This is the magazine issue that I bought which helped launch my life on the trajectory towards Japan.
This is it! Thanks to the sparkly magic powers of THE INTERNET, I have found a scan of Protoculture Addicts issue 22! This is the magazine I bought in high school which had the article "To Boldy Go... To Tokyo" written by Silvain Rheault, someone who had just returned from spending a year teaching English in Japan. THIS ARTICLE is what gave me the inspiration to someday get a job in Japan once I graduated college with a degree. I gave my stack of Protoculture Addicts, Animerica, and Animag magazines to someone just before I moved back to Japan 11 years ago, but thanks to Archive.org, I have found the article that changed my life. (I still have my sole issue of Mangajin magazine from which I found the ad for ALC's pen pal service with which I met the girl I eventually married!) The article is on pages 28 and 29. The entire magazine's scan can be found here.
This is the article that changed my life. It was this issue of Protoculture Addicts as well as the issue of Mangajin I later bought which had an advertisement for ALC's pen pal service that changed my life. This article talks about either living in Japan on a language study program or as an English teacher. It is this article where I first learned about the JET Program. While I had applied for the JET Program in '99, interviewed in 2000 and was rejected, I ended up doing similar work through the Phoenix Sister Cities Program instead.
I'm actually glad that I never worked for the JET Program, since it could possibly be a blemish on one's resume here in Japan. Seriously, their hiring is all over the place. Someone like me who had experience visiting Japan twice and could speak the language was turned down, because my interviewers were so full of themselves and focused only on teaching. Meanwhile, this same organization will hire others who neither have any teaching experience nor experience with Japan, and these candidates may end up being rotten ALTs and embarrassing themselves as well the organization. No, I did not know how to put together a lesson plan, but I loved Japan more than many other applicants, and all I wanted was to get a job close to my fiancee (although I did not mention that I had a fiancee in my interview, of course).
Here are larger images of the pages of the article that impressed me so much, so that you can read it too:
I bought this magazine because it had information and a plot synopsis of the first episode of Kimagure Orange Road among other information on shows that interested me. This issue talks of the Akira soundtrack which was released in the USA, and it talked of laserdiscs and US Renditions. On page 20 is an ad for Anime Expo '93, which featured Haruhiko Mikimoto of Macross fame as a guest of honor! Oh, how I wished I could have attended! Page 27 features an ad for Anime America, a con held during the summer of '93 which hosted Haruka Takachiho (Dirty Pair, Crusher Joe), Monkey Punch (Lupin the 3rd), and Kenichi Sonoda (Bubblegum Crisis, Gall Force, Riding Bean)! Back then, discovering the world of Japanese animation was like discovering a secret cave of hidden treasures which hardly anyone knew about. It was almost like Plato's Cave in reverse, since it was such a niche hobby at the time. I was a high school student at the time, and it wasn't until my college years when the anime explosion of Dragonball Z and Sailor Moon took high schools by storm. After a while, the trendies caught on and then everyone seemed to know about anime. At that point it wasn't such a magical, mysterious, elusive, and niche entertainment genre anymore.
Also of interest is the advertisement for New Type Hobbies and Toys on page 7, where I bought my first Macross Valkyrie model from. I used to just flip through New Type's catalog over and over again, thinking that I would love to someday build garage kits of Bubblegum Crisis and the like, but at the time I figured that I would never gain the skills to do so. Oh what a difference 30 years of my life would make!
Next: memories of Himeji Castle
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"Stars above, stars below. . . and what is man?" --The Ocean Blue
mail: greg -atsign- stevethefish -dot- net
