Welcome back to CJAS. We hope you've all had a great winter break and are hungry for more Japanese animation. A quick look at tonight's schedule will tell you what we're showing, but where did that schedule come from? At the end of each semester, the hard-working executive board puts together the schedule for the following semester. Currently, we have a schedule for this semester that needs only two more hours of programming to fill up.

Later this semester, we'll have movies and OVAs such as Firetripper, I Can Hear the Sea, Gunsmith Cats, Memories, City Hunter, Patlabor, Night on the Galactic Railroad, and Sanctuary. We'll be showing the entire series of Iria, DNA², and JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. Neon Genesis Evangelion will finish up, and Marmalade Boy will enter its second of four semesters. How do we come up with this stuff? Many of us try to keep up with the newest fan-subtitled or commercial anime in the US, and occasionally we see something from Japan and decide to translate and subtitle it ourselves. If someone sees something they really like, then they'll suggest it to be shown next semester. We all get together for a scheduling meeting and go over the suggestions. People who've seen them tell us if they're worth showing or if they're terrible; then we eliminate things that are impossible to get and vote on choices if everything won't fit. The hardest part is probably fitting it all together and spacing the longer movies and series' episodes together. After a lot of time-slot juggling, we have a preliminary schedule.

Just the schedule isn't enough, however, because we need to have the anime in order to show it. If it's commercially available, we must allocate funds for it and order it. For fansubs, requests to the fansubber must be made and then tapes sent. The real tough job goes to our translators and subtitling crew when we choose to get a tape in Japanese and sub it ourselves. It takes an average of 1-2 hours to translate a half-hour of anime, but the time can vary widely with difficulty of language and amount of speaking. The dialogue must be timed so that the right words appear at the right time, and then everything is put to tape. What I can say so easily in two sentences may be the most difficult task for CJAS to perform, but I'll let those in charge of subtitling write an article about it later.

One might wonder why certain programs are scheduled the way they are. For example, why are there two Marmalade Boy and two Evangelion episodes in the first meeting? Marmalade Boy has seventy-six episodes, and in order to fit it into two years, sometimes they must be doubled up. Evangelion on the other hand has twenty-six episodes. We have thirteen showings a semester (including the marathon), so it would fit exactly, except next meeting we're showing Nausicaä, which is so long that we had to move something out of its way. We also have to worry about a series with a serious cliffhanger. In such a case, we sometimes put them in the same meeting; splitting them up over spring or fall break must be avoided at all costs.

Once the schedule is all set, some of us still have one last task concerning it -- the Newsletter. Before each meeting, articles must be written. Sometimes important cultural tidbits need explanation, often a new series introduction will be made, or, as with tonight's 3x3 Eyes II, we have to recap the previous episodes because they were shown so long ago. If we don't really have anything new, then an article like this one might be written about a random "housekeeping" subject. Of course, the schedule for each week and the week following is included in the newsletter so you'll know what's happening.