[snippage]

To quote:
"Why do so few fanfiction authors ever investigate the real Japan?"

Forest, me laddie, not the trees. :)
 

Been there, done that, took pictures:

http://www.josephpalmer.com/fanfic/nerima/Nerima.shtml

(Sorry about the image quality, those were pre-digital camera days)

"Real" Japan  is a lovely and interesting place, and I hope to return 
again soon, but what we see in
most Anime and Manga is only each artist's rendition of the reality, and 
artists being artists, they
take artistic license. My favorite example of this is that I've yet to 
locate an automobile in the Ranma manga,
yet the real Nerima has cars everywhere.

For myself, I did a great deal of research on Japan, purchased Japanese 
dicionaries, and got a subscription
to Mangajin magazine. (Now Defunct, well worth the time if you can find 
back issues.) I watched hours of
off-the-air tapes from the local Japanese video store. I made 
Okonomiyaki. Then I climbed on a plane to visit.
(Twice, so far.)

The street scenes in my story 'Black' come directly from my visit to 
Nerima, the fire patrol from an English
language Japanese newspaper that was tucke under my door in the hotel. 
(They really still had patrols like that
in Tokyo, and the point of that article was that they were more a 
tradition than a necessity these days.)
The golf range is really there, but the idea that a teenage boy had 
climbed it comes from my own activities
on the light towers at a local baseball park. The idea for the power 
outage in Nerima came from an event that
knocked out half of California one afternoon. (The idea for the story 
came to me while sitting in the dark --
What if this happend to Ranma and Akane?)  As to what happens between a 
boy and a girl on a dark night,
well, I have a little experience there too. ^_^;

I'm drifting way off topic here, so I'll jump to my point that Japan is 
only the backdrop of Anime and Manga,
and by extension, Anime fanfiction. The most important thing is telling 
the story. The value of accuracy in the
background materials, or even just faking it really well, is to add 
authenticity to the story. 

I'll shut up now.

(BTW,  My stories are just where I left them:
 http://www.josephpalmer.com/fanfic/fanfic.shtml )

J.

P.S. I hope to get back to Yellow on November 3rd.


































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