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The Satsuma Rebellion book now

3/19/2018

Our new book connected to Japan is officially published this week: The Satsuma Rebellion.

The English version is out from North Atlantic Books from April the 3rd.
And the Japanese version 西郷隆盛と西南戦争 is coming out in May from Kodansha.

I'm happy with this book - its the kind of history book that I would have really liked myself, when I was a teenager getting into reading about history.

"A gripping graphic novel describing the uprising of 1887, when the old style samurai were crushed in a bloody conflict with the imperial army that ended samurai power in Japan. Historically accurate and with an easy-to-read format, The Satsuma Rebellion is Volume 2 in the Illustrated Japanese History series that began with Black Ships.On the same subject as NHK television's Taiga drama, now showing weekly in 2018.”

https://seanmichaelwilson.weebly.com/satsuma-rebellion.html

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'China is even worse!'

3/10/2018

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This is a common point made when anyone mentions some problem in Japan:

‘China is even worse!’

It may well be true in A, B, C point. But two problems with that:

1. Because X place is worse than Y place it does not mean - AT ALL - that we should give up and accept the moderately bad state of Y. Especially when the solutions are sometimes clear and easy. Things should be improved even if the problem is only moderate.

2. That attitude breeds a kind of arrogance and blindness that often ends up with Y ‘moderately bad’ place being left behind by X ‘very bad’ place. Because the bad place makes effort to improve, and after 20 years or so is - in reality - better than the Y place that has made no effort to improve.

Yup.

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classes at The British School in Tokyo

3/4/2018

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Me at 'The British School in Tokyo'

As the 'visiting author' during their book week I taught 9 classes in comic books over 2 days there. 7 classes to the younger kids (12/13/14 years old) in which I did a very short PPT intro to my books, then we spent most of the time on activities. In this case, I gave them 2 pages of art from our books, with the text whited out - and they had to come up with the speech balloons and caption text, working in pairs.

Then, with the use of a nice little pen type camera which the school had, we sent what they had done, panel by panel to the screen, and i read it out...of course they had done lots of silly and interesting stuff: comedy, horror, realistic and out right odd interpretations of what the story could be. The kids laughed a lot to see each others stuff.

I also did a class with the older students, 17 and 18. Along with a few members of staff they asked me some very good questions about graphic novels, the creative approach, problems that come up, and even got into contentious issues like how money holds back comics. I was very impressed by how eloquent and knowledgable the kids are at such international schools are. One 18 year old student asked me if there are any other writers that I would like to make a visual version of. I said, yes, Jorge Luis Borges - and not only did she know who he was, she even mentioned the title of one of his stories. Great stuff!

And I did a presentation to the whole school also (500 plus and all the staff), in a big lecture theatre. The students mostly organised this themselves, including an excellent video of my books they had made, and this TV show type question and answer session after my presentation.

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The Satsuma Rebellion book now

'China is even worse!'

classes at The British School in Tokyo

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