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Memoirs: I love the Japanese

I was going to write something about the Panama Canal but quite frankly I’m not in the mood to be ranting off about depressing and thought-provoking topics or whatever. Instead, I will distract you with my love for the Japanese. There’s not one ounce of Japanese descent in me, so it’s not like my affection for the country is justified but I’m simply fascinated by the people, their culture, their society, their ideas and, of course, their TV programs. For some inexplicable reason I have an affinity to Japan; I thought about it during the Japan – Brazil game in which the Brazilians ripped them a new one by winning 4 – 1 and I think it was back when I was a kid… I’ve always been a TV junkie. I picked up a lot of things from the “idiot box” and one of those things was ideas for stories by way of cartoons. I’m a child of the 80’s so I saw them all: MASK, G.I Joe, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, The Visionaries, The Thundercats, the Silverhawks, The TRANSFORMERS, and the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon (never saw how it ended… if anyone knows if the group got out of that dimension lemme know!) and ‘til that time I was exposed to inherently American TV. Then an uncle showed me a VHS tape with episodes of this crazy adventure cartoon of a kid with big eyes, spiky black hair and a monkey tail prancing around and beating ass. I was exposed to “Dragon Ball” and with that, to animé. I fell in love. It was unlike anything I had seen before; it was as if I had my standards set regarding what I wanted out of my cartoons and in came Gokou to diligently cross-kick the shit out of it.

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Many cartoons and animé came soon after with varying degrees of success in catching my eye (my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles phase was insane, and when The Power Rangers first came around I still hade some Jiban residue so I liked it as well) but ever since then American cartoons just couldn’t make the cut (with some notable exceptions: Batman: TAS was awesome as was pretty much everything else Paul Dini touched) but out of the top of my head I can only remember animés: Captain Tsubasa (“Super Campeones”) Dragon Ball Z, Saint Seiya (“Caballeros del Zodiaco”), and of course, live action HOTNESS such as Lone Wolf and Cub (“El Asesino Fugitivo”). God, I love those characters. Of course, that led to me looking for information about the culture and, when I finally could afford it, start buying Japanese cinema. That branched out to Asian cinema in general, which spread out even further to European cinema and to this day I see American movies as popcorn movies. Everyone else in the world is taking the form to its limits and I love that. Anyway, I was thinking about these shows and it really goes to show how much influence something can have when you’re a kid. I’m pretty sure that if I hadn’t seen Dragon Ball when I did I would’ve never known what “pushing the envelope” really meant.

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