Hello. Thank you for stopping by. My name is Cal Schaafsma. I’m a 20-something media/film nerd currently living in Japan. As one can probably intuit from the previous sentence I’m a bit of a fan of anime, Japanese video games, yadda yadda yadda, blah blah blah… you’ve heard this spiel before. With that said, my one true love is, has always been, and will continue to remain, cinema.
What I found in niche Japanese media is what I love most in film; in all art really. That is a true sense of personality. Works that feel audacious and different from anything I had experienced before. Look I grew up in a pretty white picket fence, suburban neighborhood. I won’t pretend that anime and manga were radically alternative things for a teenager in the early 2010s to be into. Regardless, it did set me on a path that lead me to where I am now. Shows like Naruto or One Piece lead me to shows like Serial Experiments Lain and Neon Genesis Evangelion, which lead me to the films of Mamoru Oshii and Satoshi Kon, which lead me to directors like Akira Kurosawa and Suzuki Seijun. So on and so forth. In my mind, this stuff was the weirdest media imaginable; nothing like it in the world.
Now obviously this is an oversimplification. These are the not-yet-fully formed thoughts of a high school-aged me. There are weird, bizarre, cerebral, and fascinating things being made pretty much everywhere a human can be found. Mankind has to create odd stuff. It’s in our nature. However, juvenile or not it was these wistful high school thoughts that drove me to study film and the Japanese language at university, and that’s what has led me here. I’ve been living in Japan for over a year now. I take a 45 min train ride to the movie theatre at least once if not twice a month, I read manga, read the newspaper and watch local TV. I got what I always wanted, and yet… I’m not really where I want to be.
You see despite all my big talk about expressing oneself through weird art and mankind’s inherent ability to seek out and create diverse things; it’s also in man’s nature to turtle in and stay in one’s comfort zone. While I wouldn’t say that’s what I have been doing, I don’t think I have taken advantage of everything I can while living in Japan. So I go to the theatre often, but that’s mostly for imported English-language films. I read Manga in Japanese, but that’s often stuff I have already read a thousand times. I’m basically only reading it for educational purposes. I love art so much, that I become deathly afraid of not perfectly understanding the media I’m consuming. I feel I will be robbed of some transcendent experience.
This is ridiculous of course. When I have seen Japanese language films in the theatre I understood things perfectly well. When I do challenge myself to read new manga, yes it can be a struggle, but I get through it fine. Maybe I get stuck on certain scenes on quite a few lines of dialogue (much more than I probably should honestly), but I always seem to know what’s going on, and I never fail to be moved by particularly effective works.
The reason for this should be obvious. Films, TV, and comics; are all visual media. They primarily use not the English or Japanese language, but the language of cinema. I don’t want to be afraid of a language I am at the very least intermediate in any way. I want to improve my language ability. I want to get better at analyzing the art I love. I want to better understand the visual language of film. I want to watch new things that I once thought I would never be able to. If I see some new film playing at the theatre I don’t want to be afraid to see it. If I see a new cool-looking manga in the bookstore I want to read it and be confident I’ll be able to get through it.
That’s what this blog is going to be about. I wanna write about all the new cool things I see, and talk about my experiences with watching/reading/playing while not fully understanding the language. I also want to talk about some of the maybe lesser-known works I already love. I’ll rewatch them with the aid of English and try to nail down what exactly makes them so special to me.
As of right now, the blog is empty, but I hope to fill it up a bit over the course of the next year and maybe beyond. If you are reading this in the future, I truly hope I stuck to what I said here and there is a bountiful amount of articles for you to click on if they interest you. Thank you for stopping by and hopefully, you stick around for a bit.