Bibliographic record
Abstract
Becker's (2021) young adult (herein referred to as YA) graphic novel, Himawari House, details a year in the lives of three young women living abroad in Tokyo, Japan.The narrative opens with the first-person focalization of Nao, a Japanese American returning to Japan for the first time since immigrating to the United States with her Japanese mother and American father; however, it would be misleading to label Nao as the protagonist because her narrative becomes intricately intertwined with, and shifts to, the perspectives of Hyejung, from Korea, and Tina, from Singapore.Nao, Hyejung, and Tina all live in Himawari House: a shared rental space for students studying abroad.The three main characters come to Japan for different reasons, but they are united in defining and redefining their notions of home and family as they navigate living independently from their nuclear families in a foreign country.The black and white illustrative style of Himawari House reflect the characters' (arguably mostly Nao's) melding together of Western and Japanese cultures in employing American comics and Japanese Manga tropes.For the most part, characters are illustrated in a naturalistic style commonly seen in American comics/graphic novels, but the illustrations often employ Manga characteristics.For example, the characters' facial expressions use Manga styles to communicate more intense emotions such as popping veins to express irritation, sweat drops to indicate anxiety or confusion, colour lines dropping over characters' faces to show embarrassment, and characters transforming into chibi deformations (short, round, and "cute" versions of the characters) that are meant to emphasize sweet and silly moments.Unlike the typical two by four panel grid of Manga comics, Becker did not follow a regular panel grid.Instead, the number of panels on each page shifts in seemingly innumerable shapes and sizes.This made the narrative dynamic, full of movement and energy, and flexible.Often characters are illustrated as "breaking out" of the panel borders, and this further contributed to the overarching theme of the characters' growth throughout their year together.Overall, Becker's choice of visual details and organization emphasized the graphic novel's themes of cultural hybridity and growth.Language is a key theme throughout the graphic novel that is linked to the characters' developing sense of belonging in Japan.Language is first linked to culture and belonging when Nao reflects upon losing the ability to speak in her mother tongue.Himawari House opens with Nao considering what she remembers of Japan from her childhood, and she laments that the pursuit of "fitting in" with her Western peers severed much of her connection with Japan.Becker used the metaphor of smell to illustrate this loss of connection: Nao recalls the smell of her treasure box, which she brought with her from Japan, as being what would connect her to home, but this smell fades over time.Becker directly links the fading smell of Nao's childhood treasure
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".