[#TriedItAward] I tried translating my own manga into English and publishing it!

I am currently a 45-year-old guy, and I have been drawing manga since I was 25. I wanted to become a manga artist and kept bringing my work to publishers, but perhaps because my manga was a bit gloomy, I never made a professional debut. Currently, I post my manga on note, Pixiv, and Twitter. Meanwhile, through a friend who works overseas, I started hanging out with young overseas otaku. This started around 2016. And then, one of them said this.

"Why do Japanese people only use Twitter in Japanese?"

In other words, why don't you post in English? It is well known that even though English is a common language, Japanese people have a strong sense of inferiority about it. The friend continued.

"I want to read your manga too, but I can't read it if it's in Japanese, so please translate it into English."

"I bet there are other people who want to read more Japanese manga."

I thought, 'So that's it!' Even though I post manga on social media, I have always had a complex about not being able to make a professional debut. If I could get new readers to read my work, maybe those stagnant feelings would change. I immediately tried translating the manga I had already drawn into English. The first thing I translated was a manga about when I was taking entrance exams for art school. (It would get too long, so I'll just post one page as a sample.)

The original manga is here.

As you can see in this manga, I used to be a bit of a delinquent and I'm not very good at English. Even though I said I hung out with overseas otaku friends, it was only because my friend who works overseas is fluent in English, so it wasn't a problem. But now we have the internet. You can look up words, grammar, and slang, and ultimately, there is Google Translate. Turning Japanese into English was relatively easy. Of course, it's not accurate English, and from the perspective of people overseas, I'm sure it sounds like broken English, like 'Me, art university, took exam.' Also, Japanese is written vertically and English is written horizontally, so the dialogue doesn't fit in the speech bubbles and spills out. It's all a bit messy, but I thought that might have its own charm, so I posted it on Twitter.

And when I looked at Twitter the next morning, to my surprise, there were many English comments! It seems that friend introduced it on their own English account. There were short comments like 'Amazing!', and some comments that wrote long impressions. Since I hadn't had much success with manga since I was 25, I was very happy to receive messages from an unknown world. Since I went to the trouble, I replied to each person. I'm sure these replies were also like 'Thank you, me, happy, you, good person.' But, I think this might have its own charm too. We would be happy if people from overseas used broken Japanese, right?

Feeling completely happy with that, I started posting the manga I drew in both Japanese and English. note only has a Japanese version, so I use Twitter and Pivix. I noticed something here. In Japan, there is an atmosphere on Twitter where 'it's hard to send comments if you don't follow each other.' There was even a set phrase that was born: 'Excuse me for jumping in from outside your followers.' But naturally, people overseas don't have that atmosphere. People I don't know at all feel free to leave comments. Because of that, I can also feel free to reply in broken English like, 'Old guy's manga, thanks for reading.'

Like that, for several years now, I have been interacting with people overseas through my English-translated manga. Some people even translated it into Spanish... (a comic artist from Mexico)

A superhuman who is French but submitted to Jump and even debuted...

I continued to interact for months with a British person who loves Japanese rock...

When I won a manga award on note, a French friend celebrated with an illustration...

Even though we can't speak much English, we went to a festival together...

Various fun things keep happening. Among them, a Swedish comic artist really liked my manga and actually wrote an article about me in a Swedish magazine. It's not a manga artist debut, but my soft debut is technically in a Swedish magazine.

I think the reason Japanese people have a sense of inferiority about English is because they think they have to use it correctly. When I'm searching for translations, I often see articles saying 'This expression is a no-go!' But even if you say overseas, there are many countries in the West, the Middle East, Asia, and Oceania, and if you count Japan as 100 million people, there are over 7 billion people overseas. Just as dialects are completely different between Aomori and Okinawa, with 7 billion people, English should be slightly different depending on the region. English like 'Thank you, happy' just gives the impression of 'Japanese-style English.' And above all, I am a middle-aged guy from the Showa era, and a former delinquent at that. It's natural that I'm not very good at it, and I like myself that way. The current atmosphere is that you have to be accurate, and there is also an image that people who interact overseas are high-minded. But even a strange old guy like me can do it. There is zero determination like 'Alright, I'm going to interact overseas!' It really is just a light 'tried it.' I would be happy if this article leads to your own 'tried it.'