Objective: 1000 Pages!! of Yukito's room

In the spring of this year, our family, The Kishiros, moved from Chiba Prefecture where we had lived for a long time to Ibaraki Prefecture.

We had been tenant till then, but now my father purchased a single house. Though the place was surrounded rice fields in every direction, we enjoyed viewing Mt. Tsukuba and countless fireflies dancing in the air of summer nights. (Unfortunately, fireflies are no longer seen there.) We moved right after I graduated the junior high school. I entered the Tsukuba High School at the foot in Mt. Tsukuba with fresh feel and full of hope.
Since I was likely to be sent to an industrial training school because of my parents' educational concept (never because of poor behavior or disappointing record), I was just happy to be able to enter a high school.

Though I was expected to inherit my father's tiling shop as the eldest son since childhood, did yearn purely by myself and had declared to be a tiling craftsman, but these days a secret ambition is beginning to grow in my mind.
One reason was that it had getting more intolerable for me to choose a job as my father told and get great benefit by him.
Another was my growing feel that skill job of a tiling craftsman couldn't satisfy my creative urge which arises from my inside.

At that time, there were three choices about occupation that " would make my creative urge satisfy".

The first is a film director, which I have been longing since Star Wars.
But I, as a teenager, was disappointed the tragic situation of the domestic SF film, there were no 8-mm cameras or video cameras in our house, and I didn't know what kind of training would be necessary nor had friends sharing the same interest. I had nothing, so it was finished.
Feasibility was the lowest.

The second was making plastic models, which I had gone in for since my junior high school days.
It has a big charm that I could create one completed miniature space. However, the fact was that just a small number of people could earn as professional modelers who appeared in Hobby Japan those days, and that was a big problem.
Now many model magazines are published and even a prototype modeler of figures becomes an occupation, but those days the domestic market of garage kits didn't exist and I was unlikely to cut into.
Besides, it was also unsatisfactory to me that I couldn't tell a story actively told with models.

The third was a cartoonist.
The form of story comics is the closest to movies, and moreover, unlike movies, the budget is much less and a cartoonist can create them completely by his own ability. There are some Rookie of the Year awards and it was relatively easy to understand how to debut, which was also big help.
Rather than anything, since I reached the age of discretion, I was familiar with and had drawn comics.

(I don't know why, but the idea of going to the field of animation, nearer expressive form to movies than comics, didn't occur to me at all.) Those days were in the middle of the real robot boom since GUNDAM, but I might feel it's not media where I could create works freely. Also it was time before form of original video animation, or OVA, was established. )

In this year Shogakukan awarded Rookie of the Year to a 17 year-old boy (if my memory is correct), which fired me up a lot.
And such time, I met the book called Shogakukan's Sunday Comic College.
It was a technique book that collects materials from the active cartoonists contributing Shonen Sunday of those days and introduces the basic techniques of comics. There were words like this;
"I can tell you that anyone could be a professional, if you would draw 1000 drawings. In other words, the turning point is whether you have the perseverance to draw 1000 drawings or not."
I was inspired by those words.
"If I draw one sheet per day, that would be about 1000 sheets in three years. If that make me a professional cartoonist, it would be easy!!"

The matter about it is how to count "one sheet".
If I counted a graffiti or an underdrawing with pencil as "one sheet," that would be too easy.
Because if I counted all of the cartoons I had drawn roughly with ballpoint on my notebooks and loose-leaf notebooks, it had already been far over 1000 pages at the time. Nevertheless, I do know I have no real ability to show to people...
So, I decided only the manuscript that I had drawn on B4 contribution size draft, inked and finished would be counted as "one sheet."
To keep this decision in my mind, I wrote "Objective: 1000 Pages!!" on a slip of paper and posted it in front of the desk.
And I swore secretly to contribute to Rookie of the Year awards and to win the prize by the graduation from the high school.
It was because I thought I could persuade my parents only by achieving concrete results.
If I couldn't win a contest by my graduation, I would give up because I didn't have a talent and become a tiling craftsman or anything as parents told me--that was my thought.

From this time, "to draw cartoons" became an actual struggle for me instead of a hobby.