Japan, why must you be American in disguise? Is it because I don’t know ditty squat about you?
Hmm, yes. That’s exactly it.
When working on stories about Japan, it seems that many tend to forget that it’s well…Japan. It’s pretty different from America (and other places) and no matter who a person is or where they’re from they will get culture shock (which is pretty true when you enter different countries either way).
But, when it comes to certain aspects of Japan, it’s hard to accept or let the blunder slip by if something obliviously canon in the anime is ignored, especially if it’s something that’s true. I find it important for stories to be accurate because the best kind are those that honor the whole fandom by focusing on the details, the facts, the characters and when effort is put into making it seem real, it shows. You know, when stories that make you think like, ‘wow, this story is so good that if I didn’t know any better I would have honesty believe this happen for real in the book’ or something to that extent.
One of the first thing I’ll focus on is the fact that Japanese schools are not the same as American ones. But sometimes I wonder if writers honesty believe that they are. Or worst, they just didn’t want to do the research on it and Americanize Japan…well more like they made it America disguised as Japan.
To break down the information of what Japanese schools are like I’ve split it into three parts, A, B and C. The letter A contains all the facts and information about the elementary school from grade 1 to grade 6 in how it’s run and so on. The letter B is about grades 7 through 9 which is secondary school (the equivalent of junior high school). The letter C deals with the upper secondary education, which contains grades 10 through 12 which is high school. All together it’s explains how Japanese schools are run, the duties of the students and of the teachers. Basically everything that happens in it.
As a warning, there’s massive amount of information. So I hope it doesn’t scare you off.