This is the first issue I ever did whose title is NOT a direct translation of the Japanese (or vice-versa). I think I came up with the English title "And The Winner Is..." from the Academy Awards show (this was before the phrase was changed to "And the Oscar goes to...") and then wanted a Japanese translation. Well, there evidently isn't one! When announcements like this are made, the Japanese that is used is equivalent to "The award winner is" and then the name. I could have done "the new member...." or "the winner..." but it wouldn't have sounded the same. So then I went for a more-Japanese cultural title, loosely translated as "Looking For New Members." But I didn't like the sound of that in English!
As you could probably guess, this was partly a problem of working with Mrs. Ochiai, who dutifully read my stories but didn't really "get" them, I don't think. If she could follow what was going on, she didn't really change any of my terms. So after last issue wasn't quite the translation that I would have wanted (several kids asked what was going on in several scenes) I asked Mrs. Ochiai and then also asked one of my adult English Class students, Ms Shoko Taniguchi, to look at it, too. This time I think it read better, but this combination also had its problems, not the least of which was the time constraint of having two different people reading the manuscript.
Another change that I was not happy with was my lack of "caucasian" and "gray" colored pencils. If you compare this issue with the earlier ones you'll see that the satellite gray and the skin color of most of the members had changed slightly. I had bought new colored pencils but did not like how they actually ended up looking. I would go through a few different candidates for those in the next few issues, too, until I finally found ones I liked.
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