A few years ago, I was pathetically afraid of what other people thought about me. My biggest phobia was the fear of scrutiny. That's why if you had walked into my office while I was watching an episode of "Urusei Yatsura", "Great Teacher Onizuka", "School Rumble", or any other in a long list of anime, you would've witnessed a superluminal flurry of windows closing and innocuous mathematics PDFs popping up.
Wait. Let's back up further.
I've found that if you take almost any major feature of your life and trace it backwards, you'll find that if it didn't originate from your parents, it originated from an evening of boredom. A number of the characteristics of my life trace back to anime-- Japanese animation, that now-ubiquitous body of imported cartoons with their distinct styling-- which in turn traces further back to just such a lonely evening. Sure, my friends in junior high and high school had attempted to introduce me to titles like DragonballZ, but these just didn't have any appeal to me. What did finally give anime a slim foothold, was actually a flashgame spinoff of an anime called "Love Hina".
I often twiddled away the time on bored evenings (of which I had many back then) browsing flashgame websites like Newgrounds and playing every game I could find. One of those games was a dating simulator, an open-ended game where the player assumes the role of a clueless vanilla college student and jumps through various strange quests to win the affection of various girls. This sim was based on the anime Love Hina; the game itself is here. I'm a bit shy to admit that I was actually drawn on in by this game. At the time, I had never been with a girl in real life, and I was presenting a fake mask of sexual apathy to the world, hiding the fact that I was really extremely lonely. Obviously, the game was about as good for "dating advice" as the average unrealistic Hollywood chickflick, but it was somehow cathartic to roleplay as a guy doing these things I was too terrified to do in real life, like ask a girl on a date. And yes, I liked the eye candy.
At first when I delved into YouTube to find episodes of the anime that the game was based on, I was annoyed to find that they were only available in Japanese! At least they had English subtitles, so I resigned myself to watching a couple subbed episodes, just to see what they were like. The first couple episodes quickly became the first couple seasons; I was hooked! How had I been missing this all my life?!
My biggest phobia was the fear of scrut... oh wait, I already covered all that, in the opening paragraph. "But you've gotta explain," the incredulous reader urges, "why were you hiding your newfound hobby so furtively from even your friends?" After all, it's just cartoons, it's not like I was watching shoe-tying instructional videos or something. The fact is, I mentally classified Japanimation as something for dorks and nerds. Nevermind that I was, objectively, a dork and a nerd-- I was filing my tax forms with the state of denial. What I failed to understand was that, ironically, it's not anime or any other hobby that contributes to nerdhood, but rather the very self-conscious behavior I was taking to try and avoid nerdiness!
I began spending several hours a day watching anime, moving from one series to another, all off of YouTube. On weekends, "several hours" became "many hours". The shows being set mostly in modern Japan, I began absorbing knowledge and trivia about Japanese culture and behavior. My brain adjusted to their crazy moon language, and soon instead of trying in vain to find English voice-overs, I was avoiding them, enjoying the exotic syllables of Nihongo almost as much as the drama and romance themselves. To my amazement, I was starting to pick up common words. I'll never forget the time I understood my first Japanese sentence, complete with verb conjugation, unaided by subscripts. It was the first line of the first episode of "Fate/Stay Night" (an anime, by the way, which includes King Arthur in modern day Japan... as a woman). I had switched to another window while the opening credits rolled. And then, minna shinda-- "Everyone died". There was no need to roll back and peek at the subtitles-- my brain had just voluntarily decrypted the clandestine tongue of the easterners!
I decided it had gone far enough, it was time to rouse the inner autodidact and teach myself Japanese! At least, that was my true, deep desire, but in my pathetic self-consciousness, I refused to admit to wanting to embark on such a harrowing quest because of cartoons. That would be sooo dorky (I thought). No, it had to be part of something more grandiose! I wasn't just a sudden Japanese enthusiast (an otaku), I was a future polyglot, a scholar of widespread dialects! This was something bigger, something grander, and nothing to do with cartoons, no sir!
The result of this self-deception was that I ended up studying a bunch of Esperanto and Mandarin before sinking my teeth into the language I really felt a passion for. Once I did finally penetrate the Japanese pedagogy cherry, I quickly abandoned the other languages.
Around the same time I was getting confident with Esperanto, my life took a dramatic turn. In short, I took my love life into my own hands, finally emerging from the denial of loneliness and plunging myself into the seduction community (click that link to get the juicy details). My anime-watching time went down a lot as I started spending time going out and socializing.
For a year or two, anime and Japanese took a fairly low priority. A few times, I even went for weeks without studying my flashcards at all. It took a lot of work before I started seeing significant positive results. When a person who's been living as a eunuch all his life pulls a 180 as late in life as I did, lowering the protective shields of denial and asexualness, it's not uncommon for him to seemingly become worse before he becomes better. It's not that pickup artist literature made me a creep, it's that I was secretly a creep all along, and finally ripped off the bandaids so the long-festering damage could begin to heal.
When I got my first regular partner, I mellowed out a lot from the world of Venusian arts. Amazingly, getting laid regularly had a remarkably retardant effect on my motivation to go out clubbing and barhopping. By sheer coincidence, this girl I was sleeping with was also into anime-- even more than I had been, in fact. We're talking posters on the wall and actual, expensive manga books on the bookshelf. Pretty cool. Japanese entertainment swung back up out of its long depression, and took hold once more of several-hours-a-day of my life. This time, though, I wasn't as self-conscious about it. All that time I'd spent chewing bullets in the trenches of nightlife had numbed me to what others thought about me. After being rejected a thousand times by hot club girls, it's like the volume was cranked way down on the rest of my life. Who cares if my friends knew I liked anime? Once I stopped hiding it, I suddenly saw that lots of really cool guys shared the interest-- if not as intensely.
The girl graduated and moved out of state, and I kicked back and relaxed for awhile, watching anime on the side while generally wasting time. My Summer vacation was kind of adrift, failing to really converge toward anything besides a lot of computer gaming and forum reading and anime watching-- like I'd gone back to my pre-seduction days, only with better clothing and hygiene. I devoted a lot of time to studying Japanese, which included learning a lot about how to learn languages. Amidst the lazy ebb and flow of the off-quarter, I toyed with the idea of really making something of the vacation time: a trip, or maybe a pilgrimage, to Japan itself. Then I thought, no way, that'd be way too much work. Then more time passed. Then in a moment of spontaneous recklessness, I decided, let's do it! Before I could talk myself out of it, I purchased flight tickets for a month-long stay. I was heading east.
Although I flew to Nippon because of its language and its anime, I ended up discovering there was so much more than that. The food, the scenery, the people, the bizarre... it was a month during which I completely forgot about anime. Those animated sketches were just appetizers, a sort of training program to prepare me for immersion in the real thing. I wandered as a free spirit, seldom planning ahead, merely accepting every adventure that presented itself, and there was no shortage. Forget the tourguides, just apply the Bladerunner Rule: glance down an alley, and if it looks like something out of Bladerunner, go check it out. This should never lead you astray.
After I returned home, my life took another shift. Being abroad had really opened my eyes, and I resolved to work from then on to build myself as a human being. After spending virtually all my time for that whole month just socializing with everyone I met, I seemed to be surrounded by an almost mystical aura, an ability to talk to total strangers and within minutes have them talking like we were lifelong friends. I officially considered myself retired from the seduction community, for I felt the quest for self-development had evolved from a mere nightlife treasure hunt into an epic spiritual crusade.
Just before the sun set on Summer, I met an awesome Japanese girl on campus, and soon we were practically inseparable. Our relationship was aided initially by my relatively high knowledge of Japanese language and culture, but neither of these played critical roles as we grew together.
I still put on the occasional anime episode, I still love the stories and art. The original magic and exoticism has been usurped since I live now with a lover far cooler than the stereotypical walking cliches whom our anime heros court. It seems almost a little silly to make a big deal about the culture of the Last Empire, when I'm living every day with someone brought up and raised there. Japanese animation will remain a neat hobby of mine, one which I now openly discuss with friends; but it'll no longer consume hours of my every day.
FURTHER READING
The Seduction Community Dancing Monkey
Five Reasons to Study a Foreign Language
My Trip To A Japanese Cult
Pictures From Japan
Wait. Let's back up further.
I've found that if you take almost any major feature of your life and trace it backwards, you'll find that if it didn't originate from your parents, it originated from an evening of boredom. A number of the characteristics of my life trace back to anime-- Japanese animation, that now-ubiquitous body of imported cartoons with their distinct styling-- which in turn traces further back to just such a lonely evening. Sure, my friends in junior high and high school had attempted to introduce me to titles like DragonballZ, but these just didn't have any appeal to me. What did finally give anime a slim foothold, was actually a flashgame spinoff of an anime called "Love Hina".
I often twiddled away the time on bored evenings (of which I had many back then) browsing flashgame websites like Newgrounds and playing every game I could find. One of those games was a dating simulator, an open-ended game where the player assumes the role of a clueless vanilla college student and jumps through various strange quests to win the affection of various girls. This sim was based on the anime Love Hina; the game itself is here. I'm a bit shy to admit that I was actually drawn on in by this game. At the time, I had never been with a girl in real life, and I was presenting a fake mask of sexual apathy to the world, hiding the fact that I was really extremely lonely. Obviously, the game was about as good for "dating advice" as the average unrealistic Hollywood chickflick, but it was somehow cathartic to roleplay as a guy doing these things I was too terrified to do in real life, like ask a girl on a date. And yes, I liked the eye candy.
At first when I delved into YouTube to find episodes of the anime that the game was based on, I was annoyed to find that they were only available in Japanese! At least they had English subtitles, so I resigned myself to watching a couple subbed episodes, just to see what they were like. The first couple episodes quickly became the first couple seasons; I was hooked! How had I been missing this all my life?!
My biggest phobia was the fear of scrut... oh wait, I already covered all that, in the opening paragraph. "But you've gotta explain," the incredulous reader urges, "why were you hiding your newfound hobby so furtively from even your friends?" After all, it's just cartoons, it's not like I was watching shoe-tying instructional videos or something. The fact is, I mentally classified Japanimation as something for dorks and nerds. Nevermind that I was, objectively, a dork and a nerd-- I was filing my tax forms with the state of denial. What I failed to understand was that, ironically, it's not anime or any other hobby that contributes to nerdhood, but rather the very self-conscious behavior I was taking to try and avoid nerdiness!
I began spending several hours a day watching anime, moving from one series to another, all off of YouTube. On weekends, "several hours" became "many hours". The shows being set mostly in modern Japan, I began absorbing knowledge and trivia about Japanese culture and behavior. My brain adjusted to their crazy moon language, and soon instead of trying in vain to find English voice-overs, I was avoiding them, enjoying the exotic syllables of Nihongo almost as much as the drama and romance themselves. To my amazement, I was starting to pick up common words. I'll never forget the time I understood my first Japanese sentence, complete with verb conjugation, unaided by subscripts. It was the first line of the first episode of "Fate/Stay Night" (an anime, by the way, which includes King Arthur in modern day Japan... as a woman). I had switched to another window while the opening credits rolled. And then, minna shinda-- "Everyone died". There was no need to roll back and peek at the subtitles-- my brain had just voluntarily decrypted the clandestine tongue of the easterners!
I decided it had gone far enough, it was time to rouse the inner autodidact and teach myself Japanese! At least, that was my true, deep desire, but in my pathetic self-consciousness, I refused to admit to wanting to embark on such a harrowing quest because of cartoons. That would be sooo dorky (I thought). No, it had to be part of something more grandiose! I wasn't just a sudden Japanese enthusiast (an otaku), I was a future polyglot, a scholar of widespread dialects! This was something bigger, something grander, and nothing to do with cartoons, no sir!
The result of this self-deception was that I ended up studying a bunch of Esperanto and Mandarin before sinking my teeth into the language I really felt a passion for. Once I did finally penetrate the Japanese pedagogy cherry, I quickly abandoned the other languages.
Around the same time I was getting confident with Esperanto, my life took a dramatic turn. In short, I took my love life into my own hands, finally emerging from the denial of loneliness and plunging myself into the seduction community (click that link to get the juicy details). My anime-watching time went down a lot as I started spending time going out and socializing.
For a year or two, anime and Japanese took a fairly low priority. A few times, I even went for weeks without studying my flashcards at all. It took a lot of work before I started seeing significant positive results. When a person who's been living as a eunuch all his life pulls a 180 as late in life as I did, lowering the protective shields of denial and asexualness, it's not uncommon for him to seemingly become worse before he becomes better. It's not that pickup artist literature made me a creep, it's that I was secretly a creep all along, and finally ripped off the bandaids so the long-festering damage could begin to heal.
When I got my first regular partner, I mellowed out a lot from the world of Venusian arts. Amazingly, getting laid regularly had a remarkably retardant effect on my motivation to go out clubbing and barhopping. By sheer coincidence, this girl I was sleeping with was also into anime-- even more than I had been, in fact. We're talking posters on the wall and actual, expensive manga books on the bookshelf. Pretty cool. Japanese entertainment swung back up out of its long depression, and took hold once more of several-hours-a-day of my life. This time, though, I wasn't as self-conscious about it. All that time I'd spent chewing bullets in the trenches of nightlife had numbed me to what others thought about me. After being rejected a thousand times by hot club girls, it's like the volume was cranked way down on the rest of my life. Who cares if my friends knew I liked anime? Once I stopped hiding it, I suddenly saw that lots of really cool guys shared the interest-- if not as intensely.
The girl graduated and moved out of state, and I kicked back and relaxed for awhile, watching anime on the side while generally wasting time. My Summer vacation was kind of adrift, failing to really converge toward anything besides a lot of computer gaming and forum reading and anime watching-- like I'd gone back to my pre-seduction days, only with better clothing and hygiene. I devoted a lot of time to studying Japanese, which included learning a lot about how to learn languages. Amidst the lazy ebb and flow of the off-quarter, I toyed with the idea of really making something of the vacation time: a trip, or maybe a pilgrimage, to Japan itself. Then I thought, no way, that'd be way too much work. Then more time passed. Then in a moment of spontaneous recklessness, I decided, let's do it! Before I could talk myself out of it, I purchased flight tickets for a month-long stay. I was heading east.
Although I flew to Nippon because of its language and its anime, I ended up discovering there was so much more than that. The food, the scenery, the people, the bizarre... it was a month during which I completely forgot about anime. Those animated sketches were just appetizers, a sort of training program to prepare me for immersion in the real thing. I wandered as a free spirit, seldom planning ahead, merely accepting every adventure that presented itself, and there was no shortage. Forget the tourguides, just apply the Bladerunner Rule: glance down an alley, and if it looks like something out of Bladerunner, go check it out. This should never lead you astray.
After I returned home, my life took another shift. Being abroad had really opened my eyes, and I resolved to work from then on to build myself as a human being. After spending virtually all my time for that whole month just socializing with everyone I met, I seemed to be surrounded by an almost mystical aura, an ability to talk to total strangers and within minutes have them talking like we were lifelong friends. I officially considered myself retired from the seduction community, for I felt the quest for self-development had evolved from a mere nightlife treasure hunt into an epic spiritual crusade.
Just before the sun set on Summer, I met an awesome Japanese girl on campus, and soon we were practically inseparable. Our relationship was aided initially by my relatively high knowledge of Japanese language and culture, but neither of these played critical roles as we grew together.
I still put on the occasional anime episode, I still love the stories and art. The original magic and exoticism has been usurped since I live now with a lover far cooler than the stereotypical walking cliches whom our anime heros court. It seems almost a little silly to make a big deal about the culture of the Last Empire, when I'm living every day with someone brought up and raised there. Japanese animation will remain a neat hobby of mine, one which I now openly discuss with friends; but it'll no longer consume hours of my every day.
FURTHER READING
The Seduction Community Dancing Monkey
Five Reasons to Study a Foreign Language
My Trip To A Japanese Cult
Pictures From Japan
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