Bokura Mangaka: Tokiwa-sou Monogatari (1981)

Front cover image of the 7-inch vinyl
single release of the TV special's OP/ED theme songs

https://nyaa.si/view/1948897
Fansub credits can be found in the link above.

 

Another collaboration with perevodildo, released under the "LonelyDildo" tag—this is "Bokura Mangaka: Tokiwa-sou Monogatari", a Toei Animation TV special from 1981.

 

Tokiwa-sou was the name of an apartment building in Japan which was famous for housing many influential manga artists, some of which include Osamu Tezuka, Fujiko Fujio, and Fujio Akatsuka, among many others. The animated TV special—which, interestingly enough, was broadcasted one year before the building was demolished—centers around the lives of the manga artists living in Tokiwa-sou, though most of the special focuses on Fujio Akatsuka as he slowly begins to doubt his skills as a manga artist and questions what type of manga he should truly be drawing.

 

Funny enough, this project dates back to 2022... but it is entirely my fault and the result of stalling. edo999 was in possession of an official Shotaro Ishinomori DVD that contained this TV special, and sent the DVD ISO over to me. I later sent that ISO over to this project's encoder, and the TV special was... pretty much just kept dormant in my SSD throughout the next years, with me telling myself that I'd eventually get to it "soon".

 

Several months ago, perevodildo expressed interest in translating this, to which I had asked if he was interested in collab'ing on this since it was on my radar too. He agreed, and the project pretty much finally kickstarted from there—Yume timed & translated it, perevodildo helped TLC, imatu and I QC'ed this, and an anonymous user offered to help QC this to help identify & fill in references to various manga & anime that none of us on the project's team knew—said user also helped TLC this and fixed some lines here & there.

 

I think that's pretty much it. Despite this anime special featuring various prominent authors, there's only a few handful I really recognized in here. The others—either I vaguely knew them somewhat or didn't know them at all... and TBH I have no interest in checking them out either 😅

 

Regardless, enjoy! 

Mamoru Nagano in 3159 — MAKING OF THE BABY SITTER (1991)

 

https://nyaa.si/view/1948470
Fansub credits can be found in the link above.

Whew... this one is a doozy.

Okay, so lemme get this out of the way first:
This is another collaboration with Kineko Video—an English-subbed version of a rare VHS-only documentary starring Mamoru Nagano. It's supposed to go into detail behind the production of an image album he made himself based off his Five Star Stories manga, released by Nippon Columbia in September 1990.

The thing about that, though... the documentary doesn't really cover the actual tracks themselves and is mostly just Nagano talking about the instruments he uses (some of them being custom-made), how he acquired them, etc. This documentary has a book version (now out of print) and even Nagano himself admits that you should check that out if you want extra details behind the production history, some of which includes background on the sound recording. Bummer, but at least he was honest about it! 

Second half of the VHS centers on him visiting Hong Kong for some kind of anime/comics convention—he answers some interview questions here, which I think is a little neat treat for fans of Nagano looking to grab more information about him.

 

 

This project had been in the works since 2023. It started with a user named Dominic Kopp who had approached me via Twitter DMs, letting me know that he had this on VHS and was looking to get it captured. I re-directed him towards the folks at Kineko since I don't have any fancy VHS capturing gear myself. I sent this over to a translator after Kineko finished encoding it—naturally, it needed a TLC pass.

 

However, a JP user took a look at the subs and noticed that the first few lines were already incorrect. Nothing to do with the translator's skills, BTW... he's trustworthy. But he admitted this VHS was a hard one for him to work with due to the accents and all that. As far as TLC passes go on my projects, I don't get the whole thing checked—only marked lines that the translator had trouble with. But in the case of this project, everything needed to be checked, literally. The JP user who looked at the subs in the first place offered to do it but ultimately he got really busy and wasn't able to get to it anymore. 

 

There wasn't anybody else I knew in any fansubbing circles who could tackle this (or who was willing to, anyways), and even after asking for help on Twitter, I got no reply...
 

Unfortunately, the only option I had left was to place this on indefinite hiatus.

 

That changed several months ago when MercuryFalcon introduced me to another Japanese user who's fluent in English and accepting translation commissions at the same time—OverworkedSalaryman. I sent the subs down his way and to my surprise he was actually able to successfully TLC the whole thing with no issues whatsoever!! The thought of having to put this on hiatus actually stressed me out a little bit so I'm glad I was finally able to put this project to rest.

 

Final note:

I'm intending on putting out a v2 of this, eventually. The capture does have a noticeable increase in visible quality compared to what was available on YT previously but the downside is that it has lots of ringing—some tests were done and the ringing can be reduced after all, but it has to be done on the raw capture and due to various IRL circumstances it's not something that can be looked at any time soon. Frankly, I don't know when it'll happen, so I can't give estimates... but I'm not in a rush for it.

 

Regardless, enjoy!

Tongari Boushi no Memole - Episode 08

https://nyaa.si/view/1947903
Fansub credits can be found in the link above.

Inka's write-up:
https://www.inka-subs.net/2025/03/lonelychaser-inka-tongari-boushi-no.html