I think I’ve mentioned I love Sketchbook before, so hopefully that needs no introduction. If you need one, consult Wikipedia.

Recently, two members of the Sketchbook cluster on Twitter traveled to Fukuoka with the intent of visiting its suburbs, of which the anime adaptation Sketchbook ~full color’S~ largely draws its scenery from. One of them, doujinshi artist Yuzuneko, posted his notes and photos to his blog; I asked him for permission to translate the post, which he graciously granted (thanks!).

What follows is my (very rough) attempt at translating his post.

A couple of notes:

• This is, once again, a rough (and sometimes loose) translation.
• Picture tooltips provide episode numbers and cue points, synced to SpoonSubs’ fansub releases, since that’s probably what most English readers will have access to. For those who actually have the DVDs (good job!!!), if the point is after the opening, you can subtract about seven seconds to get to where you want to be.
• Picture tooltips that aren’t necessarily linked to a specific episode cue were fabricated by me. Go go HTML 5 standards and WordPress’ insistence on adhering to them. (Well, that’s fine.)

–

I’ve mentioned this in my previous post, but over the course of two days, 9/9 and 9/10, I went on a Sketchbook pilgrimage disguised as a simple trip to Fukuoka. There’s a friend who went with me for the same reason. He hadn’t lost his interest in the anime and whatnot, but the so-called Bennett-like Kakashi was a complete novice to everything Sketchbook-related.

…well, I think that’s fine.

There isn’t too much that’s been said about holy-land tours like this. I’d almost thought about winging it, but then I thought about the disastrous time I attempted Comiket without scouting circles out first, so I ended up concocting a plan while consulting trailblazer sites and footage. I screencapped some shots from the anime, took a look at each and every locale, marked maps, and, most importantly, put all the details together. And suddenly, everything had been compiled.

But meanwhile, I’d collected so much info; I ended up putting together a PowerPoint with 30+ slides, sorta like putting together a proposal. It took about an eighth of a day, and the labor costs were about xx yen (truncated)

Anyhow, I gathered together the materials and put together a route.

First of all, seeing this for the first time, you can say it looks a bit difficult. Also, I’d heard that Shioujiyama, Dazaifu High School, and Houmangawa would take a terribly long amount of time without a car, so I planned this kind of rotation:

Although you could call having concrete plans like this ideal, I opted for grabbing some alcohol as I made my way around town. Although it’s easy to imagine what bad things might happen when two guys go around on a weekday drinking beer flailing their cameras around…well, I don’t have too much self-control, so yeah.

–

In any case, day 1. Choosing to take the first train and following airplane out, I arrived at Fukuoka Airport at a little past 8:30. Just as planned, I headed over to the Shime area.

This isn’t from any scene in particular, but first of all, truthfully, my target was actually pretty far from the station. Well, not like I have a problem with walking, but there wasn’t a convenience store to be found — and thus, no chance to grab a beer, which sucked.

In the end, I found one…right next to my destination.

To begin with, a drink.

Below, some Shime area comparison shots.

Shime: Railway Park

The park neighbored the convenience store from where I bought my can of beer. It’s formally known as the “Shime Railway Memorial Park”.

The two students waiting for Kasugano-sensei. Although my friend got my shoulder and back point right, I guess I should’ve moved a bit further forward.

You’re supposed to see the coal mine from the front of the park like this, but it’s actually hidden if you take the picture from the same angle. Moving left a bit, it slightly changed.

The place where Kallen Kozuki and Diethard — I mean, Asaka Kamiya and Kuma meet. Identical.

The place where Sora feeds Haa the expired salmon. The shady guy in the middle there is me. At this time, I’d finished my alcohol, so I felt slightly loopy.

Although there’s only one bench, this is the place, right?

Looks a bit forced, but this is the only shot in which I could get the coal mine, a house, and a tree in a single picture.

Shime: Intersection

The place where I’d heard Asou say “birubiru” instead of “biribiri”. Behind it is a commerce building.

The scene where Hazuki’s hyped up about the sale. The traffic light provides a subtle difference.

The scene in which our lead character arrives. The shape of the roof is the same.

The dashing scene. Although the building on the left’s the same, the right building’s definitely off.

Although identical, in the anime, the building’s shorter.

Anime version Sora’s traumatic moment…just kidding, her small victory over her shyness. I’d say the angle of that roof needs someone like Peter Parker to climb it…

Shime: Bus Stop

Although it looks like it’s close to the Railway Park in the anime, it’s actually pretty far away.

The bus stop bench. Incidentally, the real version’s business isn’t actually in front of Nishitomo.

There’s no tree in the background, as confirmed by a previous report. Although it’s funny how they put it in there so that Kuri-chan could play with the walking stick.

The Suzukaze combo version. Probably the same place, but it seems like they’ve added more to the bus stop…

The scene in which Kasugano-sensei arrives. But, well, having seen the background in real life, the bus stop is unfortunately the only thing that remains.

Shime: Neighborhood

Cuts in which you can see the coal mine from town. Because it’s hard to do this from a car, I ended up searching by foot.

The scene where Inuo’s following Negishi-kun, who’s returning home. Thinking about the angle of the coal mine and the two rooftops, this shot might be wrong.

The scene in episode 11 where Sora catches a cold. Questionable, but this is the only place in which I could get a shot with the coal mine angled like this.

*There actually aren’t any more buildings further down from here.

Forgot which episode this is from, but the scene in which you see the coal mine. Keeping the balance of telephone pole and whatnot in mind, it seems like it’d be this area.

Here’s where I took my second drink.

–

Even though there isn’t a point in the anime where they have a shot of the coal mine up close, I ended up taking a look anyway.

Formally, it’s known as the Shime Mining Industry Area Shaft Tower. It was built nearly 70 years ago. I’m not especially a fan of ruins, but I couldn’t help but think of Hinata from Ro-Kyu-Bu (unrelated) going “oohhh”.

At this point, it was 1 in the afternoon; remembering my plans, I thought, “Oh, yeah, let’s head over to Hakata.” In the interest of speeding things up a bit, let’s head over to Zasshonokuma.

Zasshonokuma

The nice town in which the protagonist lives and often appears in. I’d made some screencaps of this iconic place, but in the end I didn’t jot down any particulars…

I’d thought about grabbing a drink from that 24-hour liquor, but it had changed into a flower shop.

Instead, I opted to go inside a nearby 7-Eleven to grab this.

The shot in front of the railway crossing in front of Gourmet City, looking up. The back was under construction, so that’s rather different. As an aside — I thought I’d heard of the name “Gourmet City” before, before I realized that the 24-hour supermarket I always get my liquor from is also a Gourmet City.

Had to pull the camera a bit back for this one, but here’s the railroad crossing scene. It’s a bit hard to see, but the cleaning shop’s there.

The scene in which we see Natsumi and Hazuki, who didn’t go to the sketching session. The cleaning shop on the left is as-is. I ate lunch at Sandoria, the café on the right.

–

Because I ended up with a bit more time on my hands, I decided to head over to Nishitetsu Futsukaichi that day instead of going on Day 2.

–

Nishitetsu Futsukaichi Station

The station that appears in the overnight trip episode. Nearly identical, save for a handful of subtle changes.

This definitely looks like a forced comparison…

Aside from the window and a couple of other things missing, it’s identical.

I’m a bit further away from where I’m supposed to be, but if it weren’t for the cars, I guarantee you I’d have this shot down.

Once again, I’m a bit further away from the actual spot, but standing in the road’s dangerous.

Mostly matching. The “travel company” sign isn’t there, but I guess that’s a sign of the times.

Here, the “travel company” sign is also missing. The person I don’t know in the picture I took is unrelated.

Identical, aside from the shop. The old lady who I don’t know who happened to be in Kasugano-sensei’s position is also unrelated.

–

We also wrapped that up in a short amount of time. If this were day 2, I’d be visiting the school after this…then I looked at the map and decided that wasn’t going to happen. Instead, as planned, our next destination was Nishitetsu Fukuoka (Tenjin).

–

Nishitetsu Fukuoka (Tenjin)

The first-years’ party of 4 visited this town in episode 12. Compared to when I visited before, there were a lot more people. Sorta reminded me of Ikebukuro and the like.

From this angle, it seems to be simply unchanged.

The lion. I like the Ginza lion better, myself.

The pole on the right-hand side is different, but other than that, it’s the same.

They just did away with the specifics for this one, ouch…although they got the lights right.

I needed to ability to Force Jump my way up to the angle I would’ve liked, so I gave up on that.

The objet d’art in front of the bank. Although it’s quite easy to compare the two, it seems like a stamp rally point.

I couldn’t quite find a park that matched completely…but I managed to find this, which almost gets the job done.

–

Afterward, I’d head back to the inn at Hakata, visit two bars, and because I’d be driving that rental car tomorrow, I ended up drinking just once more before turning in for the night.

That said, Kyuushuu shochu is pretty reasonable. At a shop offering beer for 490 yen, the shochu was 300 yen – for a sizable portion, at that! I can say going for more shochu than beer on a Kyuushuu trip is definitely the right choice.

Although this post ended up being quite long, I’ll start working on Day 2 tomorrow. I’ve got a lot of pictures, so I imagine they’ll take some time to process…

–=–

He’s since posted part 2 (in fact, he posted it this morning), so if you’d like, you can go ahead and read that. Hopefully I can knock out a translation later out this week…

So life happened, and by “life” I mean “a bunch of things”. Well, I guess that’s sorta what life amounts to. I’d also like to think that life would give me a bunch of things to blog about, but either I end up pretty lazy, or I become too busy to the point where, by the time I would’ve posted it, the entry in question wouldn’t be as timely as I’d like it to be. Anyway…happy new year, two months in.

Manabi Mode seems like such a 2010 thing, despite what my Twitter says (“I heard [ufotable producer] Hikaru’s coming to SF for a Kara no Kyoukai event!! MAYBE I SHOULD COME UP TO HIM WITH MANABI STUFF AND HAVE HIM SIGN IT AND TALK ABOUT IT WITH HIM MASSUGU GOOOOOO”). But if you check my Twitter, you’ll notice that I also happen to be tweeting a lot about Sketchbook. As of late, I figured I’d start tagging stuff with #sketchbookmode, to see how long this particular round of obsession lasts.

If you know me well, I have a list of three series that I consider my god-tier-will-rewatch-or-reread-any-time-I-feel-like-it-which-is-often series: Manabi Straight, Sketchbook, and Hidamari Sketch. (As an aside, there are two other anime rated 10 on My Anime List — Azumanga Daioh, which is more of a sentimental rating than anything; and ARIA the Origination.) At any point in time, I will be unusually hype for one of those three series. Right now, it’s Sketchbook. For a moment inbetween all of my Manabi hype last year, it was Hidamari Sketch.

As they say, parting makes the heart grow fonder. The three series are in different positions. Manabi, with its thirteen episodes, OVA, and four tankoubon, is completely done; in the end, there’s nothing truly new I can experience from that series. Hidamari Sketch‘s manga is ongoing (on its fifth volume right now); the anime has three seasons and I wouldn’t be surprised if SHAFT animated a fourth.

Sketchbook, however, is somewhat interesting. The manga is ongoing (the seventh volume hit Japanese bookshelves in early October, and it’s understandably not been licensed for the English market); and the anime, full color’S, is a 2007 thirteen-episode release whose only official English release has been on Crunchyroll. Crunchyroll’s license for the series, as of last June, seems to have expired, and thus everything but the first episode has been taken down. The series covers some three to four volumes of scattered content…most of it resides in the shucchouban – a special volume comprised of comics (with most of the content actually not being 4-panel!) that were published in the spinoff Comic Blade Masamune.

I’ve mentioned before that Sketchbook, to me, is a really great series; in fact, I prefer it over ARIA. I wouldn’t be able to tell anyone why, though. Some people have dubbed me slightly odd, but at the very least, we all recognize that to each his own.

Anyway, as of recent, I’ve somehow ended up following a couple of Japanese Sketchbook fans. They seem pretty passionate about the series. I read their tweets whenever I’m bored and whenever they make a reference, I get it, even if in Japanese…but I can’t respond, nor make appropriate replies/comebacks, because despite my ability to read/recognize Japanese text, I’m not very good at actually forming sentences, and thus not very confident about using it, either.

Also: just last week was protagonist Sora Kajiwara’s birthday. The moment it hit midnight on February 4 in Japan, a good chunk of the Sketchbook cluster cheered as much as they could. Some talked about how glad they were to be Sketchbook fans, and to have met like-minded people. Some posted birthday pictures. Some rewatched an episode or two of the series. Some sent congratulations to @KajiwaraSoraBot. Some admitted that Sora’s birthday was the first time they got really, really hyped up over the birthday of a fictional character. Fun times were had.

Somehow, in addition to my wanting to be a great translator/interpreter/teacher of the Japanese language someday, I now have a very active reason to study Japanese. And now, as of late, I’ve been practicing my Japanese to no one in particular, unless someone replies or mentions me in Japanese. Then, I try my best to form a reply. (As an aside, I love you, love you, LOVE YOU, codefromtokyo; his Japanese dictionary for iOS has come in useful when I can’t come up with words or phrases I need.)

So, long story short: due to the fandom, Sketchbook continues to be relevant for me as I continue my study of Japanese language and culture. And so, from time to time, I’ll be posting a handful of notes here on the usage of Japanese, in an attempt to explain it…and maybe it’ll be useful to other people studying Japanese. And, like I’ve been doing lately on Twitter, the examples are probably gonna be Sketchbook-centric…though I could probably go either which way with that.

Anyway…頑張ります！そして、よろしくお願いします！

So the first episode of Tamayura - Junichi Sato’s (and HAL Film Maker’s) new slice-of-life OVA project – aired on AT-X, as what I figure to be a teaser of sorts. It teases, alright. Having marathoned ARIA the Natural and ARIA the Origination instead of taking it easy on getting through the series out of fear that I’d put it on hold yet again, I might even go so far to say I might’ve been going through SatoJun iyashikei withdrawal. (As an aside, thank you very much, RightStuf — let it be known that I love you guys!)

For a moment, I went through a bit of a phase: what was I supposed to do to get my fix of fresh iyashikei, having finished ARIA? Well, I guess there’s Kaleido Star, of which the second season boxset sits shelved right next to the first boxset of Someday’s Dreamers — neither of which I’ve actually really gotten my hands into.

I prefer it, however, when there’s not too much emphasis on competition — as with ARIA or Hidamari Sketch, both of which have some elements of competition that aren’t not shown very often if they’re not lighthearted. Or series where there’s not really anything going on at all, as with Sketchbook. Or, maybe, if it’s got one main conflict that quickly resolves itself, then sets up a huge sign that tells you when to say “AWWWWWW,” as with the Animal Crossing movie.

Or, I could talk more about Manabi…but if I’m going to talk about Manabi (as iyashikei or otherwise), I’d rather link to people who can describe the experience much better than I can, then link to the one guy aggregating ‘em all.

Anyway, it’s funny how the third point (“nothing really happens a la Sketchbook”) works: when there’s nothing really going on at all, everything mundane suddenly takes center stage, thus making it a top priority to take those things and make them seem more significant than they actually are. That’s probably one of the things that makes Sketchbook one of my favorite shows — I love it when Sora or Hazuki or Kurihara-senpai point out stuff, because they all point out the things I usually don’t pay too much attention to and make them somehow sound interesting…even when at the end of the day, most of the things they point out are truly just plain. (As an aside, I’ve got an alternative hypothesis: the ‘observation’-slash-pun humor in Sketchbook — especially the manga, but certainly present in the anime — is sometimes eerily similar to a handful of my friends’. Like, say, pointers about cheese steak. Cheese steak? That sounds like you’re making a meal out of a frickin’ hunk of cheese — and so on, and so forth.)

Tamayura feels like a Sketchbook 2.0 to me. It’s slow. There’s not much going on. Fu-chan’s got two missions: to take pretty pictures, and to try and become more extroverted — analogous to Sora wanting to capture her life in drawings and perhaps become a bit more extroverted, herself. It’s the change in media — from sketch to film — that really strikes me. I’m not the best person to ask for a sketch (although I could try), but I share the same sentiment as Fu-chan when it comes to photography. That coupled with her shyness — it isn’t quite as bad as Sora’s, but she’s still pretty shy! — made her character someone I could definitely connect with.

I can’t wait to watch the completed work — fifteen minutes is simply not enough. On the other hand, like I said, I guess it’s supposed to be a teaser for a reason…

Amusingly enough, I’m celebrating the birthday of a girl who’s supposed to be born in 2018, but if you set it relative to the series’ end (meaning it was 2037 two years ago), she’s 21 and thus legal to drink alcohol in America! Although, of course, she’s only studying in Oregon for one more semester…

Other character birthdays I celebrated this month (albeit without this much fanfare) were those of Nayuki Minase (12/23) and Kuga Kokage (12/19).

Happy Holidays to everyone who celebrates them!

So I was reading the Sketchbook Perfect WorkBook last night while drifting off to sleep, and I noticed that the birthday of my favorite character in the series – Kurihara Nagisa – is 7/7.

Sounds familiar, yes?

My time with Sketchbook has come to an end; it joins Azumanga Daioh and Hidamari Sketch as one of my all-time favorite anime, perhaps further driving into the ground the fact that I might be enjoying the slice-of-life genre a bit too much.

In the meantime, I’m ramping up my anime watching. Like the above picture, Sketchbook handed the baton over to ARIA the Natural. Alongside that in my Queue of Old Stuff™ is Ookiku Furikabutte, with some Shugo Chara! on the side, and Uchuu no Stellvia, in a joint watch-o-rama with Amol.

I’ve also taken to sampling a handful of things from this season. K-ON! continues to be good. The new Fullmetal Alchemist feels quite like its predecessor, and perhaps has the best eyecatch (earcatch?) of the season. I’m going to sample Saki and East of Eden by the end of the week. And, finally, to top things off, I’ve got an Abridged Script for Ristorante Paradiso episode 1 that goes something along the lines of this:

FADE IN: INT. FANCY ITALIAN RESTAURANT

NICOLETTA walks in and has a fine supper with her mother and father-in-law. She notes the presence of SEVERAL HOMOSEXUAL ITALIAN MEN. She also notes that every woman in the restaurant that isn’t HER nor HER MOTHER are fawning over said HOMOSEXUALS.

NICOLETTA
What is up with all of these women blushing? Geez.

One of the HOMOSEXUAL MEN pours cheap wine into NICOLETTA’S GLASS. NICOLETTA ends up BLUSHING.

NICOLETTA
Shit.

END

K-ON! is good. Queen’s Blade will never touch my machine ever again in animated form, but a couple of friends found scanlations of the source material, and so my laptop plays host to a handful of PDFs for their use whenever necessary.

And Sketchbook continues to be wonderful. I think I might be addicted, even. It’s so good.

Today, I dug into Sketchbook ~full color’s~ for two episodes due to an acquaintance of mine proclaiming it better than Hidamari Sketch. I wonder why he made the comparison, because it feels as though I can’t really link the two, other than the fact that both of them deal with students with an interest in art and the fact that both of them have “sketch” in the name.

For the better part of episode one, I thought aboout how I could liken it more to ARIA…until they showed ARIA-shachou in the form of a bowling alley’s mascot. Looking up Sketchbook on the Anime News Network encyclopedia, much akin to the realization of my not-so-strong Yui Horie link, it makes a bit more sense: it’s animated by the same guys who worked on ARIA, it’s published in the same magazine as ARIA, and it has Makino Yui, who, likewise, is responsible for theme songs for both series (ARIA OP, Sketchbook ED).

Speaking of Toradora!, I should probably get around to watching the rest of it, now that it’s done. Seems like something I should perhaps watch. And, speaking of anime, I’m somewhat disappointed at the lack of a preview for a new Key series adaptation at the end of Clannad After Story. 2009 is the International Year of Astronomy, after all.

Yumemi shall be second to Miichan this year, I suppose.