ve decided to make a strategic retreat and get a day job again. (Oh, the horror!)

The good news is, I’ve landed a great one: as a JET Program assistant English teacher. This is what I did from 2003-2006, and what served as the framework for the Tonoharu storyline. It’s hands-down the most rewarding “day job” that I’ve ever had, so I’m honored to have the opportunity to do it again (plus, it’ll remind me of the experience as I work on the last half of Tonoharu). I’ll be leaving for Japan late-July.

So what does this mean for my cartooning aspirations? I haven’t given up on them. I’ll continue to work on Tonoharu in the evenings and on weekends. I suppose this will slow my already glacial pace, but what can you do. Once I’ve had the chance to refill the coffers a bit, I’ll probably take another swing at cartooning full-time.

In the meantime, it’ll be great to have money for extravagances again, like replacement computer equipment and dentist visits. That’s how I roll, folks!

I’m not sure how many current participants / alumni of the JET Program regularly read my site, but if you’re out there…

I was asked by JET alum and all-around nice guy Steven Horowitz to plug his new website JetWit.com, a blog “for the JET alumni freelance and professional community”. It looks pretty good, so if you’re a freelancer / professional JET alum (or a freelancer / pro who’s interested in Japan), check it out:

JetWit.com Homepage

I’ve been to Japan a few times now. First as a high school exchange student, then as an educator through the JET program, and most recently for as a ”tourist”,  living with my then-girlfriend for three months at the tail end of 2006.

My first night in her apartment she gave me the obligatory tour. The thing that most caught my attention was the shower. It looked like something from straight out of the Industrial Revolution.

It was an imposing metal unit, and its operation required the use of five different cranks and knobs. That evening my girlfriend provided the necessary explanation:

“Turn this knob to start the gas. Then turn that knob to “high”, and then push and turn this knob, and hold it down. While holding it down, turn this crank. [*click, click, click*] Okay, look in the little window. Can you see the blue flame?”

I looked in the window: “No.”

“You need to get the angle right. Look again.”

I scrutinized the inside of the metal box from every possible angle, but still didn’t see it. Wait. There’s something, but it looks more like a reflection from somewhere, or a dying ghost. “You mean this little thing?”

“Yes, that’s it. Now turn this knob to here. Okay, if the water gets too hot or cold, adjust that knob over there. NEVER turn it past this point, or you’ll get burned. Enjoy your shower.”

So I took my first shower in my new home. The funny thing was, with five different knobs, there was still no way to adjust the water pressure. It was either barely on, or off.

During the course of my shower, occasionally an arm, thin and yellow as an egg noodle, would squeeze through the crack in the door, check the water temperature, adjust the knobs accordingly, and then slip back out.

When my shower was done, I had tea with my girlfriend, the owner of the helpful arm. She explained that the shower was like a person; you needed to get to know its moods. If the water was just the perfect temperature, then it would soon be too hot or too cold. You had to anticipate this and act preemptively.

For the first shower, the arm took care of things for me. The second time I showered, the arm was at work, so everything was up to me. I struggled with some knobs and got the little blue ghost to appear. Then I played with more knobs and got the water going. Sometimes it would be so hot it could give you second degree burns, other times it was ice cold. Eventually I started to get the hang of it.

That night, I talked to my girlfriend. I took a shower today, I told her, but I’m not sure I did everything right…

She looked me up and down and said solemnly, “Well, you’re still alive, so you probably did okay.”

Pictured Below: The shower unit, in all its wonderful, horrible glory

Pictured: The upper right corner of a poster from one of my elementary schools, featuring all the teachers’ photos and names. Yours truly is pictured hovering in the little UFO.

Here is the ninth and final of my Tuesday mini-series of reflections on my experiences in the JET Program, lazily culled from e-mails sent to friends and family at the time. This one looks to be from August 2004, written in recognition of my one-year anniversary in Japan:

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As some of you may know, before coming to Japan I spent a year at a classy four star hotel conveniently located in the heart of Minneapolis’ financial district (as dramatized on my comic book Young Men of a Certain Mind). I worked in the capacity of a night bellman, arriving everyday at 11pm and staying until 7am. I spent my time helping the odd late arriver with their bags, shining shoes, delivering papers, or wandering around the hallways, looking for trouble.

But the life of a bellman isn’t as exciting as it might seem. In the course of a year I ran into only one couple having sex in the stairwell, only one naked man who got locked out of his room somehow, broke down only one door, and brought cereal to Janet Jackson at 3am only once. The television programs would have you believe that all this happens to a bellman nightly, but that’s just not the reality of the job. It’s actually pretty boring.

It’s hard for me to believe that the amount of time I’ve spent in Japan is just now roughly equal to the time I spent at the hotel. At the end of my year at the hotel, my bank account had a few more thousand dollars in it. That’s about all I have to show for the experience. In the same amount of time in Japan, my whole world has been transformed. I’m starting to slowly grasp some of the mores and ways. Signs aren’t just a collection of meaningless squiggles, they have meaning. And the conversations I overhear are no longer just complete gibberish, now they’re only 95% gibberish. Okay, granted, I still need another year to really get my Japanese to a true conversational level (I’m staying for a second year for those of you who didn’t know), but still I think it’s pretty cool that two years that I could have spent puttering around empty hotel hallways (or working as a graphic designer or whatever) will instead be spent reaching a working level of language and cultural proficiency. I dunno, it’s interesting to me anyway…

And on top of that, after planning and scripting it for a year, I’ve officially started production on my next comic book project. Not only is this comic more labor-intensive than any of my previous efforts, it’s also likely to be more than two hundred pages (my longest single narrative to date was sixty pages long). After slaving away for three weeks, I’ve managed to churn out about three and a half pages of finished comic. If I can continue at this breakneck pace, I’ll finish the whole thing in 170 weeks, which is juuust over my goal of finishing the whole thing in a year and a half, so… er… that’s good…
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And that was it. 

Even though I stayed in Japan for another two years after I wrote this, that was the last mass e-mail I ever sent out. I don’t think I really planned it to be the last one, and I don’t know why I stopped writing them. Probably to devote more time to the comic, I guess.

The comic book referenced is, of course, Tonoharu. Tonoharu would go on to be  twice as long as I originally projected (at least), and despite my hopes, wouldn’t even come close to being finished before I left the JET Program. But oh well, that’s the way it goes.

It’s also funny to look at this old e-mail now and see that I thought I’d have reached a “working level of language and cultural proficiency” by the end of my second year. Ah, sweet, naive optimism…

But anyway… that’s it! The end of the JET Program Reflections entries. From here on out, the old blog will be updated just once a week on Fridays, just like the masthead says.

But I’m sure I’ll revisit the JET Program again in future entries from time to time, so I implore JET Program enthusiasts to continue to stop by on Fridays. Peace!

Here is the eighth in my Tuesday mini-series of reflections on my experiences teaching English in Japan through the JET Program, lazily culled from e-mails sent to friends and family at the time. This one looks to be from April 2004:  

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The new Japanese school year just began today. Actually officially school started on Monday, but if you’re like me you believe that much in the same way that “Life Begins at 40″, a Japanese school year doesn’t start until you’ve had an opening ceremony. And today we had one of those. I have to admit I thought we already had opening ceremony because there were two other apparently unrelated ceremonies earlier this week. But no, today was the real thing with an audience of parents and public officials and the student band’s rousing brass interpretation of Queen’s “I was born to love you”.

Blissfully ignorant, I walked into the teacher’s room this morning looking like an unemployed lumberjack. When I saw everyone in their figurative Sunday Best I knew I was in trouble. Luckily I didn’t wear my Little Mermaid windbreaker this morning but opted instead for my tasteful solid black jacket, which I kept securely zipped throughout today’s ceremony. Face-loss inverted.

I’d like to tell you that before the ceremony they spray painted all the student’s heads black so that those with naturally brownish hair wouldn’t ruin the sea of uniformly black-haired heads, but unfortunately they don’t do that at my school. The honor of that anecdote belongs to one of my colleagues at the different school. Much to my chagrin, my schools refuse to marginalize the individual in such a blatant way. I mean sure we have uniforms, but do we reproach the inferior biology of those with slightly less dark hair? The sad answer is no. How my humorous mass e-mails suffer in the face of such reasonable behavior!

A few months ago the shyest teacher I work with gave me a ride to a teacher’s party. We both live in the same area, and since I knew she had lived there for five years I asked her opinion about some of the restaurants around there. She hadn’t been to any of the restaurants I asked her about, and went on to tell me that she doesn’t like to go out very often because she’s embarrassed that she might run into her students. With a shudder she related a story of a time she went out to get a haircut and was spotted by a couple of her students. The next day the students told their friends about seeing her, much to her horror.

A few weeks ago at the end of a teacher party at one of my elementary schools, all the teachers all sang a song by the Japanese band SMAP while two teachers accompanied on the guitar and xylophone. This is a prime example of something that didn’t strike me as funny until I imagined the equivalent happening in America, with a group of American teachers singing a Backstreet Boys song off printed lyric sheets in the Home Ec room. Thinking about the coordinated practice the guitarist and xylophonist must have put into the endeavor tickles me in particular, I can’t really explain why…

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“My Little Darlings” Corner.
About a month ago, I taught a certain third grade class for the first time since I got here. I have no idea how the powers that be decide when and where I go; the only school I consistently go to every month has a grand total of five students. But I digress. In this class, I noticed a little girl in the front row clutching a folded note throughout class. At the end of class after several false starts she worked up the courage to come up and give it to me. “Why would I want a note from some dumb little kid?” I told her in Japanese. No, just kidding, I thanked her. Later I removed the novelty printed tape keeping the note closed and read it. It said (in English):

Hello.
Nice to meet you.
My name is Haruka.
I am a girl.
I am 9 years old.
Thank you.

Immediately before “Thank you” I could faintly see that she had written “Thank you for being my friend”, but must have decided it seemed to forward as she had erased it.
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The ninth (and final!) installment of JET Program Reflections will be up next Tuesday.

Here is the seventh in my Tuesday mini-series of reflections on my experiences in the JET Program, lazily culled from e-mails sent to friends and family at the time. This one looks to be from mid-February 2004: 

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So, February isn’t off to a very auspicious start. I’ve been sick for about two weeks straight, attacked by two separate viral infections back to back. I’m okay now, but it was rough going for a while there. Various people around me speculated that the children I teach were to blame, but I’m almost more inclined to blame the teachers. One thing about Japan that I think we can move out of the “culturally relative” column and into the “just plain lame” column is the fact that there is no substitute teacher system. That means if a teacher doesn’t show up, another already overworked teacher has to pick up the slack. So unless a teacher is like deathly ill, they come in. How Japanese people have the highest life expectancy in the world I’ll never understand…

Do you remember during the SARS scare, they showed all this news footage of people in Hong Kong or wherever wearing surgical masks? I suppose the intention of that footage was to provide a visual example of the hysteria and fear–I mean, I think the plague would have to break out before we’d wear something like that in the West, otherwise we’d just feel too stupid. But here in Japan (and let’s speculate Asia at large so that my SARS lead-in makes sense), it’s not really that rare at all; I mean, kids wear them everyday when they dish up food for other kids during school lunch. It looks pretty funny, actually, this line of kids dishing up food wearing lab aprons, shower caps and masks. So that SARS scare news footage might have been a touch misleading in that sense. I think most people wear them so they don’t make OTHERS sick rather than to save themselves from sickness. All around me, during this flu season, I’ve heard the hacking and sniffling of various mask-wearing teachers, and I think it finally caught up with me. I missed just under two straight weeks of school, so now I’m frantically trying to salvage the rest of this month and make up for as many missed classes as I can, while planning for new ones.

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And now on to “Reader’s Corner”. My “Christmas in Japan” entry has drummed up more reader mail than any before. As you may remember, in the last installment a reader corrected my erroneous assertion that Christmas Cakes were a purely Japanese invention. Another reader had this to say on the subject:

“While your correspondent was correct in pointing out that the “Christmas Cake” is, strictly speaking, a “British import”, in that country, I believe it is actually something entirely different (i.e. not a grocery-store-style birthday cake that says “Marry Xmas” on it). I’ll leave it at that.”

Not leaving it at that, the reader went on to say, with a grim smile on his thin lips: “Also, you probably know the other meaning of Christmas Cake (“kurisumasu keeki”) in Japanese, but in case you don’t, it’s a euphemism for a woman who’s turning 25 years old and is still unmarried. Until recently, 25 was considered the “expiration date” for would-be brides, after which point they, like the cakes on December 26th, “sell for half price”. Though this politically incorrect term is still widely used, the average marriage age for women in Japan is now something like 28, rendering it meaningless.” This said, our reader noticed and tried to dislodge a small piece of tobacco, left on his lower lip from a hand rolled cigarette, by blowing on it. When this failed to produce results, he finally removed it with his fingers.

Another reader, a girl from Alabama that I’ve never met before, took offense at another part of my “Christmas in Japan” article, in which I asserted that “eating Kentucky Fried Chicken accompanied by champagne was a 200 year old Polish Christmas tradition.” She lived in Poland for one year, she told me, and the only Polish Christmas tradition of note is that of keeping live carp in the bathtub. “Vodka” she went on, “being the most popular ‘tipple’ in Poland would most likely have been served with the carp.”
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Check back next Tuesday for Part Eight.