Big Voice! Big Smile!

Overpaid: strong yen, hired straight out of college, able to afford pretty much everything I actually want.

Underpaid; seven-year-olds trying to stick their fingers up my butt.

Right to Privacy Vs. Right to Privates

This may be my favorite Demographic Crisis comic, if only for the use of the word "decriminalize." Also, obese anime fan is quickly becoming my favorite character.

And I just realized that my craptastic scanner cut off the word "crisis."

Resumé Stain

This is one of those few solutions that might actually work...if you consider what Japanese students go through to get into an elite universities, I'm sure they'd be more than willing to pop out a few kids. The only question is if the Ministry of Education could manage to make sex as joyless and soul-crushing as the rest of the curriculum. And you know the kids would have to go to after-school classes too...which would bring a whole new level of weirdness to the term "cram school."

Oh, and I forget to mention this last time: this comic ran in the November issue of the Hyogo Times, a monthly newsletter for the local JETs. Which was pretty exciting :)

まわして！まわして！

One of the first things they told us about teaching English in elementary schools is that you're not actually supposed to be teaching English. You're supposed to convince the kids that learning English isn't extremely difficult and miserable, it's fun. So we practice some pronunciation, play games, color pictures, and so on.

Of course, as soon as these kids get to Junior High, English class will become extremely difficult and miserable, mostly because the Elementary classes do nothing to prepare the students for things like, you know, reading and writing, because of all the games and whatnot.

At any rate, I'm not sure if my kids think English is fun, but they definitely think their teacher is hilarious, what with all the piggyback rides and kung-fu battles and noogies and such.


Update on comics: So my scanner and printer are cooperating again, but my computer refuses to accept that Photoshop is a program and not some sort of hideous computer version of super-aids. The basic result is that comics will go up, but they will be of even less quality than usual. So yeah.