Once upon a time, there was a young American girl.
Her grandparents emigrated to the U.S. from Japan, making the girl a third-generation Japanese-American.
She grew up in a white neighborhood in Southern California, a child in the 1960s and a teenager in the 1970s. Not that long after WWII, with Pearl Harbor within living memory of most people.
She felt American inside, even if some people she met saw her face and considered her a foreigner. Her parents, who spoke both English and Japanese, only spoke English at home, perhaps to ensure that she would be seen as American as possible by other Americans.
They never taught her anything about the culture of her grandparents and ancestors.
She didn’t mind. After all, she was American.
Many years passed.
One evening, she was watching the Starz Network and saw something she’d never seen before.
It was something called anime — animation from Japan.
It blew her mind.
Not only was the story adult in tone, but it was what she knew as slash — a romance between two men. She had no idea that entertainment like this existed outside of fandom, and from a foreign country too.
Japan. A country she was connected to by blood made shows like this. She was staggered to find this out.
But that wasn’t all. The Starz Network also had other anime series.
Slowly, as if being drawn in against her will, she began to search out more anime to watch.
It was her first exposure to Japanese manga and anime art styles, and what she saw changed her whole view on art.
She particularly loved how some anime series created entire universes one could lose oneself in — the setting, characters and stories forming whole worlds in themselves.
She fell in love with so many characters... and the seiyuu who played them.
She attended many anime conventions, discovering the love her fellow fans had for anime.
... And that sometimes, one could meet a Shonen Jump editor in real life that you’d seen in an anime.
She started a blog so she could write about her love for anime and manga.
And she began taking Japanese lessons, finally starting to learn the language of her grandparents — and discovered what her name was in Japanese (ジャン 鈴川).
Since she’d worked as an editor before, she began freelancing as a translation rewriter/editor for the U.S. companies that published manga and anime-related books.
She edited many books in the field:
Even the yaoi light novels she loved to read... she became the editor of some of those books as well.
The world she entered when she became an anime fan expanded her sense of storytelling and setting, and inspired her first published novel.
That novel set her on the road to other fictional worlds, and other series that she is still writing today.
Her love for anime and manga gave her a second career in editing, as well as the fulfillment of a lifelong dream — to be a published fiction writer.
It brought her full-circle in terms of acceptance and appreciation for her heritage as a Japanese-American.
So be open, and stay curious as to the world around you. Because one day, you may be watching television or surfing the Internet and not expecting your life to change, but — it can.
A gift that takes your life in a new direction can come to you, unexpected, sent to you by the universe with hidden hands.
Thank you for reading this blog for the past ten years.
