wahoo.com

Tensai = genius.

Time and time again, I would be asked: why do you use this Sakuragi Hanamichi name in your email?

So that’s why I’m here today, to expose the great mystery of SAKURAGI.

The story begins when I was 8 years old…

Haha.. kidding.

Seriously, when I was 15, I went into this huge bookstore right in the middle of town and..haha…. I can’t help it. You’re like, still reading. Woo… so funny

Alright. It is actually not that dramatic. It’s a pretty lame story actually. The fact is, I have Japanese blood in me cause my great grandfather is Japanese and he married my great grandmom who’s Chinese from Guangchow, China. Thus I was given a Japanese name: Sakuragi Hanamichi. Hanamichi being my surname.

And then some idiot read this in my blog and think that this story is true. Ahem.

You want to kill me, don’t ya.

Still reading? I’m impressed.

Here’s the real story:

Years ago I got addicted to a comic book series known as SlamDunk by Takehiko Inoue. I read the Malay version at that time cause my chinese reading skills sucked pretty bad at that time. The last of the series was published during my 2nd year in uni.

I was a total fan of Slamdunk and still think that it is one of the best comic series I’ve come across. Period. I still remember I would spend a lot of time drawing the characters from  the comic and after some time, I had a collection of artwork  on SlamDunk. I thought it was pretty awesome.

Well, I have strong (positive) opinions on my drawing talent and there are probably only 2 or 3 people who has seen my SlamDunk artwork collection who think otherwise (actually, only 2 or 3 people has seen them).

And in maintaining high regards for my own art skills, well, lets just say I have my ways of effectively silencing critics.

May they rest in peace.

You got it right. Sakuragi Hanamichi was the main character of the comic. Because I liked the character so much that I use it when I first register for my email add, partly also because of the fact that I wasn’t able to register the name that i initially prefer (for emails or any other membership sites) because my name ‘wahoo’ would normally be taken, also ‘wahoo79′ or ‘wahhoo’ or ‘wahhoo79′ or…you get the idea. I don’t feel comfortable registering myself as ‘wahoo37146′ and the like, know what I mean?

So, it became sort of like a habit since then.

But the name and the character Sakuragi do actually have a deeper meaning to me, which I’ve written about in a since deserted blog of mine in a post titled: ‘Sakuragi and me’.

Cause I’m lazy, lets just do some copy and paste here, k:

Sakuragi and Me.

      Whats with the japanese name? I get this a lot when I inform people of my email add. So who the hell is sakuragi anyway?

Hanamichi Sakuragi is his full name.
Westerners likes to put our names the other way round, with the family
name at the back, so it appears as Sakuragi Hanamichi in the mal
ay
version of Slamdunk. So this Sakuragi is actually a character from the famous manga: Slamdunk.

Sakuragi is a nutcase. An arrogant, self-obsessed, loud, rude gangster. But he’s the central
character in the manga and what makes it interesting. Yes, he is the HERO! What?! You ask. Yeah,
funny, eh. So why this name?

In the manga, Sakuragi joined the basketball club in his
school to impress his dream girl. But being a rookie in the game, he makes a fool of himself all the time thinking he is a born basketball genius. And so, our hero tries hard to show off his ’skills’ right from
the first day of training, which caused a lot of embarrassing
moments which is just damn funny.

Being humiliated again and again by
his achrival (Rukawa, an amazing player) which is also the love interest of his dream girl does not
affect his faith in himself as a ‘talented’ basketball player.
He does has great talents, as later shown in the story, an unpolished gem.

Right from the start, he believe he’s the future star player, even if he does play like shit in the beginning, and has no liking to learning all basic skills whatsoever or taking advice from anyone. No one knows where his ego comes from. It’s
like he’s too stubborn and stupid to understand the critisism and
humiliation he faces so often.

I particularly like his skill of cutting off all sounds by ‘closing his ears’ when he has done something stupid
and everyone is trying to talk some sense into him. (Don’t we all need this
skill to keep all the negative things away to move ahead?)

He’s a real nut but he is a hero because right from the start, he
believed in himself, he believed in his talent, and no setback could
convince him otherwise. The kind of faith is impressive (even though he started off
just to impress a girl, haha..).

Sometimes we all have to be a nutcase to the people around us too,
don’t we? We have to do things that seems stupid/ impossible/
impractical to the people around us, we have to make some choices that
would make us very unpopular but we know is the right thing to do. Sometimes, I just think, we have to be Sakuragi.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 25th, 2008 at 9:00 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.