Ya haha I forgot about video games also being part of my japanese influence. I guess I kind of asked people to post stories without even posting one of my own. I think the main reason is that I don't exactly know.
Thinking about it now, it was an amazingly gradual process. When I was younger I was never into anything japanese, about the only japanese activity I participated in was super mario world. I played baseball too, but didn't know that countries other than the US played it seriously. I was always the half athletic / half nerd guy throughout middle and high school. I had alot of friends, but could clearly tell that they were into different things. I eventually seperated from the athelete friends (on account of all they would do is smoke/drink and talk about going out to "git sum honayz") and stayed with the gamer/normal people.
Although I did play my fair share of games, I was more into the next american thing (I didn't really think about the japanese games/influences). A friend of mine came over and he brought over final fantasy 7 and grand tourismo. We drank a 24 pack of A&W and played the sh*t out of those games until our eyes bled enough too blur the image to the point where we couldn't correctly play the games. Needless to say I liked the games, but I wasn't going to go out and play every final fantasy game out there.
Then along came anime. The first anime I watched was Cowboy Beebop. I remember coming home from vacation to see adult swim with their hypheness about whatever new program they were slangin'. I didn't know anything about anime, and when i began to watch the first episode, I thought of how it was like cartoons but actually looked artistic, as if it were paintings brought to life. The music hit me too. I think to this day the cowboy beebop soundtracks are my favorite cd's in my library. I played the electric bass guitar in the jazz band at my schools so that was also friggin sweet. I picked up anything I could about the show. I would go through shady sites/napster/kazaa/limewire/suprnova, anywhere where I could get a taste of it. From all the stupid american reality shows that were on and the american cartoons, (don't get me wrong dexter's lab and angry beavers were awesome. not to mention invader zim either) anime was a not only a breath of fresh air, but a giant tank of the stuff.
After that I watched most of the other anime that had been brought over to the states (Trigun, Samurai Champloo, Black Lagoon, all the studio ghibli movies, etc.) and got into those. Then took it a step further and started watching subbed stuff (my first real exposure to a lengthened amount of time of actual japanese being spoken.
After awhile of leeching off of the countries art forms that were being shipped overseas, I finally decided that I was going to take some time and actually learn about it. This was probably a couple years ago. I read, watched, and ate anything that would get me closer to understanding the culture that to me was abstract. It was in 2004 that the first thing that actually made me want to go to japan for even a short amount of time.
At the time I was really into this game called Street Fighter:3rd strike (I still am and benefit from having one of the best US arcades near me). I played/studied/and lived that game for a good couple months, until I knew everything that I could about it. I was addicted, and it was good. There is an international tournament for fighting games that is held in japan every year called Super Battle Opera. I began watching the videos and seeing the amazing level that the japanese players took the game to over there. All the techniques were over there months before someone in the US found out.
Then one night while going through the endless list of 3s videos, in the "related videos" column of youtube, I saw a video called "Life in Tokyo". At the time I knew Blogs existed, but didn't even think about someone video taping their lives and calling it a Vlog. I watched every episode of Mr.Cooney's collection (and continue too), at which point I would watch the vlogs of the fellow foreigners whom he would reference. This is the point where I thought that going to Japan for an extended amount of time might actually be a possibility. I quickly picked up hirigana katakana and began reading the pages at japanese.about.com trying to pick up anything that I could. There were no japanese classes available near me so I thought that this would be the next best thing.
Then, Tkyosam put up a video about a week or two ago about people learning japanese. He very briefly described the method that his friend Khatzumoto had shown to him.
After the video I clicked on the link to see what this method was. In one sitting I read almost the entire site. It made so much sense, and I was wondering how I never thought of it before. I immediately started planning how I was going about learning japanese (which needlessly to say, has changed), and thought about how once I got the RTK book, that I would be set to go. Well, it turned out that the book was not available at book stores near me and was going for 50+ on amazon.com. This was not good. I searched around and "found" the book online for the premium cost of 0.00 (I intend on mailing a check for a more appropriate amount to Mr.Heisig once I find a mailing adress or the book pays off). I sat down at my computer and then... I really didn't know what to do. I knew to read the book and go through the kanji, but what after. So I clicked the link to this site and started reading about what the heck I was actually supposed to do with this new book I got. That was a week ago, and I'm currently on kanji 430 (ya I split lesson 18 in half). But ya thats pretty much my story.
If I remember more I'll post. I hope to hear more stories.
