CATDOLL: Japan's Kadokawa Group opens an online high school to create a school for ACG talents

Online schools are not new. With the development of the Internet, online schools can be said to be all over the world. However, the recent announcement by Kadokawa Group, a giant in the Japanese publishing and entertainment industry, that it will open an online school has attracted a lot of attention. The reason is that Kadokawa Group's online high school "N High School" is different from ordinary pure online schools. Kadokawa has invited various big names in the ACG industry: popular light novel writers such as Reki Kawahara and Keiichi Shigure, and Yukihiro Matsumoto, the creator of the Ruby language, to serve as lecturers in the school. "N High School" will officially open in April 2016 and will begin recruiting students from all over Japan from October 14.

To quote Kawahara Reki's famous saying in SAO, "Although this is a game, it is no joke", this high school of Kadokawa Group is an online school but it is no joke. After successfully graduating from this online school, you will have a high school degree recognized by the Japanese education department. Moreover, once you become a student of N High School, you will also receive a school uniform. The main campus of N High School is located in Okinawa. As an online school, it doesn't matter where the main campus is. Most of N High School's courses are taught online. Since it is an online school of Kadokawa Group, it is naturally inevitable to be related to ACG. In fact, this school is completely a otaku high school.

The high school's board of directors includes Studio Ghibli producer Suzuki Toshio, 5pb president Shikura Chiyomaru, and Kadokawa Group president Kadokawa Koyohiko. As a high school that is no joke, this school will also teach basic courses to students through the Internet. Kadokawa Group has 30 years of experience in publishing teaching aids, and the school's teaching materials will receive full assistance from Kadokawa Group, which will launch special handouts and combine them with Kadokawa Group's animation works, so that students can learn high school knowledge through the Internet.

Kawahara Reki

At the same time, N High School also offers a number of extracurricular courses, such as programming courses and mobile application development courses taught by core members of the technical department of DWANGO, the parent company of Nico Animation, including JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Node.js, and mobile application development, etc., as well as artificial intelligence and big data analysis courses. Matsumoto Yukihiro, the creator of the Ruby language, will be one of the main lecturers of this advanced course. The school's study room is directly located in the Nico Animation headquarters in Tokyo, and the annual school cultural festival of this school is held at the Nico Super Conference. So this school is a high school recognized by the Japanese education department that is specially built for otaku to cultivate future otaku talents.

Shiguse Keiichi

In addition to these extracurricular courses in science and engineering, there are also extracurricular courses in the humanities. One is the traditional novel writing course, in which the famous Japanese mystery novelist Seiichi Morimura will be responsible for teaching the basic structure and plot structure of the novel story, helping students to independently plan and set up, write and proofread. The other is a light novel writing course. The school will invite popular light novel writers under Dengeki Bunko, Reki Kawahara (Sword Art Online, Accel World) and Keiichi Shigurezawa (Kino's Journey) to be lecturers of this course. In addition, there are illustration creation classes, animation production classes, voice actor training classes, costume design classes, and other courses closely related to ACG works.