Zack Wood's Asian Adventure

Zack Wood knew early on that he would be an artist. 

“I always loved drawing, and since both my parents were artists, it seemed reasonable. Other people had parents who left for work. I could tell we were different, but I felt good about it. By middle school, when someone asked me what I wanted to be, I always said artist or cartoonist. Most parents would think that was crazy.”

But Wood’s parents, Lamar and Rebecca Wood, didn’t think it was crazy at all.  Both are painters, and his mother has overseen R Wood Studio Ceramics for twenty years.

Although teachers often expressed concern about Wood’s withdrawn demeanor, and he describes school as “sometimes amusing, mainly forgettable,” he enthusiastically reflects on his childhood as fun, citing his sister Anna Belle, a few friends from school, and his life-long friendship with Eli Burke. It was Burke who got Wood playing the Japanese video games that propelled his friend on his path.

Wood was always looking for something alternative, something creative. After finishing high school, that search led him to Bard, a small liberal arts college in New York’s Hudson Valley. There, Wood combined his love of work and play from the start. 

While his impetus for taking Japanese his freshman year was to be able to play "Lennus II," the untranslated sequel to his favorite game, “Paladin's Quest,” his love for the Japanese language deepened. He liked how “it was totally different from English; how, from the fundamentals up, you had to think of everything in a new way.” He also responded to the way the written language incorporated drawing.

Unfortunately, Bard’s East Asian Studies Department was tiny, and Wood found the place claustrophobic and the students detached.  Before transferring, though, he went with a small group on a month-long study “abroad” to Kyoto Seika University, the first school in Japan to offer studies in the Japanese comic art form known as manga.  In retrospect, Wood sees this excursion as a “crazy full-circle thing,” an experience that would prove instrumental in his development as an artist.

Next stop was Stanford University, which proved to be the perfect environment for Wood: It was much bigger, and “people were doing things. There was a mindset of success. If you wanted to do something, you took steps to do it.” 

What Wood wanted to do was immerse himself in Japanese culture, so he hooked up with the Academic Theme Association in East Asian Studies, serving as an advisor at his dorm. He says that he “loved being in charge of the house and making things happen. It was a leadership position.”  He organized trips to museums and monasteries, outings to amazing Asian restaurants, and “academic dinners” where professors would visit the dorm. He was also responsible for organizing in-house seminars: The one on food and drink was a highlight.

Wood's entire ethos can be summed up by this statement: "I love working hard but I try to do things that are fun and productive. I'm stubborn, so I do what I want and make it fun!" It's that determination that had Wood playing "Lennus II" by senior year.

Wood graduated from Stanford in June 2007, and by August he was in Japan, teaching English under the Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme (JET).  He was placed in Niigata, a rural region whose snowy mountains feed the rice fields with spring run-off, yielding the best sake in Japan. But Wood doesn’t drink, and even during the historically warm winters of his stay, there was still three feet of snow. 

Nevertheless, this was a productive time: He’d found the blog of Hidenori Shibao, director of "Paladin's Quest" and "Lennus II," and began an email correspondence. He solicited his thoughts behind the development of those favorite games, as well as recommendations of other things that would appeal to Wood's sensibility. Shibao led him to his favorite book, The Amber Chronicles, by Roger Zelazney. Wood also began working with Burke, generating a video-game project that incorporated his love of good food and drawing.

After two years in “the boonies,” Wood was ready for a change, but not yet ready to leave Japan. His plan to experience the “high life” of Tokyo was short-lived, as the administrative position he applied for there fell through. But that disappointment led him to where he really “needed” to be, back at Kyoto Seika University, where there were no degree requirements and where he'd been so inspired when he visited with the group from Bard. There he met with Shuho Itahashi, a manga artist of the 80s and 90s whose work was “full of imagination and crazy interesting worlds and characters.” Wood was thrilled to be accepted as a research student under this “cool and laid back” advisor who would also become his favorite teacher. The only catch was that there were eight months to kill between the end of JET and the start of this program.

With time and money short, Wood accepted another position teaching English, this time with Interac, a private version of JET.  He found himself in a Tokyo suburb, in a sports-oriented school with a reputation for “meltdowns and sudden departures.” He spent excruciatingly long days teaching classes of forty students; many of them unruly, many of them asleep. In the evenings he taught their mothers, “housewives with no goals.” 

Wood was seeing it all: “I had a taste of every level of the Japanese high school education system.” His Niigata experience fulfilled the stereotype of rote learning and endless homework with “everyone silently, frantically working.”  And while the Interac experience was exhausting, he was able to break through the stiff, outmoded model of teaching. He gave his students a rare chance to interact with their teacher in English conversation, where he put them in groups and created true/false games about his American high school experiences. They loved it.  Once again, Wood had extracted -- and contributed -- something positive under less-than-exceptional circumstances.

Wood thinks anyone interested in drawing comics would gain from studying manga. “The Japanese developed manga as a mode of expression using unique symbols to convey the story. Design elements are used to convey emotional states. It’s all about the characters. They made comics into a new media to be read quickly, rather than be seen as art. The speed they read comics there is insane.” Wood explains that unlike here, where “comics are for kids or ‘weird adult men,’ in Japan, there’s manga for housewives, businessmen, boys, girls. It covers sports, cooking, tax codes and medical breakthroughs. Like movies here, it’s acceptable for everyone.” 

It was in Kyoto that things really came together. As a research student, he could take any classes. He took freshman drawing, focusing on perspective.  He joined in a junior-level independent project, where everyone converted an H.P. Lovecraft Cthulhu mythos story into manga. Wood produced "EAT," a digital online comic about food as a senior independent project. He also "snuck into" a game-design class taught by Kenichi Nishi, who worked on the famous game "Chrono Trigger," another that Burke had introduced him to.  And he continued working with Burke by skype and email on their own game, "Café Murder."

Even though Wood had been studying Japanese for seven years, up until this point he’d spent a lot of time “nodding and smiling,” understanding maybe fifty percent of what was being said. It was hard to become fluent when teaching English, but here his teachers and fellow students, as well as friends from Taekwondo, spoke only Japanese. He had “gotten to the point where he could understand everything except some obscure cultural reference or detailed economic discussion.” 

Wood regards his time in Kyoto as the “most awesome and rewarding.” His drawing improved, and it was “extremely satisfying, both academically and socially.”  He took a part-time job at the Manga Museum, where he served as greeter and tour guide to English-speaking visitors, but they never utilized his skills to fix the questionable English in their exhibitions, which he found “insanely frustrating.” It was here though, that Wood got casual word that “someone wanted to interview him.” He ended up in a full-page story in the New York Times, published the day after Christmas, 2010.

And now. Wood recently returned to an America changed from the one he left four years ago. Despite the atrocious economy, best friend Burke was ready to leave his job baking at , acknowledging that he “was getting too old for the night shift.” Burke took the leap so he and Wood could finally launch "Café Murder," their restaurant simulation game for the iPad, the iTouch, and other platforms in the future. They partnered with Kickstarter, an innovative approach to funding that Wood says “liberates you from the power sources of money.”  It’s crowd sourcing for creative projects. Imagine Wood’s pride when he learned that one of his earliest Japanese backers was Hidenori Shibao, the creator of the games he played in his youth, games that spurred his East Asian adventure and surely, many more to come.

Full disclosure:  I was kept up many nights by raucous laughter coming from our parlor, where Zack and Eli played those long-ago games.  Wood is my “surrogate” nephew; Burke, my stepson.

"Café Murder" is open for funding until 11:30 p.m., Friday, Ocober 21.  For more information, click here.

Wood’s comics appear monthly in Flagpole.