I hope everyone reads this interview with Frederik Schodt by the intrepid Electric Ant tribe (cf. Same Hat!). Topics covered: translating Tezuka with whiteout & typewriter; not realizing you couldn’t just waltz up to Tezuka Pro and ask to translate stuff; being terrified by protofandom; and not knowing citrus industry vocab (yuzu? mikan?). And comics industry stuff, like whether manga’s a bubble or not, shojo etc, but that’s just the drapes.

Either because the chat’s not related to a PR cycle, or because I’m just interested in why Westerners ended up in Japan in the 60s/70s, it seems like a rare interview where the speaker’s personality shines through.

(An aside: it’s interesting that Schodt first wound up in Japan through his father’s diplomatic work: so many of the Americans who settled there, like Donald Richie, Oliver Statler, and Donald Keene, went on military coattails; of course, Schodt’s younger than those guys. Either way, I can only imagine how much things have changed.)