Behind the Trend of Huge Eyes in Japanese Anime

JAPANsociology

by Yukako Ikezoe

There have been controversial debates going on about why characters in Japanese manga have huge eyes. Do such huge eyes in Manga mean that Japanese people are craving for them?

Having read Terry Kawashima’s piece, “Seeing Faces, Making Races: Challenging Visual tropes of Racial Differences”, I also started wondering why the eyes of characters in Japanese manga are big, even though I had never strongly questioned that before. Readers from Western countries might have wondered about the looks of characters in Manga because the characters’ features are similar to the features Caucasians have, including round eyes or blond hair.

Thinking about the real purpose of this kind of trend from the perspective of Japanese myself, I would say that is not because Japanese strongly desire to get big eyes like Caucasians, but rather because big eyes are one of the most important techniques to express characters’…

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Top Ten Favorite Book Quotes

Leona's Blog of Shadows

Top Ten Tuesday

Happy TTT everyone!
I have been out of blogging for some time due to personal and health issues, I gotta admit missed the Top Ten Tuesday the most.

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly blog meme hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl and this week’s theme is favorite book quotes. Here goes my top ten:

Prince of Thorns

“Memories are dangerous things. You turn them over and over, until you know every touch and corner, but still you’ll find an edge to cut you.”

The Judging Eye

“I remember… I remember asking a wise man, once… though whether it was last year or a thousand years ago I cannot tell. I asked him, ‘Why do Men fear the dark?’ I could tell he thought the question wise, though I felt no wisdom in asking it. ‘Because darkness,’ he told me, ‘is ignorance made visible.’ ‘And do Men despise ignorance?’ I asked. ‘No,’ he said, ‘they prize…

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Don’t Erase, Highlight

I go back and forth on how I wish sentences to be worded, but the second I choose one way I decide I want to go back or a few days later I think I want to change it back. If I’m lucky to make that choice a second later, I can hit the undo button but if it is a few days later (as is often the case with me) I can’t quite remember how it was previously worded before and the undo button is useless.

Now the easiest way to do this would probably be to use the strike-through feature in Word or Google docs (the two I use, but whichever platform you use probably has one as well), but seeing the word(s) there bug me. They distract me when I’m reading through it and makes a few minutes of reading into a longer period of time. I have taken a leaf out of the FBI’s playbook and highlight the non-used words in black.

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Here, I have left the redacted words because this story is obviously still in it’s first draft and still deciding if I want to reword the sentences or not.

This method also helps when I work through my notes or “outline” like I mentioned in Different Outlines.

Different Outlines

In school you probably learned an outline structure similar to this one:

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But that’s not the only way to outline. Unless this method works for you, it doesn’t need to be that structured or you can use other templates that are the same just different starting letters and numbers.

Personally, I am not as structured in my outlines as above. That just happened because I copied those rules from a webpage (https://en.japantravel.com/guide/shrine-temple-etiquette/20924 ) as a quick reference. Most of the time my outline just looks like this:

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Each line starting with a capital letter is a different thought. It is just a rough sketch of what I want/need to happen in that chapter without being fleshed out. These quick notes are faster to write so I don’t forget anything. I also don’t have to worry about if I’m putting things in the right level of the outline structure or agonize over where it needs to go if it can fit into two or more categories.

Then it’s right below the words I’m typing and can see where I am headed with the story and the notes change into an actual story. The words above have been fleshed out from other notes, and those below are still needing to be applied.

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Then because I am very forgetful, instead of deleting the notes I’ve used I highlight them in black and move them to the end of the chapter’s notes. So if I need to go back and look at them, they are still there.

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This is just a trick that helps my writing process go smoother than keeping thousands of notebooks stashed all over the house (admittedly still have those too) and keeps my thoughts better organized than I have been able to do with pen and paper (probably because I use pen and hate pencils with a passion). You can use any color you want, I just chose yellow for notes and black for redacted because I use other colors for other color coding that I tend to do to help remember different characters.

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Word Tracking

Long time no read, sorry I’ve been pretty busy. Have been writing and reading, so that’s a plus. Thought I would share how I track everything word wise.

I am a tracker, I like to have a visual of my progress and love excel. I know there are others out there so naturally, I hunted the internet for different templates, but none really felt right for me. I would tweak the templates for a better fit, but still not right for me.

It took a while to figure out how I wanted everything to work, but finally came up with my daily spreadsheet.

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Just the basics: Code name of the project and how much I wrote in that for the day. Totals for overall and how much I have written per project in that one month. At the bottom I decide on a goal, keep an overall running total and then how much more I need to go. January was obviously a bit of a slow month as I only barely reached my goal.

Then, I wasn’t just satisfied with the daily numbers. I wanted to expand and see both monthly and yearly. It was a pain to figure out how to get the totals to show up on a different spreadsheet, but had a hay day when I got it where I wanted them.

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It’s simple and similar to the daily. Track the projects and number of projects I’ve worked on in the year (better understood for later) and pull the totals for the month from the daily page. It ends in totals for both monthly and project wise throughout the year. If they are blacked out as three of them are for January, that means I didn’t work on those projects at all that month.

The yearly page is my favorite because I have pulled the yearly totals used another formula for words per page and created charts to better visualize my work. This helps motivate me to work on different projects because I can see where I am putting most of my concentration and which books seem to be falling by the wayside.

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