Manglish: Japanese Manga in English
Not a big fan of manga myself, but I know how popular it is with people fascinated by Japan so I thought some of you might want to check out Mainichi Daily News’ new section Manglish – Japanese manga in English.
They seem to be updating the page regularly, bringing out various manga by different artists. Manga and Japanese anime can be a good way to learn Japanese, particularly if you learn the basic hiragana and katakana alphabets. Especially with anime you can hear the dialogue and read along with the subtitles at the same time. The only real problem with this is that you can end up speaking Japanese like a local version of the chipmunks. I worked with a guy who learnt to speak Japanese this way and basically, the moment he opened his mouth killed any chance he had of finding a girlfriend!
While I don’t really watch that much anime myself, one anime movie I saw which I enjoyed was Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind – a beautiful, environmentally aware anti-war story from the renowned director Hayao Miyazaki. The copy linked to is in English, but for American and Canadian viewers – if you are from another part of the world you will have to search around for a copy. Of course if you are in China you can get a copy much more cheaply.
Ditto for manga, but there is a series called GTO or Great Teacher Onizuka that I would recommend. I was given copies of the English translation (there are 6 volumes in English AFAIK) of several of the books by one of the students I taught when I was teaching here in Akita and really enjoyed them. GTO is (was!) a very popualar manga series here in Japan.
From Publishers Weekly
Eikichi Onizuka is a 22-year-old high school dropout in need of some direction. He has a black belt in karate, a Kawasaki bike, a porn collection and a habit of squatting at the bottom of escalators so he can look up skirts. Not an obvious choice for the moniker “Great Teacher.” But the seemingly unlikely premise of this manga is that these qualities are precisely what will make Onizuka a success. He might be misguided-he wants to become a teacher so he can meet young, impressionable high-school hotties-but his struggles to find a path to adulthood through the wilds of hormones and violent impulses are not unsympathetic. In fact, the book is wildly popular and has been made into a Japanese live-action TV drama, a film and an anime series.
Like nearly all Japanese manga you read it from top to bottom, from right to left. This takes a bit of getting used to. Of course Japanese people get confused when they see a comic strip in English as we read things from left to right. And that causes problems for a lot of designers and graphic artists involved with Japan. But that of course is another story.
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