What's Jappening?

Whether I wanted to or not, it was inevitable that in my time studying abroad here in Japan I would compare my home university (UCA) and my host university (NUA). So today I thought I'd take a little look at how the classes differ between the two unis. Obviously, I can't compare everyone's timetables and lessons so I'm just going to compare my timetable in UCA with my friend Kato's timetable here at NUA. The reason I'm not comparing it with my timetable here at NUA is that I only had to take five classes in order to get enough credits to pass the year back in England and I wouldn't be able to take a lot of the classes due to my pretty shaky Japanese. So here is Kato's timetable: By comparison, my timetable at UCA goes as follows: Monday       9.00-12.00 Illustration                       12.00-1.00 Lunch                       1.00-4.00 Illustration Tuesda...

Fresh off my door-sized print and inspired by my recent trip to the Nagoya City Science Museum (which kinda looks like that robot from The Incredibles), I decided to go a little outside my comfort zone by producing a three-colour print of a pattern (as opposed to any particular thing). I was still recovering from a pretty painful hand cramp and I was starting to worry about how I'd take all this work home, so I decided to go for a postcard-size print which, in hindsight, I think suits the design perfectly. Unsurprisingly, this print took no time at all to finish, and I made a total of eight, whimsical little prints that I am very pleased with. When I get back to England, I'd really like to go back to this design and reprint it with different colour combinations, it could make for an interesting series!

One thing I should probably tell you about NUA is that, in the middle of the campus, there is a large(ish) gallery space that has a weekly rotation of students' work. It's actually something I really love about this university and I honestly wish that UCA did this as well, because it's so awesome to look at everyone's work and support your friends and fellow students in the process. I think I'll suggest it when I get back to England... Anyway, at our orientation at the beginning of the semester, we were told that there was going to be an International Students Exhibition and that this would be a chance for us to show off the work we'd produced during the term. Admittedly, this exhibition took place about a month before the end of term, so not all of our work would be finished, but the hope was that we would have enough work between us to show off the power of the foreigner (or something like that). Having just missed out on exhibiting my work with the rest o...

So this is a bit of a strange one. Since coming to Japan, I've obviously noticed a whole bunch of differences between here and old blighty. Some of them were to be expected, such as the food, some of them were a surprise, such as how cheap eating out is, some of them were not a big deal, such as the train/subway system, and some of them were totally random and unimportant and yet somehow completely threw me. This is a post about one of those things. Now the majority of the eastern world uses the Roman alphabet (a, b, c...) and whilst the order of these 26 letters is fairly arbitrary, we never really think about it. It also makes sense that the vowels follow the same alphabetical order. Now Japan doesn't use the Roman alphabet. Instead, it uses Kanji (Chinese characters representing words), Hiragana (a set of 46 syllables, or sounds, used to construct words), and Katakana (the same 46 syllables but with different characters, mostly used for foreign words). Hiragana and Katak...

So a few weeks ago, I was talking to my course leader here about the upcoming international students exhibition and what I was planning to exhibit. I showed her all of the work I'd done up until that point; my etchings, my first woodcut, my calligraphy etc. and she was a really big fan of the large, floor calligraphy that I'd done at the beginning of the term. She then came up with the idea that I should do a really large woodcut inspired by one of the kanji that I had drawn, with the goal of exhibiting them side by side in a few weeks time. Though hesitant at first due to the practicalities of taking a print that large home to England, I agreed, and she told me that she would have some wood ready for me to carve by that time next week. Blissfully ignorant of what I was getting into, I went about my business, and the next week I came to class with a design in one hand and my cutting tools in the other. People. This piece of wood was big . Like, the size of a large door big. I ...

Existential questions aside, this is something I've been thinking about for quite a while now. Obviously, I'm studying abroad, so that would suggest that I should be focusing on my classes whilst I am here. But it's not quite so simple. My friends and family, myself and the wider realm of the internet have all told me that there is more to it than that. I should not only be studying, I should be making friends, learning about the culture, learning the language, travelling (both in and out of Japan), trying new foods, going to local events, visiting galleries and museums, the list goes on. The thing is, as much as I really want to do all of those things, I don't think I can. As I'm sure many of you reading this will know, I have Aspergers, and one of the characteristics of that is that I find most situations more difficult than the average person, for a number of reasons. The two main ones being that: a) I have sensory difficulties, meaning that my senses are much...

After my successful first try, I was very excited to start on my second woodcut brief. This time, our design could be any size, but it had to have three or more colours, which meant that we had to carve multiple pieces of wood that would be layered on top of one another to create the full image. I decided to use a photo that I took in Atami for my print, as it contrasted to my first print with it's more geometric shapes and block colours. Given that this would be the most complicated print I've ever done, I thought that going with a more simple image would work in my favour, as I'd be less likely to mess up. I also decided to go with the same size as before because I thought it was effective at showing off the technique without being so big that it would be cumbersome. After sketching out my image, I broke it down into four basic colours; brown, red, yellow and black. As the yellow and black were both relatively small parts, I put them on the same piece of wood, so I woul...