This blog post was recovered using The Internet Archive and has been backdated as part of its republication.
I have thought about making an anime/Japanese culture blog for a while but never got around to it until now. I decided that I had come to the point where I needed to express my observations and complaints about anime, manga, and Japanese culture in general.
Mostly I’ll write short column-style posts about a subject or just focus on an anime I recently revisited. I am not trying to be an “official” anime blogger, like Jeff Lawton and the other well-read people in the anime blogosphere, and post episodes summaries with screenshots and I don’t really want to be. If there is something interesting in something I happen to be watching that I’d like to point out (like puns in Yakitate!! Japan), I will make a post about it. But there are not going to be posts titled “Blood+ 15″. Remember that.
And now, the reason why this is named “Part-Time Otaku”. I don’t really have a lot of time to devote to this blog because I’m a second-year undergraduate student with lectures, papers, and finals (OH MY!); I will probably start working soon, which will leave me with less free time. I also am interested in many other subjects than Japanese culture. These include politics, philosophy, economics, and linguistics. I might post about these things intermittently if I can articulate them clearly but I’ll try to maintain the focus on Japanese culture.
Also, when reading this blog, keep in mind that my language background is as a native English speaker and a beginning to intermediate German speaker. [I took some German in high school and am currently taking a three-quarter series of classes to fulfill a foreign language requirement.] As such, I know little to no Japanese (some katakana and hiragana but no kanji) and those few words that I do know I learned from…you guessed it, watching anime. Words like nii-san, kanojo, onna, sekai, tenshi, chigau, etc. I would like to learn Japanese someday but as I said, I’m currently taking German. Maybe senior year, I could try but I think I would probably suck at writing the characters out, especially kanji so I might be limited to conversational Japanese.
About my otakudom, I would say it is about at intermediate level. I have never visited Japan, cosplayed, or been to a convention. However, I would like to do all of those things at least once in my life. I have probably 20-25 DVDs of various series and have purchased a few manga volumes. I think I’ve been to Japantown in San Francisco five times. I’m currently a member of my college’s Anime Club and may soon become an officer of that club. I suppose my thirst for anime started in 1999 or so, Digimon came on the air here in America. This first post is getting to be pretty long so I’ll probably cover “My Road to Otakuhood” in my next post.
So, I already have a couple ideas of things to talk about including licensing, “off vocals”, and the art of Japanese puns. I will strive to make posts at least once a week, although my ultimate goal would be to regularly post twice a week and perhaps use a webcam every once in a while for fun and effect. Now I have to get a webcam…that costs money. But my first task is to create some header art so I have some customization.