How I ended up apprenticing under a MANGA LEGEND in Japan.

[@TOKYOTOYBANZAI]

Have a question you'd like to ask me? Let me know in the comments

[@Nelson_Win]

Tetsuo Hara is the GOAT. Most people forgot to give credit to him. His art is a treasure.

[@TOKYOTOYBANZAI]

Indeed! I do plan on doing a deep dive on Hara-sensei, some more details about what he taught me, and how much influence his work had on ALL of shonen manga.

[@CCGDude]

Thank you for the story man, i live a boring life. This was a great distraction and I throughly enjoy watching your videos. You’re helping more people than you realize. And if you’re ever having a bad day, just know people are looking up to you!

[@TOKYOTOYBANZAI]

[@nicholaswhitler9116]

Best babysitter growing up! You terrorized your cousins with a raptor puppet. But the main reason I love Dragon Ball Z! Always awesome when you would come and draw us those awesome pictures!

[@TOKYOTOYBANZAI]

@@nicholaswhitler9116 🤜 💥 🤛

[@muttrogers6586]

Dude, I never get tired of hearing your stories. Thanks for sharing them with us!

[@Jomon1976]

I never tire of hearing this story and you tell it so well. Fun to listen to while delivering packages. Lol. Great video Jeremy.

[@TOKYOTOYBANZAI]

I'm so happy to hear that 😊 Stay cool out there!

[@codeninja100]

Your story to becoming a manga assistant is wild man and goes to show what can happen when you put yourself out there! Any plans on ever releasing your own manga?

[@TOKYOTOYBANZAI]

@@codeninja100 Thank you! I actually did! I show some toward the last half of the video (briefly), but as I will go into detail in a future video, doing that for a couple years burned me out, and I realized I enjoyed the design aspect more than sequential artwork (it’s so demanding) - and that led me to stepping away from it and later taking up writing and then producing videos 😊

[@codeninja100]

@@TOKYOTOYBANZAI that’s dope! I’d love to read them! I’m currently working on my first long form manga inspired comic. I’ve written smaller 2pg, 6pg, and 12pg stories. While the actual drawing part is daunting to get through, finishing a complete chapter or short story is so gratifying to me. Is your work posted anywhere?

[@ElCapoNinja]

Wow great story man, would love to hear more!!!

[@clavinwan]

A very well edited and attention grabbing video. Jeremy is such a fun, interesting friend. Always fun to learn new things about you lol 😝

[@zh7334]

Very Interesting! I love fist of the north star manga and I liked fist of the blue sky. Read all of it too.

[@TOKYOTOYBANZAI]

Thanks! I've honestly not met many people that have read Fist of the Blue Sky. I know it's not looked upon as fondly, but there is some fun stuff there. I was handed the scripts for each issue while Hara-sensei would work on the (super rough) layouts. I couldn't read any of it, and even if there was any Japanese writing I recognized, it was all written by hand and not so easy for a beginner to read. So most of the time, I had no idea what was going on - I just did as I was told 😅

[@zh7334]

@TOKYOTOYBANZAI it's still very cool that you got to work with tetsuo hara. His art is timeless and better than most manga, even today. His art is so iconic and detailed that it's almost impossible to animate it at the same level of detail and artistry, much like berserk. We'll see how they do with the remake. Hopefully 2d.

[@zh7334]

@TOKYOTOYBANZAI i don't like fist of the blue sky as much but it's still fist of the north star at its core and had plenty of great moments. I liked the gang war setting in the beginning, some of the extra lore on hokuto shinken and the unique setting. It's no post apocalyptic wasteland but it is an interesting historical setting that we rarely see.

[@TOKYOTOYBANZAI]

@@zh7334 NorthStar studios had been using 3D cg animation before most other anime (and we were one of the only major manga publications that was doing digital rendering for the manga screen tone elements (which were then printed out on sticky film and then cut put and placed on the final ink. Replicating his style was very tough. I imagine with the advancement in cell shaded 3d cgi, I’m going to guess that whatever comes next will be more manga accurate, but be built ontop of 3d models, made to look 2D. Much like the last Dragon Ball Super Hero film (which surprisingly looked MOSTLY fantastic). But with studios cranking out mega hit mixed media anime with an emphasis on 2D style, like Chainsaw man and Demon Slayer - they could be leaning more in that direction for some of it too… the biggest obstacle is that THAT sort of intense animation requires space labor to complete - the 3D cgi is much more manageable to complete.

[@conzalez94]

Love Fist of the Blue Sky. Read it all and all of regenesis. Tetsuo Hara is an absolute genius. Did he write the script in addition to doing the illustration?

[@TOKYOTOYBANZAI]

I believe it was a collaboration between himself, Buronson, and one of the editors. I only ever saw Buronson enter the studio once or twice, and it was treated like a special thing. I've not seen much of Regenesis, how did it compare? I honestly don't know much about it, but I've briefly met some of the new assistants that worked on it with Hara-sensei on my last visit a few years ago.

[@conzalez94]

@@TOKYOTOYBANZAI Awesome man! Subscribed to your channel btw, great stuff brother! The rajin comics of Blue Sky had nobuhiko horie as author and Hara as artist. But the Japanese comics has Hara as writer and author with Buronson supervising. Thanks for the clarification! Regenesis is super epic, the artist Hideki Tsuji is a genius worthy of being Hara sensei’s successor. It’s on hiatus right now but it will return probably within the year. Tsuji is really cool I’ve had many conversations with him on X. The manga is infinitely times better than the anime btw I don’t recommend the anime to anyone they need a real studio to animate it and keep it faithful to the source material.

[@TOKYOTOYBANZAI]

@@conzalez94 that’s right! Horie Nobu - I hadn’t heard that name in years. Since I had no involvement with the script, that stuff was never of interest to me. Thanks for the reminder! I do believe that the initial concept was discussed between Hara & Bronson, but it was very evident that he didn’t play a large role in the script. I’d say the same for the last volumes of FOTNS too… they were just milking it at that point.

[@TOKYOTOYBANZAI]

@@conzalez94 and thanks so much for subscribing!! 🙏 🙇‍♂️ 🙏

[@conzalez94]

@@TOKYOTOYBANZAI That would make sense. Awesome man! HnK is getting a remake anime to celebrate its 40ths anniversary last year. No update in almost a year unfortunately. If that is really well done and brings in a lot of viewers hopefully they can animate blue sky and regenesis, you never know

[@pandafresh]

super interesting story

[@terenceyuen4424]

Did you ever reconnect with Tetsuo Hara after? Would be cool for you to interview him for a future video 📹👍

[@TOKYOTOYBANZAI]

@@terenceyuen4424 I’ve been back to visit the studio a couple times over the years. But the last time was before the pandemic. All of my contacts there have moved on, and I don’t want to be the weirdo that just shows up at their door unannounced 😅 But who knows 🤷‍♂️

[@Tanooki20]

Love my pin cushion Pikachu dolls and my lucky chogoink franky doll as well Love those toys. That I have the pin cushion pikachu dolls and my lucky chogoink franky doll 💜💜💜

[@FutureHH]

i actually got a couple or more of soten no ken manga

[@luizfelipebocolibuenodasil2859]

Blade of the Immortal is one of my favorite mangas of all time. I have all volumes that were published here. It's a shame I can't find the sequel (Bakumatsu Arc ) anywhere in Portuguese or English. I have a question, I am from Brazil, and there is a guy here that worked with Tetsuo Hara and people treat him like a god. But for what I could understand, there were more brazilians working for him. Is it right?

[@stephenrichnafsky897]

good video

[@TOKYOTOYBANZAI]

@@stephenrichnafsky897 thanks man 🙏

[@MightyJabbasCollection]

Why were they looking for foreign assistants at the time?

[@TOKYOTOYBANZAI]

I'm not entirely sure how extensive that was - but I will say that after I started, they also hired a part time artist assistant from South Korea (who was so cool), which seemed progressive to me as it seemed like all the other adjacent studios that worked in our building were 100% Japanese (I spoke to many of them during parties, dinner, etc). Back then they were known as BUNCH COMICS, owned by COAMIX. Now they are called ZENON - and recently launched an international manga contest. So they have a continous history of trying to bring cultures together with manga, which I think is fantastic. I am very thankful for the opportunity I had, and to the people that helped make it happen - Hara-sensei being my biggest supporter at the time. If he ever allows me to interview him (he rarely does interviews, and they are usually text based and printed in major Japanese publications), I'd love to ask him about all of that. He's been studying English for the past two decades, and the last time I went to visit him around 8 years ago, he already spoke English very well, compared to when I worked for him (his English was non-existent, as was my Japanese 😅) Sorry for the lengthy reply! Thanks for the question!! 🙏

[@CCGDude]

Inuyasha changed my life. Unfortunately the love I experienced through the show was better than real life..

[@LewisChristisonVids]

Link to your old DeviantArt?

[@TOKYOTOYBANZAI]

I'm too embarrassed - I have a couple old DeviantArt accounts floating around there. I don't even want to go back to... I don't even like watching my old videos. The curse of the artist.

[@Nebuloid1]

"and Europe" NOT here in The Netherlands. It was all Dragonball Z in the late 90's. Just the "cartoon" though, never even heard the words "anime/manga" until the early 2000s. Also, no Godzilla movies or anything else.

[@TOKYOTOYBANZAI]

That's super interesting that you guys didn't hear the words "manga" or "anime" back then in The Netherlands. The term I remember hearing the most was "Japanimation" - but maybe that was just a US marketing thing early on. But the same for parts of the USA, regarding some areas that got Japanese media before the rest of the country - states like California, New York, & Hawaii, had a bunch of Japanese tv programs airing on their local stations, in English, as far back as the 1970's and 80's. The uncle I'd mentioned renting Godzilla 1985 for me when I was a kid, grew up in California, so he'd learned about cool stuff like Godzilla & Ultraman growing up back when that stuff was unheard of to most of the western world. Godzilla had me hooked as a kid, but DBZ definitely knocked me into a completely different lifestyle... which led to me sitting here replying to you on this keyboard here in Tokyo during a passing typhoon :P Thanks for the comment!!

[@Nebuloid1]

@@TOKYOTOYBANZAI Maybe just a small town thing, born in '84, saw Akira in the early 90's only because my uncle was in the army and brought some vhs tapes back home... Italy and Spain got a bunch of anime back then, weird because it had to be overdubbed, we would've been fine with English subtitles. Some force has always blocked all of this stuff from coming here.

[@FutureHH]

@@Nebuloid1strange, so you didn't get classic 70's and 80's anime back in the day(Rose of Versailles, Hokuto no Ken, Tastunoko stuff, Heidi etc)? here in italy even boomers watched them. Did Netherlands have a big national cartoon industry at the time? Thanks in advance for the reply.

[@Nebuloid1]

@@FutureHH Nope never even heard of those... We had our own Dutch cartoons for sure, but mostly for the little kids. Plus some cartoons coming in from Belgium/France mostly, nothing Japanese. Oh and Looney Tunes and Animaniacs ofcourse, and later Dexters Lab/Cow and Chicken/Johnny Bravo etc. I do remember watching x-men/spiderman/batman every day in around 1993, but that was it.

[@FutureHH]

@@Nebuloid1 yeah, we got those too, You know what? many western cartoon (like batman) were partially animated in Japan.

[@hereiam6149]

we had dragonball and dragonball z