CLAIR Magazine “JET Plaza” series: David Namisato (Aomori)
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Each month, current and former JET participants are featured in the “JET Plaza” section of the CLAIR Forum magazine. The June 2013 edition includes an article by JET alumn David Namisato. Posted by Celine Castex (Chiba-ken, 2006-11), currently programme coordinator at CLAIR Tokyo.
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“I went on the JET Programme because I had quit art, but I returned to art because I went on the JET Programme, and thanks to that, here I am, over a decade later, an illustrator and comic book creator, with my JET experience influencing many of my works.”
David Namisato (Aomori-ken, Ajigasawa Town, 2002-04), is from Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He came to Japan on the JET Programme looking for a different career path after animation school, and spent two years in a rural town of Aomori as a CIR. Back in Canada, he started a comic series about the JET Programme experience for the JETAA Toronto Newsletter. Life After the B.O.E. quickly gained popularity inside and outside the JET community, to become a book in 2011. David is now a professional illustrator and has just released his new fantasy comic The Long Kingdom #1.
My Long Journey to the Beginning
In October of 2001, having become disillusioned with art, I decided to drop out of animation school, and to try something completely different and applied to the JET Programme.
Fluent in Japanese and looking for translation and interpretation experience as well as to transition in to a more planning and administrative career, I thought the position of Coordinator of International Relations (CIR) would be a good fit.
I was admitted to the JET Programme in 2002 as a CIR, and went to Japan. However, my contracting organization, Ajigasawa Town in Aomori Prefecture, used CIRs as elementary school English instructors. I had no planning or administrative duties beyond curriculum design and lesson planning, nor did I have translation or interpretation work. Rather, I was entrusted to teach English to children grades one through six at six of the town’s elementary schools.
As an elementary school English instructor, my art skills that I had abandoned were quickly resurrected and came in quite handy as I would use drawings to explain difficult vocabulary and grammar to my students. Slowly my joy of drawing returned, and as it returned, I also began contributing covers to the Aomori AJET newsletter.
In the spring of 2005, six months after my two years as a CIR ended, I decided to give art another try, and I started work as an illustrator creating illustrations and comics for children’s science, and history magazines in Canada.
Along with my magazine work, I began drawing comics for the newsletter of the JET Alumni Association in Toronto, and the spring of 2006 saw the launch of “Life After the B.O.E.”, my monthly comic about the wonderful and often hilarious moments of being a foreigner in Japan and being on the JET Programme. “Life After the B.O.E.” would continue for five years until it ended in the summer of 2011. “Life After the B.O.E. the Book” the graphic novel was released November 2011.
In the spring of 2011, I was contacted by the Origami Cranes Project of the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre in Toronto to do illustrations for the project. The Origami Cranes Project was a project to send senbazuru (thousand origami cranes) made by Canadian school children to school children living in the regions devastated by the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami. Because the JET Programme had placed me in Aomori Prefecture, Tohoku region has a special place in my heart, and I was delighted to participate in the project. My illustrations were used in the curriculum book designed to teach Canadian school children about the earthquake and tsunami and the significance of the thousand origami cranes.
Just over ten years after I had quit art and joined the JET Programme, in November of 2012, I returned to Japan as a comic book creator and illustrator to participate in the first Kaigai Manga Festa, a showcase of foreign comics held at Tokyo Big Sight. As a part of the Toronto Comic Arts Festival booth, I, along with over a dozen indie Canadian comic book creators, publishers, and game designers, showcased our work to Japanese manga fans.
I went on the JET Programme because I had quit art, but I returned to art because I went on the JET Programme, and thanks to that, here I am, over a decade later, an illustrator and comic book creator, with my JET experience influencing many of my works.
Quitting art in 2001 and applying to the JET Programme was clearly the right decision.
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