Art Critique

Now I know I bitch a lot about Japan, but not EVERYTHING is that bad. I teach little kids and believe it or not, the ones that don’t actively try to poke me in the ass, aren’t too bad. In fact some of them seem to actually like me. Some have even gone so far as to draw my likeness and present it to me as a present. So today I shall be examining three of these likenesses and critiquing the motives and inspirations that these eight-year-old artist have.

The first is a picture where I, all and all, look like an adorable anime character.



As you can see I have all of my limbs, I have huge eyes, and a funny gourd-shaped head. I especially like the fact that I’m wearing a sweatshirt with my name on it, you know, just incase I forget. All and all this picture gets a 10 on adorability. The stickers and random floating objects around me really add to the whole feel of things. Now the chair I can understand, since this chair is not set in perspective, but is in actual size, it portrays my relative size to the common furniture present in these class rooms. Yeah, big guy, little chair. The pencil and paper/notebook/thing floating on the left makes sense too, since I’m a teacher and teachers like pencils and notebooks, right? Now I got to admit, the floating orb of the right has gotten me a little confused. Is that a light? Maybe, but I’m not THAT tall. It might be my little special gaijin (foreigner…. or maybe better translated as “other”) device, making me all gaijin-y. Yeah we’ll go with that. Overall this picture is awesome, I bet you wish you had little 8 year-old girls drawing pictures of you, huh? Yeah, the cuteness is almost unbearable.

That brings us to the second picture, all and all not quite as well polished or cute as the last, but with a charm all its own.



This is me as the gaijin Robot. I do rather appreciate having the extra elbow on my right arm... that will definitely come in handy. As for what’s on my shirt/robotic body, it rather looks like my control knobs, or maybe it’s just a little design to match the floating balls within balls thing in the upper right. What is that, anyone know? Please let me know, cause I got nothing. The one thing that kinda freaks me out about this picture is the eyes. You see it? Each eye individually is no problem, but…. they’re different!!! I have one dot eye and one full eye. But I suppose this fits in with the whole robot motif, a different style eyeball to diversify my seeing capabilities. I guess what I like best about this picture is the fact that I look like I’m dancing. There is nothing better than a dancing robot. Rock!

Ok the last picture is the most resent.




I guess this is me as a 70’s porn star. Yes I do still wear plaid… has that gone out of style? Also note the arm hair. It’s strange, my arm hair is a big hit with the kids…. apparently no one in Japan has arm hair, so, even though I never really thought of my arms as particularly hairy (they really aren’t) the kids still love to pet my arms and feel the hair. I guess it kinda makes me furry like a huge, 300 pound rabbit. Yeah, it’s kinda strange, so thus, the big tuffs of arm hair in the pictures. Now apparently I have sketchy peach fuzz on my face…. this is rather perplexing to me since I had recently shaved right before the picture was drawn. But I guess I deserve it, my shaving habits in Japan have not been….. regular. Well, I guess they’re regular, but regularly sparse. So come Friday, I’m pretty scruffy looking… thus the facial scrub. The little people jumping around me are the students in that particular class (which happens to be my smallest, by far). That’s right, only four kid. So if you can read Japanese you can learn these kids name…. yeah, good luck with that.

So yeah, that is all the art for today. So until next time.