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Whenever I think back on how I became interested in any particular thing, I can't help but notice how it all hinged upon the person who did the introduction. For instance:
I've been a life-long (literally) Stephen King fan. My mom read 'Salem's Lot while pregnant with me and Cujo was the subject of my first book report. She also got me into The Hobbit. In fourth grade my friend Tim based his Dungeons & Dragons world directly on The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, and I lost my entire childhood to the game. I listened to my cousin's Master of Puppets cassette tape on repeat for at least two days straight, becoming an instant metal-head (which meshed well with the D&D.) A high-school friend more-or -less forced me to play drums in his crappy cover band, and now people seem to enjoy my own music. A local late-night college radio DJ who went by the name Tuesday Night Tod played the darkest industrial and techno music in the world and changed my musical life. I later became his apprentice and took over his show, a quiet event that would change everything forever, as is the way with such things.
And the list goes on. The point is that all of these things are not so much about the things as they are about the people who shared them. I think this is something that most of us do naturally, and that some of us do specifically. So, when I started to try and think of something suitable for my My First Time entry, I couldn't help but keep returning to the guy who was totally responsible for my early anime obsessions.
My friend Pete.
Pete was (and still is, as far as I can tell) much the same sort of geek as I was/am. He was into all the same music, movies, books and whatever else to varying degrees and intensity. The important difference was that, one day, in a way I still do not understand, he began getting box-loads (again, literally) of anime on VHS tapes in the mail. At some point he had become entangled in the dim and slippery world of fan-subs and tape-trading. This was long before the Internet was what it is today. Sure, there were BBSs, crude email systems and eye-bleeding web-pages, but it was still pretty amateur, hobbyist stuff. Much of what he did, as far as I can remember, was still done though regular written correspondence.
Just in case you don't know or couldn't figure it out on your own, tape-trading entailed plugging two VCRs together and copying anime shows from one to the other, then sending the tape out to whoever requested it. That was way before DVDs. In return, you got something back from the person you sent it to. Naturally, since this was the stone-ege, all of the dubbing took place in real-time, so it was all rather slow. Getting a new batch of material in the mail was something of an event.
Because of all this slow work, we were totally happy watching anything and everything. Most often the shows were subtitled by fans to varying degrees of accuracy and technical ability. Again, this analog, hand-crafted feel was wonderful and only added to the appeal or the whole endeavor. We would even be happy watching raw, un-subbed shows.
The world of anime was something completely new to us, and the shows we got, like Ranma 1/2, Evangellion, Sailor Moon, Macross, Akazukin Cha Cha, Urusei Yatsura, All Purpose Cultural Cat Girl Nuku Nuku and Totoro, were all on equal footing. It was all just anime. Naturally we loved all the wacky stuff, but there was also a lot of dramatic stuff that we had never seen in western cartoons. And the music? I think that the music was just as much of a draw as the shows themselves. I still remember singing along to that "Cosmic Cycler" song. And I still have the Sharon Apple EP he got me for my birthday or Christmas or something.
Most of the time, it was just me and Pete hanging out at his house (we were both still in high-school and/or just beginning college), watching whatever was new, playing Magic, talking about music. Occasionally we would have a bigger group of people, but it never felt like most of them "got it" like we did.
Not long after, we were both going to the same university. Pete formed the very first anime club in its history, christening it "Anime-hem." Clever! I was treasurer. Not that we had any treasure. Or many members. But there were a dedicated few, a few of which were actually normal people and not weirdo freaks (aka "otaku".) Though there were a couple of them too, just to keep up appearances. In fact, one of the other founding members would eventually become my wife, but that took a while.
The club was little more than watching a few episodes of whatever we had. We started getting stuff from actual companies like Viz and even had some nice give-aways for the Halloween party. We had an official mascot, Annie-May, designed by a friend of ours. But the club never really took off like we would have hoped and eventually it either dissolved or underwent a management change. I'm not sure which. In the end, Pete moved away and my (future) wife and I inherited two giant boxes of VHS tapes, one of which we still have in the house somewhere.
Not a very spectacular ending, I know, but that's the way a lot of things went back in ye olde college days. I had my hands full dealing with the whole radio DJ thing, playing out, talking with record labels and interviewing people. Pete was on very much the same path, finding his own popularity as a club DJ. I would go on to discover a small compilation called Japan Not For Sale that would, again, change my trajectory. That was the one thing that I found more or less on my own, and is a rather obvious antecedent to Japanator Radio.
If there is anything to take away from all this, I guess it would have to be: I really feel like we've lost our sense of mystery and discovery when it comes to stuff like anime and music. I'm not going to get all down on our age of instant access to information, but it really does make it tougher to enjoy the simple pleasure of discovery and of feeling like part of a small club. The initial feeling we had watching those early anime shows just isn't possible to obtain when you've got wikis and complete torrents and thousands of world-weary fans all just a nano-second away. I'm not sure what the answer to this is, or even if there needs to be one. I guess we'll all just have to wait and see what the future holds.
8 comments
Man I'd love to get my hands on those old tapes... too bad they can't withstand time that well.