Autobiography of How I Became an Anime Fan (2009 edition): chapter 7

Chapter 7, the final chapter, of my newly revised anime autobiography…

I had a bit of post-Japan depression after I returned from my month-long stay in Japan in the summer of 2006. For about a month and a half after I came back, I became somewhat of a hikikomori – I wasn’t working or taking summer classes at the time, so I literally spent everyday holed up in my room watching anime. As I mentioned last time, I had recently gotten my first computer that could download fansubs in August 2005, so I started catching up on a lot of fansubbed series I had missed – I spent the rest of that summer plowing through Air, Rozen Maiden, Higurashi no Naku Koro ni, Ginga Densetsu Weed, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Nana, and Black Cat among others. Then, starting in September of ’06, things got a lot busier for me as I got my first part-time job and went through my last few semesters of community college.

Autobiography of How I Became an Anime Fan

Chapter 7 – Life and Anime Go On

Mainichi Anime Yume In fall of ’06, my life became busier than it had ever been. It was the first time I was working and going to school at the same time. Because of this, I didn’t have much time to update my anime fan site, Anime Yume. However, this was also the time when I started to notice the abundance of anime blogs via Anime Nano. My Yahoo! server offered me an easy tool to create my own WordPress blog, so I decided to give anime blogging a go. I figured writing blog posts would fit into my schedule a lot better than the often time-consuming updates on the main site. Thus, on October 1st, 2006, I wrote my very first blog post (a review of the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon game). Some of the first anime series I blogged about were a few late 2006/early 2007 series like Kanon, Asatte no Houkou, Death Note, Code Geass, Sumomomo Momomo, and Digimon Savers. And now, three years and 275+ posts later, Mainichi Anime Yume has become the blog you see here. Like my anime fan site, it has never become a very popular site. But I have since grown to love blogging and being a part of the anime blogsphere.

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya I first heard about The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya not long after it started airing, via ANN’s Spring ’06 Preview Guide. After reading their review of the first episode and seeing some screencaps, I became a little interested in it, but I wasn’t able to watch the series as it was airing because I was on my study abroad trip in Japan at the time. When I returned home in mid-July of 2006, Haruhi had finished airing and I saw what a phenomena it had become. I downloaded fansubs of the 14 episodes and watched them in their original, non-chronological order. I enjoyed it and I could definitely see why fans were obsessing over it. However, at that time I never thought it would replace Inuyasha as my favorite anime.


The SOS Brigade!

For the next year, I didn’t give Haruhi all that much thought – I liked all the Hare Hare Yukai parody videos floating around and I bought a nice Haruhi desk mat at Mikomicon 2006, but I wouldn’t say I loved the series.

However, that all changed when I attended Anime Expo 2007 (pkjd and I went together actually). Haruhi received major promotion at that con via the concert and guest panel by the three main voice actresses, as well as Bandai’s new release of the official U.S. DVDs. I suppose I was overcome by Haruhiism at AX ’07. After the con, I rewatched the 14 episodes in chronological order and I loved the series much more than I did the first time. Not long after, I came across Baka-Tsuki’s translations of the Haruhi novels. I decided to read the stories that weren’t in the anime and I became instantly hooked. I remember I was so addicted, I spent a good few weeks doing nothing but reading all nine novels. Each day I couldn’t wait to get home from school or work so I could keep reading!

As I mentioned a few times in previous chapters, Inuyasha remained my favorite anime since late 2002. But finally in 2007, after the anime had ended and the quality of the manga started to decline, I began to slowly lose interest in it, just as my interest in Haruhi rapidly grew. As of now, I still consider Haruhi my favorite anime. I’ve already discussed why I like the series so much in a previous post, so I won’t go into detail here. Will another anime rise up one of these days to take Haruhi’s place as my favorite? Who knows.

Majoring in Japanese Language & Literature For most of my three years of community college, I thought I would simply get an A.A. because I could never afford to get a B.A. at a four-year university. However, in late 2006, I was convinced by family and teachers to at least apply for some universities and see if I could get financial aid. To make a long story short, I applied to the four UCs (Universities of California) that offered Japanese as a major, and in early 2007, I found out that I got accepted into all of them! However, only one of them, the University of California Irvine, offered me practically a full scholarship because of my good grades. Therefore, in fall of 2007, I graduated from community college, transferred to UCI, and spent my last two years of schooling there.


Like my room at home, my college apartment was always covered in anime

I ended up majoring in the more general East Asian Language & Literature, with my country of emphasis being Japan of course. UCI has a fantastic Japanese program – for my major, I took many Japanese literature, history, art history, politics, and culture classes, as well as Japanese language up to Advanced. My community college had a small Japan Club, but the Japanese Student Association at UCI had a lot more meetings, members, and events. Also, during one school term, I took a five week extension class about anime and manga, which is where I met my friend and fellow anime blogger, Jan Suzukawa.

Cal Animage Epsilon UCI’s anime club, Cal Animage Epsilon, is definitely one of the best anime clubs.


Watching Gurren Lagann together with a bunch of other fans on the big screen was quite epic

The club meets every week for three hours, either watching anime together via the big overhead projector screen, or socializing with fellow fans in another room. During my two years there, I met a lot of interesting people, participated in many fun events such as karaoke and gaming, and of course watched some good anime like Gurren Lagann, Claymore, Seto no Hanayome, Macross Frontier, Seirei no Moribito, Amatsuki, and many others. I also had the pleasure of becoming friends with another fellow anime blogger, 2DT, whom I met in one of my Japanese lit classes, and he too joined me in the anime club fun.

New Beginnings The past six months have been quite eventful for me. First, I graduated from UCI in June 2009. I had applied for the JET Program, but although I went through the interview and was placed on the alternate list, they never got a space for me. However, I was lucky enough to participate in the Rainbow Student Exchange Program, an all expenses paid, three week sightseeing trip to Japan (you can read full-coverage and see photos of my trip here).


My first time at Akihabara

After I returned from Japan, I spent the rest of the summer job hunting. Nothing good came up for a while until finally, I found an enjoyable little part-time job as an after school enrichment teacher for the local YMCA, with the topics I teach being Japanese and anime. Although the job is fun and convenient, I don’t make very much money from it. But it’s definitely a good place to start until something better comes along.

Conclusion As this anime autobiography of mine indicates, anime has been a big part of my life. It’s had an influence on many things I’ve done over the years, including my major in college. According to my anime list, as of today I’ve seen nearly 250 anime titles and have spent over 150 days of my life watching anime. That’s not much compared to other hardcore fans, but for someone who didn’t have cable, high-speed Internet, or the money for DVDs for many of my years as a fan, I think I’ve done pretty well. In fact, for the past decade, the only ongoing TV shows I’ve watched have been anime – I barely watch any other TV shows or movies besides animated ones. Anime offers me enough creative stories, engaging characters, and stellar art and music, so I don’t usually have interest in most other shows and movies. Unfortunately, as many of my fellow American anime fans will agree, anime is still misunderstood by most Westerners. But I’m hoping that will change in coming years. I don’t know if I’ll still love anime thirty, forty, or even fifty years from now. But for now, I’ll definitely try my best to promote this amazing medium of art and entertainment.

Click here to return to chapter 6.

No Comments… read them or add your own.

  1. Jan Suzukawa says:

    150 days watching anime(!). I think I’m still at around 34 days or something like that…

    I didn’t know you were on a scholarship at UCI – how cool! And Northrop’s class was a lot of fun, wasn’t it. :)

    It’s interesting that you say you don’t know if you’ll still love anime 30, 40 or 50 years from now. I was thinking about what anime means to me the other day. I don’t think I’ve ever been quite as captivated by an interest like this before. I don’t watch American TV anymore, and rarely see American movies. It’s all anime and manga for me now. And not because I made any big decision about it – it’s just what I keep gravitating to, each and every day. It hasn’t been by design for me, but it just as well could have been. It’s odd how we can never predict some of the major things that come our way in life.

  2. Yumeka says:

    @ Jan

    Yeah, a part of me wants to say that I’ll definitely be an anime fan the rest of my life, but you never know what could happen. I’ll LOL if I’m still playing Pokemon games when I’m 70+ years old.

  3. Anonymous says:

    Hey there,

    I wanted to say thank you for taking the time to write his autobiography about yourself. I’ve recently just come away from watching an anime series called “Lucky Star”, and afterwards I began to question why it appealed to me so much. After extensive internet research, I began to understand that the series is involved with several major discussions in the anime culture such as “Shojo”, or otherwise being directed at a male-audience, despite being a show completely about the everyday chatter of highschool girls in Japan. While trying to further understand the deeper meanings behind male-oriented anime shows and female-oriented shows, I by fate came across your blog post called “the true definition of ‘Shojo’ and ‘Shonen'”.

    I enjoyed the perspective and insightful comments you made in the post and that led to me pondering a deeper question of what is it about anime that draws people to enjoy them as a culture, fanbase, community, and imitative lifestyle of Japanese. Furthermore, I was, and still am, interested in answers that don’t use ‘male-centered’ or ‘female-centered’ audiences as a main reason for explaining why there is that ‘magical’ feeling many people enjoy from watching anime and in turn make it into one component of their lifestyles/interests.

    Your autobiography provides a fairly detailed account and perspective opinion about how anime affected your life all the way to the present. It was interesting to learn how old shows like ‘Pokemon’ and “Sailor Moon” led to later interests in more mature, and adult anime interests such as learning Japanese and becoming more attuned to it’s culture. And then from the background as an anime fan, it is interesting to learn how your one’s interest in anime also led to the acquiring of knowledge and skills of creating anime fan-websites, and blogging. All in all, I appreciate being able to read someone’s personal account of anime and it’s influence on their life. It allows me to take one step closer into analyzing what anime means to myself in all it’s wonderful aspects of creativity, meaning, art, music, story-telling, careers, and popularity.

    Thank you. I hope you continue to use your passions, interests, dreams, and inspirations to motivate your presence and meaning in life. One can already tell you have stayed very true to things you love and enjoy pursuing.

    Preferring to remain,
    Anonymous

  4. Yumeka says:

    @ Anonymous

    Thank you so much for your kind words. The fact that you thought so highly of my anime autobiography and other posts really made my day ^_^ It’s gratifying to me that someone took the time to read my entire anime autobiography with a genuine interest and understanding. I’m glad I’ve given you things to ponder as far as the unique and complex world of anime fandom.

    Thanks again for reading.

  5. lias4dh says:

    Hello, I’m new to your site. But I’m starting to like it.

    From what i read (Chap 1 to 7)

    I truly impress with your dedication. You’re true Fan (Die Hard) indeed.

    You were able to make your life revolve around your interest.

    I for one love anime, but my life usually revolve around non-anime stuff.

    In year 2005 I graduated from highschool, 2006-2007 I enter matriculation program in physical sciences, then, 2007 to 2010 i pursue my BA in Chemical Sciences.

    Though my interest in anime didn’t fade but it didn’t expand either. Unlike you, i still not well verse in japanese language and culture. Moreover, I’m too scared to lead my life to follow my interest.

    Thus, kudos to you Yumeka! Though you said you yet to have your ‘dream job’ but to me your dream had come true.

  6. It’s been a nice trip reading through your stories, and I enjoyed it! It certainly gives a nice meaning to the term “A blast in the past”, since I could certainly relate to some parts of your stories. I’m glad to have found your blog. ^_^

  7. Aleera says:

    I can certainly relate to your story. I grew up with role-playing games (SNES) when I was 8, then got into Pokémon, Sailor Moon, and Utena around age 12. I used to try to learn to speak Japanese at beginner level in high school and sing songs, Gundam Wing and DBZ were popular at the time. Around year 2000, I remember because Final Fantasy 9 and Gundam Wing were the most important fandoms to me then. I used to also create rpg shrines in computer class because I was bored. I gave up learning because no one to speak with and I had actually signed up in high school for a Japanese I course but they cancelled it due to low enrollment; so I never had a chance to take in high school.

    2002 was actually the first year I attended my first anime convention(s) in Florida. Coincidence that it was the first year you began this site. It was very exciting to go to my first conventions, it kept me from being depressed with school; I had gotten injured from snapping the flute in band.

    College: I also went to community college; got an AA in accounting, and worked as a tutor part-time. Got my bachelors (also in accounting) and I get paid higher hourly as a math tutor who can also tutor accounting (seriously not many students go to the math lab for accounting). I did not think I would qualify for financial aid in college because I was from a single parent household, but thank heavens I applied for it during the 1st bachelors degree.

    It is great that you were able to go to Japan and get a degree in East Asian Language & Literature with a focus on Japanese (up to advanced is very good ) from UC Irvine (an amazing school). Studying French currently. I still go to conventions when I can but it is expensive. I only went out of state once to Atlanta for a con as a panelist (the con was one time and no longer exists lol). I’ve always wanted to go back to Atlanta and California (I lived in Orange County when I was 4-5 years old) cons because I’ve been to many Florida cons. I still like to support the local convention nearby me. I watch anime and still do some cosplay but try to save money for now. I wish I had more money to travel. You have a beautiful story. If you still want to teach Japanese, you might be able to become a TA as a graduate student possibly, even still keeping the current job. I did read that you teach Japanese and anime at the YMCA after school. The money still isn’t much, it is a labor of love with teaching, I believe. It would be more fun to teach abroad, It is a shame the JET didn’t happen for you; my grandmother taught French abroad once. I have been through graduate admissions applications, even gotten one acceptance (I don’t want more business school and it was expensive online program). For language, I just spoke today with grad admissions at that department there is option to TA and get a small stipend. I guess one could work in business or academia afterwards as a professor. I am not sure if you could teach elementary-high school with certification or become a translator; all of these are ideas. Hard to live and save money though. Keep up the fandom! Best of luck with everything!

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