During the 1990s, I served as translations editor for Mangajin magazine. Launched by businessman Vaughan P. Simmons, the magazine carried a wide variety of feature articles, columns, and reviews about Japanese pop culture; it also reprinted manga as language texts, offering facing-page translations along with extensive vocabulary, grammar, and cultural notes for learners of Japanese. It was among the early pioneers in bringing Japanese pop culture and manga to the English-speaking world and in helping spark the current boom.
The magazine is no longer being published, but back issues are still available from the Wasabi Brothers Trading Company, and are highly recommended in conjuction with my book, Japanese the Manga Way, which grew out of my work for the magazine. The book uses real manga examples to illustrate each point in a systematic survey of basic Japanese grammar, starting from zero. It's the ideal starting point for manga-in-translation fans who'd like to learn to read the original, and a great reference for students at almost any level.
A number of the manga I translated for Mangajin were reformatted with the English dialogue in the balloons and published as Bringing Home the Sushi: An Inside Look at Japanese Business Through Japanese Comics, also available from Amazon.com.
In 2007 I joined the Project Gen team working on a new translation of all ten volumes of Keiji Nakazawa's Barefoot Gen (Hadashi no Gen), an autobiographical story of the bombing of Hiroshima and its aftermath seen through the eyes of the artist as a young boy. Volumes have been appearing since 2004 as they are completed, published by Last Gasp of San Francisco; the full ten volumes are expected to be available by mid-2009.
| Feature Manga | 4-Frame Manga & Other Shorts |
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