Since my friend showed me an anime called One Piece more than ten years ago I have been watching anime.
Anime is the common name for an animation style prominent in Japan, and most anime by a mile comes from Japan.
And is known for its huge eyes and colorful hairs and color usage in general.

Most people have watched anime, but don’t think much about it. Some of the bigger ones on the international scene are Pokemon, Dragon Ball, and Yu-Gi-Oh. Some of the bigger movies include: Howls moving castle, Spirited away, and in general every work of art that Hayao Miyazaki (The founder of Studio Ghibli) has worked on.

In the start, I watched anime with English dubbed (usually shortened to dub), but when I had caught up in One Piece to the latest episode, I waited and waited, but the new episodes didn’t get added with dub. I started watching a few other shows, seeing some of the most well-known and loved ones (Death Note, Code Geass, etc.). Then I got annoyed and continued watching in the original with subtitles (shortened sub) and could watch a bunch more episodes.

Once you have watched a bit in Japanese and read the subtitles, it quickly became the natural form to watch anime. As a bonus, you got access to hundreds of shows, which all are great but not loved enough internationally to get dubbed. So I just continued to watch, got dazzled by the bright colors and cheerful characters.

Anime isn’t shy of showing stuff that most diffidently would have been censored in the western world. Depending on the target age group, they show people being ripped apart and having the most horrible deaths if it furthers the plot, they also take a more relaxed view on nudity, some shows contrary to western shows can show a breast without it getting censored, and no I’m not talking about porn…

After I had been watching for a while, I started to notice things that are common in the different shows. You start to take notice of the cultural things that are simply common in Japan, but different here at home. School culture, a bit of working culture, and some common stuff at home. Bits and pieces that give a common understanding. I wanted to see if I was just getting blinded by movie magic, so in 2018 I traveled to Japan to experience the country for myself. And most of the things I had learned were true enough, and this just got me more interested in Japan.

At some point when you have listened and read the subtitles for hundreds upon hundreds of hours, you start to connect meaning to the words and learn common phrases. This just drove me to want to learn Japanese to see how much I got right, and learn more.

So yeah, at this point I have watched so much anime, that if you put it all in one long video it would keep running for 153 DAYS. And with that amount of time, you see a bunch, some very great that you can think about for weeks, rewatch, and still enjoy. Some absolute garbage that you just sit and be like “Why did I waste my time watching this?”.

So anime is for me what usual movies and Netflix are for other people, I can talk about some of the ones I enjoy, some of them I remember fondly, and others I look at the title and think: “Have I watched this..?”.