NB! Japanese layout! Reads RIGHT TO LEFT!!
Normally Irish commuters aren’t this pushy…well…on second thought maybe they are…
Part 6: Class Schedules and Maternity Hospitals
As you may already know, Japan is pretty far away from Europe. Travel between Western Europe and Tokyo can take up to 10-15 hours depending on the aircraft used and the route taken which makes short trips there unfeasible (you’d want to get a week or so there if you are going to spend an entire day on a plane). Another effect of this distance is that Japan, like much of East Asia, is in a very different timezone.
Japan is 8 hours ahead of most of Europe, so when I get up in the morning it is already later afternoon in Tokyo. By the time I finish work in Norway, it is usually midnight or the early hours of the next day for those living in Japan. This presented a set of practical issues with my attendance of the course at Manga School Nakano, which thankfully Nao had thought of when she planned the class timetable.
First off, all the classes happened on the weekend. For me, this was usually on Saturdays and for most other students this would also be true. All of the distance learning lessons were held on Saturdays and Sundays. Naturally, Nao posted the class times in relation to Manga School Nakano’s timezone, which is Japan Standard Time (JST). JST is 9 hours ahead of UTC (That’s the UK’s GMT timezone without summer adjustments, also known as ‘Zulu’ time by military folk) and it never changes for Summer Time. So, when my classes were scheduled for 16:00 JST, I would do some subtraction to figure out that my class would be at 08:00 CET in Norway. I also had to watch out for the summer changes which would shift the time by an hour.
It was a little tricky, but thanks to my time living in China, I was used dealing with this time difference whenever I would call home to Ireland. So, I would take lessons with Nao for an hour on Saturday mornings, and then use the rest of the week to fulfill an assignment she had given me.
The course started off well, with the lessons fitting in with my week rather nicely (the morning lesson freed up the rest of the day). However something happened which possibly makes my attendance to MSN rather unique. Although I can not be sure of this, it’s probably safe to say that I am the only MSN student who has had to cancel a lesson because his wife had gone into labor.
Thus as some of you might already remember back in April, Anna gave birth to my son Albert. He came on his due date, without complications and by the end of the week we had brought him home. I could go into length about that experience and also what it is like to go through it in a Norwegian hospital, but we would be here forever, so I will probably save those stories for another time. But thankfully, against all of the fears that appear to be natural for a new parent, Albert had the uncanny knack of being a perfectly healthy baby.
Thankfully, it also seemed that I didn’t need to go back to work straight away. Norwegian law is a surprisingly generous thing when it comes to this, and following the birth I had become entitled to a weeks paid leave on-top of my standard leave. So for the following week I remained at home to take care of both Anna & Albert. I have regularly raved about how awesome Anna is, and the fact that a lot of Aoife’s later character developments are based on her, and needless to say that awesomeness continued during the following week when I asked if it would be alright for me to continue taking the MSN lessons. Anna supported my wanting to take the course in the first place and continued to do so after the birth thus confirming how awesome she is yet again 🙂
I contacted Nao and got the ball rolling. My course would continue, but also Nao would introduce a new level of challenge that was about to put my drawing capacity to it’s toughest test yet.
Next week: The Rookie Manga-ka Experience.
Aw, poor Áine. Flashed forward and then knocked about by modern times.
When it comes to time differences, it could be worse. I used to chat with a friend in Australia, and since that’s the southern hemisphere, daylight savings time could make the time difference change by two hours, depending on the time of year. The US has also been on a bizarre DST schedule for a few years that’s different from the rest of the world, so even talking to people from the UK or Europe the time difference shifted a lot. (This is due to the US Congress’s idea of implementing an energy policy being extending DST, since studies from the 1970’s showed that energy use dropped during DST.)
@Azreal: Indeed. She’ll be ok in the end, but she is getting a much harder time of it compared the rather ‘different’ manner Ashling & Aoife introduce her to the modern world. This was actually one of the harder pages to produce too :O
@Kessy: Agreed, it could certainly be worse. Thankfully due to the ‘direction’ of ‘time’ and the relative distance between Oslo and Tokyo, I’m able to communicate with Nao in mostly the same day as her. Thus it worked out ok. However in the opposite direction towards the US I sometimes get some difficulty due to me being a day ahead. Often I’d been chatting with someone in my Saturday morning, while my US friend would be in their Friday night. Gets tricky 😀
This is kind of funny, Rawr. I’d never heard the song “The Final Countdown” until your post on the previous page. And just in the last week or so a TV ad has started playing here featuring that exact song.
‘The Final Countdown’ is *very* 80’s song here in Europe and many will know it automatically.
It was a typical “one-hit-wonder” from the Swedish rock-band named ‘Europe’.
It is one of my own favorites of this particular genre and has often inspired ideas in my head about what the lyrics mean. Very often I would imagine a flight away from a doomed Earth, which became the basis for my ‘Last Day’ manga idea.
It still surprises me that few people in the US know this song though.
It’s funny the things that make it across the pond and the things that don’t. “The Final Countdown” isn’t that well known in the US, but if you ask most Americans for what they think of as the defining example of that genre, I imagine most would say “Sweet Dreams Are Made of These,” even though the Eurythmics are also a European band. Go figure.
I feel that one of the big things I’ve gotten out of talking to people online is that it’s shown me just how many unconscious cultural assumptions I have. It completely blew my mind when I found out that Dr. Seuss is mostly unknown in the UK. I still have a hard time imaging growing up without “The Cat in the Hat.”
I must say I’m well acquainted with Europe’s “Final Countdown”. Then again I was a teen in the eighties so probably not all that surprising. 😛
@Kessy: It is one of those fun things about meeting people from other parts of the world. Although I’ve found a lot of the basics to be familar around the world, what people take for granted as ‘normal’ really does change a lot.
Dr. Seuss book are being read in Ireland & the UK in recent years, but there isn’t as much a tradition of reading those as compared to reading the works of Roald Dahl (for example).
Mentioning how things make it in one place and not another, it reminds me of another oddity. For some reason a couple of Irish music acts in the 70’s completely flopped out in Ireland, the UK & the US. However for reasons I can’t grasp, several became *huge* in Japan. One such example was The Nolan Sisters, who had a lack-luster career in the western world, but enjoyed a massive fan following in Japan during the 70’s. It was even suggested that the Nolans were ultimately used as a model for the first 5 anime-girl archetypes. If true it would be crazy…and would sort of make all anime-girls Irish :O
@Azreal: Good to know that I’m not the only one then 😀
You’d probably enjoy ‘Last Day’ if I ever get around to making it.