People sometimes ask me: 'Why do you like Japan (or the Japanese culture) that much?
It all started when my father started a
Jiu-Jitsu club when I was around nine years old. Of course, I had to join from my father. In the beginning, it was somewhat against my will but I soon started enjoying it. I followed Jiu-Jitsu for about ten years till I went to the university. During the last years, I tried out some others like Wing Shun, Taekwondo, Karate,.... but I didn't like sparring all too much.
My father's club was a sportsclub and not a dojo. He really did it as a sport and didn't learn too much about the origin of this discipline. Out of interest, I started to read about the subject from books from the library. I eventually also read a lot about Samurais and Bushidō which I found fascinating. This got me interested in the culture.
A second element were the cartoons I watched during childhood. Although not a native French speaker, the channel with the most cartoons was
TF1 (
Télévision Française 1). So I grew up watching
Dragonball, Les Chevaliers du Zodiac (
Saint Seiya), Ken Le survivant (
Fist of the North Star), Nicky Larson (
Cityhunter), ....
At the time, I didn't know these were
Japanese Anime but dubbed in French. Later on, I tried to collect these series in original Japanese and so my collection of Anime started. Although I wanted to follow some series without having to read the subtitles. Hence my wish to learn the language.
I got to know fellow collectors and over time I found a lot of new series like
Ghost in the Shell,
Naruto,
Bleach (some of my favorite series) etc......
So my goal is to
- Start a blog to track my progress and keep track of resources (and exchange them with others)
- Start Japanese evening classes this year
- Visit Japan within the next year
- [Classified]
