For many people attending Kawaii Kon, the annual three-day anime convention kicking off Friday at the Hawai‘i Convention Center, a trip to Japan would be nothing short of a dream come true.

Japan, after all, is the land of anime (Japanese animation) and manga (Japanese comic books), where everything from "Astro Boy" through Cartoon Network’s "Toonami" lineup has been merchandised into cute plush toys, action figures and anything else fans’ little hearts desire.

Artist Jamie Lano got to live that dream and then some. Fresh out of college in Arizona in 2004, she moved to Japan to work with Nova, a group of English conversation schools. She eventually ended up employed as an assistant on a popular manga series for a year, hosting a TV show and writing a newspaper column.

And then one day, tired of having to deal with bitterly cold winters, she decided to leave it all behind and move to Hawaii.

So after a few months’ layover in Washington state to reunite with family members, and with her beloved cat, Sansa, at her side, Lano flew off to draw the next chapter in her life’s sketchbook. It’s a journey that will bring her to Kawaii Kon, where she’ll share her expertise and experiences in three panels over the weekend.

A chat with the 34-year-old Lano is a chat with a free spirit who is really enthusiastic about her craft. It’s clear she has a passion for art and traveling, eagerly sharing her experiences on her blog, jamieism.com. She credits her days spent growing up watching "Star Trek: The Next Generation" for instilling in her a spirit of adventure.

"They were explorers, exploring the galaxy," said Lano, who lives in Makiki. "It made me feel like I want to do that someday. And it pains me so much that we don’t have a Federation of Planets that I can go around, travel the stars, because I would so be there. We don’t have that, so I chose to study art because that’s the closest I can get right now to use my imagination."

She’s found a lot to love since she moved to Hawaii in July.

"There’s such a sense of community here, like with the anime fans," she said. "And I love that. I’ve never known libraries to be like, ‘We need cosplayers! Come!’ or things like that. That’s not a part of my experience at all, and I think that is awesome."

Also a relatively new experience for Lano: hosting multiple panels at an anime convention. She was a panelist at a discussion about making manga in Japan at Comic-Con International in San Diego in August — "I barely got to speak," she said — and hosted a panel at a smaller local event, Taku Taku Matsuri, in November, but Kawaii Kon is the first major convention she’s attended where she’ll be working solo.

"Hopefully it will help other people follow their dreams and become manga artists in their own way and their own right, and we will grow and nurture all these budding artists," Lano said. "In Japan we call them ‘mangaka no tamago,’ which technically I still am. It just means ‘mangaka (manga artist) eggs,’ like you’re about to hatch and grow. So I’d like to help do that, incubate all those little mangaka eggs that are waiting there just to blossom."

Lano’s Kawaii Kon panels will deal with various aspects of her life in Japan. Two of them, "Working in a Manga Studio" and "How to Make Manga the Japanese Way," will share what she learned working as an assistant to Takeshi Konomi from 2008 to 2009.

Konomi’s best-known manga, "The Prince of Tennis," about a tennis prodigy and the allies and adversaries he meets as he strives to be the best in Japan, has grown into one of Japan’s most popular franchises. It spawned an anime series and multiple live-action musicals to date.

At Konomi’s studio in Chiba, Japan, Lano and four other assistants helped him create early chapters in the "Prince of Tennis" sequel series, hand-drawing intricate details like backgrounds, tennis rackets, necklace charms and speed lines, or lines that denote motion. She also designed the uniforms used by the main character and his teammates.

Lano wrote about her experiences, first on her blog and then in a self-published book, "The Princess of Tennis." The book offers a rare behind-the-scenes look at the inner workings of a manga studio and what it was like attending events with someone regarded as a superstar in the trade. The "Working in a Manga Studio" session will expand on those stories, with pictures and video.

"How to Make Manga," meanwhile, will be a hands-on workshop, with Lano providing materials — Japanese manga paper, pencils, different pen samples — for participants to use and sharing drawing techniques for them to try.

Her third panel, "Living as a Foreigner in Japan," will be a more general look at what newcomers can expect when moving to that country. Lano plans to have at least one of her friends on hand to share stories.

"It should be a fun panel, and anybody who wants to go to Japan and live the dream, live in the land of manga and anime, they should come to this panel because we can give you the real answers," Lano said.

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Visit the "Otaku Ohana" blog (otakuohana.staradvertiser­blogs.com) for more excerpts from Jason S. Yadao’s interview with Jamie Lano.