[pg 190-191]

By Yasuhiro Takeda (2002)

About the author:

Born 1957 in Osaka. General Manager and Producer for GAINAX. Spent a total of six years (five years repeating the same grade) in the Nuclear Engineering Department of Kinki University. Takeda would go on to host several sci-fi events, including the near-mythic DAICON 3. In 2001, at the 40th Annual Japan Sci-Fi Convention, he resigned as chairman of the Sci-Fi Fan Group Association Committee, a post which he had held for 16 years. Currently, he is employed at the creator-centric studio GAINAX, where he works diligently as the studio’s sole bastion of common sense. His current hobby is playing (more like practicing actually…) the theremin .

Japanese edition:

English edition:

I hope this book will serve as an aid to readers who want to learn the truth behind the rumors of how we got from DAICON to GAINAX, as well as information on things they might want to know about us. Of course, if you do fall into that category you must be even more of a geek than I am…

At the very least I’m trying not to write any outright lies, so please forgive me of any faults in my memory, or if others happen to remember things differently. That’s just the nature of the beast.

Naturally, most of the things I remember happened to me personally, so those are the things I mainly write about. And there’s a distinct possibility that this account of mine may not even be accurate, in the sense of being based on hard, objective facts.

More than anything, it was DAICON 3 that played the greatest role in many of these encounters, and now here we were again, hosting SF2001. I guess you could say the convention marked an era in my own career, so I decided to treat the occasion as an opportunity to synthesize the past two decades into the form of a record of my youth.

What changed me was a series of encounters, an unbroken procession of chance meetings that thrust me from my young and vigorous but ultimately clueless boyhood, and transformed me into the man I am now.

In the summer of 2001, we hosted the 40th annual Japan Sci-Fi Convention (SF2001) at the Makuhari Messe center in Chiba, Japan . It had been a full 20 years since DAICON 3 , the very first sci-fi con we’d hosted, and it’s going on 24 years since we first became active (as they say) in the biz. In the beginning, I was a kid who didn’t think much about anything, who preferred the pleasures of the moment to any long-term uncertainties about the future. I was just a regular kid.

The end of my youth [pg 18-21] When I was a kid, I don’t think I was quite the geek I am now. As far back as I can remember, television was always a part of home life. The same goes for comic magazines like Shonen Magazine and Shonen Sunday, which made their debut in this world long before I did. Since much of the anime and manga of my formative years leaned toward sci-fi themes and settings, that genre became (and remains) my favorite. I was drawn in by the strange and powerful lure of futuristic stories—the future seemed so sublime, and filled me with longing. For a kid in those days, this kind of thinking was par the course. But there were plenty of fun things to do besides watching TV and reading comics, and I certainly didn’t spend my entire childhood wrapped up in anime and manga. In fact, there was really only one difference between other kids of that era and myself—I liked reading novels. I’ve already forgotten what sparked that interest, but it was in the fourth grade or so when I became an avid reader. While other kids were running around the schoolyard, I was running back and forth to the library. (I don’t think it was a time when you bought the books you liked—if you wanted to read one, you just went to the library.) I was hooked on sci-fi and mystery. Of course, the stories I read were adapted for gradeschoolers, and I simply devoured them. To name a few, there were titles like Lupin and Sherlock Holmes, and authors like Arthur C. Clarke and Robert A. Heinlein —sci-fi novelists from the mid-’60s, whose works were considered required reading. That’s not to say I didn’t read other works. I explored almost every aisle of the library… with the result that I became a library assistant by the time I was in the fifth grade, simply because I could stay there for hours on end. All I ever wanted was just a little more time to read. Looking back on it now, my only regret is that I never sought out anyone to share in my little world. My first encounter with adult sci-fi books, the kind published by Sogensha or Hayakawa Shobo , was during the sixth grade. My initial attempt to finish a full-length novel was by reading Gray Lensman, but to tell you the truth, I failed miserably. I only made it halfway through before I got completely lost and tossed it out. My reasoning was quite simple: How can you be interested in a book you can’t even understand? And why continue to read a book if you derive absolutely no enjoyment from it? As for the book itself, sci-fi fans are likely to know that Lensman is an entire series of novels. When a kid in the sixth grade picks up a book in the middle of the series, it’s no wonder he can’t get through it. But a little thing like that wasn’t enough to stop me from reading books. My next encounter was with Van Vogt’s The Voyage of the Space Beagle . The main character is a general scientist who is described as both calm and calculating, a leader of men whose path stays true to his goal. I thought he was just the coolest, and the book was so captivating that it shaped my idea of what a scientist is and should be . It’s also what spurred my ever-deepening interest in sci-fi. To this day, I still pull The Voyage of the Space Beagle off my shelf at least once every two or three years. It never gets old, no matter how many times I read it. Thinking back, I seem to recall that every time I tried tackling fiction, I’d tire of it almost immediately. I just didn’t read that particular type of literature. No, the only stories that really got me excited were sci-fi, mysteries and adventures. I did read plenty of school books, though, and I still wonder why so many of those children’s stories were so dreary, almost depressing. Maybe it was the shadow of violence that darkened our time. It was, after all, the middle of the Vietnam War. Perhaps for us Japanese, the specter of battle still lingered in our memories, vivid and real. At the very least, it wasn’t some far-off drama like you see on TV today. Come to think of it, I was born in 1957, a mere 12 years after the end of the war in the Pacific. Around the time I was in sixth grade, Apollo 11 landed on the moon. What’s more, it was broadcast live. I was blown away. All I could think was, Right now, right this second, humans are standing on the moon! I was glued to the television, and praises for science flooded my mind. But what really sealed my faith in that most essential field of study was the Osaka World Exposition in 1970 . I think people of my generation will understand when I say that the Osaka World Expo was a symbol of our future, a glimpse of what science would bring about. As anticipated, the U.S. building had moon rocks on display, and of course I went to see them. I stood in line for two hours to look at some rocks. But they weren’t just any old rocks—they had been brought back from the moon. They carried the promise of a bright and powerful future; they seemed to glow with the confidence of that tomorrow. After these early experiences, I began to nurture a new belief somewhere deep inside me, a belief that the future was sci-fi, and sci-fi was science. Again, I don’t think there was anything especially unusual about this feeling. Many children of that time—especially boys—probably felt exactly the same way.

My fateful university acceptance [pg 21-23] The deciding factor in my chosen school path was my unwavering faith in science. Kinki University was the scene of my college career, and once there, I chose to study nuclear engineering. The reason was simple: The world was changing, and the future would revolve around electricity. Be it computers or what have you, my vision of the world to be was that electricity would power everything. I was sure of it. And electricity for the future meant nuclear energy—or so my 18-year-old brain conceived. At that point, I hadn’t done much research on the subject, but after cracking the books I discovered that nuclear energy was absurd. Harnessing the power of the atom for energy was simply asking too much of humanity. I started to think our future would be better served by instituting an alternate source of electrical power. It would be pretty hard to call Kinki University a first- rate school. My feeling at the time was that it was, at most, second-rate. for one thing, there were hordes of students in attendance, making the campus a virtual wilderness of 4- and 5-story dormitories. That’s the kind of school it was. At a time when Nihon University—the mother of all mammoth universities in Japan—boasted an enrollment of 70,000 or so, Kinki University had at least 50,000 students of its own. There was even a certain rumor, told in hushed and serious tones, that if all the students were to actually attend class, the school would run out of desks. No matter how you sliced it, it was an enormous school, which is perhaps why in my freshman year I wasn’t able to locate the only club that I really wanted to join—the sci-fi club . During the course of reading those sci-fi books throughout junior high and high school, I stumbled across a publication called SF Magazine , which alerted me to the existence of these “sci-fi clubs”. When I say “stumbled across”, that’s no exaggeration. I lived in the country, so it was only once in a blue moon that the local bookstores would even carry anything like SF Magazine. It goes without saying that you wouldn’t find it in the school library, either. Anyway, I had a vague notion that once I got into college, I would join the sci-fi club. Maybe it was because I’d never had any close friends to share my love of sci-fi with. But I wasn’t able to make it happen—the sci-fi club at Kinki University wasn’t an official school club . Their existence wasn’t even acknowledged by the university, and as a result they were shunned, without even a clubroom on campus. Hardly surprising, since they weren’t even associated with the school. Their status being what it was, I failed to notice the powers they’d put up at the start of the school year, and—at the risk of stating the obvious—was consequently unable to join. I wanted friends to discuss sci-fi with, but it wasn’t to the point where if I couldn’t find any I’d think, I can’t take it! I want to die! or anything. So I left it at that and just stopped looking. I had other pleasures in life besides reading. For example, in high school I played bass guitar in a neighborhood band. I was also positively addicted to skiing, and would hit the slopes the minute the season opened. So my freshman year wasn’t exactly miserable. I had fun outside of my obsession with all things sci-fi.

Encounter with the sci-fi club [pg 23-26] It was at the beginning of my sophomore year that I started seeing recruitment posters for school clubs, and more importantly, the sci-fi club. At least! I had finally found a group of friends to discuss sci-fi with. I had assumed that I was extremely well-read, but after joining the club, I was surprised to discover that my upperclassmen had read a lot more than me. The amount of reading they did was frightening. And once I began talking to them, I discovered the incredible amount of information they actually knew. During the course of a single conversation they’d jump from one topic to another, go back to where they’d started, then take off in a different direction altogether. It was nothing more than idle chit-chat, but it was incredibly entertaining and I couldn’t get enough of it. I was always hanging around the sci-fi club. Of course we weren’t officially recognized as a club by the school, so we didn’t even have a room. We would hop from cafe to cafe, but inevitably, we’d end up at the Sunset Inn , a coffee shop near the school’s entrance. Just to give you an idea of how often we went there, even now, 20 years later, the Sunset Inn is still the default meeting place for the sci-fi club. A while back, I met up with some of the old crew from the Sunset Inn. When I learned that someone’s daughter—still in grade school during our college years—was now out of college, it really drove home how much time had passed, And yes, of course I had to tell her, “Say, didn’t you and I take a bath together way back when?” Anyway, it seems that in those days every sci-fi club or group throughout Japan had an old familiar meeting spot like ours. It just went with the territory. Once my place in the sci-fi club was established, college life was just plain fun. It had to be, with friends as crazy as mine! Take, for example, Mizuno . He’s a cop now, but he used to be one of my underclassmen. This guy read his fair share of sci-fi novels, but what he really loved were movies, and he saw a ton of them. For some reason, he was obsessed with that zombie flick, Night of the Living Dead, which was playing in theaters at the time. It was all he’d ever talk about, so we gave him the rather appropriate nickname of “Zombie”. Another of my underclassmen was Miwa . Besides sci-fi, he liked rakugo, or Japanese comic storytelling. The second you gave him a topic, he’d burst into some funny story. Miwa later spent some time as a director for General Products. And then there was Yasushi Okamoto . He was an upperclassman of mine (in fact, he was already an alumnus by then), and we always called him “Mr. Yasushi” and stuff like that. He was already famous in fan circles for emceeing and speaking at sci-fi conventions. This may surprise you, but I’m no good at public speaking—my face used to always turn beet red. Yasushi was a master, though, and it was he who taught me how to speak in front of crowds. Aside from them, there was Ikeda , an older guy in the same year as me who’d recently returned to Japan from Argentina, and an underclassman named Toyama , who works at GAINAX today. Since he first joined the sci-fi club more than twenty years ago, Toyama has had the nickname of “Chestnut head”, for no other reason than we all thought his face looked just like a steamed bun with chestnut filling. All of the guys in our group were one step shy of certifiable. but from what I hear, our eccentricities mirrored those of almost every sci-fi, manga or mystery club at the time. I think our involvement with the club was more about discussing and exploring sci-fi topics than actually participating in bigger fan-type activities that drive it. No, scratch that. The main thing was just hanging out with friends and having stupid conversations. That’s really all it was. One of the members who joined at the same time as me was a guy named Goto . He was one year older than me, and, boy, was he different. He was a member of the Seigun Society , a creative group based in Kyoto. He’d written his own novels, and was the first sci-fi fan I’d met who actually wanted to be a professional writer. Or rather, I should say he was the first person I’d met in my entire life who openly shared his vision with other people. It was quite a shock. Goto knew a lot of people, and not just from the Seigun Society. He had connections to sci-fi fandom in places outside of Osaka, and he hobnobbed with the so-called “BNFs” (Big Name Fans) , who were well-known in the sci-fi community. One day, Goto came to me with the idea of forming a communication network between the various university sci-fi clubs throughout Kansai (the region around Osaka, Kobe, Kyoto and Nara). He asked me to help him set it up, and from that point on, my life changed drastically. I’d always had a tendency to choose the sci-fi club over classes, but that’s when I started going to school less and less. I guess you could say that one moment was the first step toward my future.

Confederation of Kansai Student Sci-Fi Clubs [pg 26-29] Back then, the world was in the middle of a sci-fi craze. Almost every university in Japan had sci-fi clubs, ranging from very small to extremely large. I decided to help Goto, for the simple reason that I thought it sounded interesting. I ran around to university sci-fi clubs far and wide, making contact, having meetings, calling for the establishment of a communications organization, and just helping out where I could. The Confederation of Kansai Student Sci-Fi Clubs (or “the Confederation” for short) we established would later become the administrative body for the 4th annual Sci-Fi Show, the first sci-fi event we would host. It was as if, even then, the student movements of the 1960s retained a glimmer of their former impact—remnants of resistance, like dying embers. I could feel something of it as I traveled around in an attempt to drum up interest in the Confederation. In other words, they didn’t seem to appreciate people from other schools suddenly showing up and telling them this and that. The impression I got was that their clubs were their business—their dominion. I suppose it was to be expected, but since I’d never been a part of any student movements, even in passing, I was initially rather lost as to my next move. They started throwing around English words like “organizer” and “propaganda”, words I’d never even heard before. But on the other hand, it didn’t seem that the ones spouting those phrases had much of a clue what they were saying, either. It wasn’t long before I stopped interacting with those types. At first, there were four or five schools (including Kinki University) participating in the Confederation. I was thoroughly engrossed in it all, and working so tirelessly that I began hearing calls for me to run the “Secretariat” . And that’s how I ended up becoming the first secretary-general. I don’t have any idea what Goto’s intentions were, but at this stage the Confederation didn’t have any aspirations of hosting events or anything like that. It was really just a contact committee for the sci-fi clubs in each participating university. We put out a newsletter a few times a year, and that was the extent of it. To be honest, I didn’t really care what we were doing it for. It didn’t matter. The most important thing was that it was fun. And because it was all I did, I started skipping school more and more. But I never missed a chance to go to the cafes with friends from the club. A typical day for me involved waking up and heading down to the usual cafe, where I would sip coffee and read some sci-fi. Once my friends began to arrive, we’d get all fired up by some kind of ridiculous conversation. When the sun went down, we would move on to one of the local pubs and get even more fired up. That’s how it went every day, and it was fun. As for school, it’s no wonder that I had to repeat my sophomore year. In the midst of all this, I would be attending my first sci-fi event. I forget exactly how this came about, but Miwa, my underclassman and fellow club member, had been active as a sci-fi fan since high school, and he regularly attended conventions . After asking around, I found that a lot of people in the club and the Confederation were regulars at those cons, too. To all those who know about sci-fi conventions, I apologize for the unnecessary explanation. But for those who don’t know, they’re fan-sponsored events held annually. There isn’t a fixed executive committee or board. Whatever group or organization wants to host one can raise its hands and be counted among the candidates, and the format is different every year. For that reason, the location for the convention can be anywhere within the country, and the theme and presentation—even the date—change each time as well. At a metropolitan-style convention, in areas like Tokyo or Osaka, the meeting hall will be separate from the lodging. There’s no real need to reserve lodgings for this kind of gathering. And then there’s the resort-style convention, where you may not be able to secure an adequately sized hall, or it may be held in a rural area where reserved lodging is an absolute necessity. In those cases, an entire lodge is rented out for everyone, and the convention is held right there. Those can be weekend events, and the late nights always turn into massive drinking parties. You need stamina for those cons. But that’s why many people say that these are the only true sci-fi conventions. The 2001 event marked the 40th annual Japan Sci-Fi Convention. Many of the people who hosted the earlier Conventions are now big-name authors in their own right. People like Sakyo Komatsu , Yasutaka Tsutsui and Masahiro Noda are the great-grandfathers of the Convention. It has always been hosted by amateurs, but in the sci-fi world the distinction between fan and author is a relatively small one , and many professional writers participate right alongside the fans. An event like that would be unthinkable in other genres. I did have a vague notion of what these events were, but I’d never thought of actually participating in one, so it was somewhat surprising to learn that everyone else went to them. It was with the mindset of Well, I’ll just go once and see what it’s like that I filled out an application to a local con in Kagawa.

Kansai entertainers [pg 31-25] And now, on to Ashino-con . The Japan Sci-Fi Convention sprouted from the idea of doing something like the World Sci-Fi Convention (aka Worldcon, which is held in the US) in Japan. The first one was held in Meguro, Tokyo. Conventions tend to have abbreviated nicknames, usually “something-Con” (this, too, was patterned after Worldcon). The 17th Japan Sci-Fi Convention was held at Lake Ashino, so its nickname was “Ashino-Con”. In case you’re curious, the one held in Meguro was called “Meg-Con”, and the one we would later host were nicknamed “DAICON”. That was because they were held in Osaka, and the character used for the “o” in Osaka can also be pronounced dai. Brimming with expectation after the event in Kagawa, I headed for Lake Ashino by way of Tokyo. It was smack dab in the middle of summer break, and I had hatched an ambitious plan for a summer trip. I would go from my native Osaka to Shinagawa in Tokyo, where along with some friends from the club I would attend the Space Science Exposition , hosted by the Japan Shipbuilding Industry Foundation (now known as the Nippon Foundation). From there I would go on to Lake Ashino. I guess I was no different from any other sci-fi fan out there. The Japan World Exposition in Osaka had me hooked, and I couldn’t get enough space and rockets stuff. The Space Science Exposition promised displays of a moon lander, a moon rover and a Saturn rocket brought over from the US, so I figured seeing all that would get us even more fired up for the Sci-Fi Convention. That was the plan, but in retrospect, maybe it wasn’t such a bright idea after all. Ashino-Con was a three-day event, but unlike local cons, it was attended by a large number of professional writers and editors. They may say there’s not much difference between a fan and a pro in the sci-fi world, but in Osaka there just aren’t that many chances to rub elbows with writers. Tokyo was different though, and I just couldn’t wait to get to the Convention, where I could hang around people I wouldn’t normally have the chance to interact with. But as it turned out, it wasn’t so much fun. There was a party the first night, and I was able to have a conversation with a writer. That was nice. But after that? My feeling at the time was, Ok, this is odd. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. It was as if the convention had provided the vessel, but it was up to us to decide what to put in it. I for one was unsatisfied. I don’t know whether it was because there wasn’t enough sci-fi to be had, or because the hosts weren’t paying enough attention to us, but I was let down nonetheless. I’d been looking forward to spending three days thoroughly immersed in sci-fi, but there wasn’t enough of an effort to cater the Convention to first-timers. I felt like the only fun I had was just hanging out with my usual crowd—and we would invariably end up sticking together. Which is why, on the afternoon of the second day, my buddies from the club and I went riding on the ropeway. I mean, we’d come all this way to attend the Sci-Fi Convention, and we ended up just wandering through the city. If sightseeing had been our reason for coming here, then I guess it was fun enough. Above all, I think it’s important to share experiences with people—to eat from the same pot, as it were. Still, while we were there, we decided we shouldn’t waste the opportunity to cosplay (although in those days we didn’t call it “cosplay”—we just called it dressing up in costume). For one of the parties, we stole some toilet paper from the bathroom and mummified one of our buddies. The final touch was taking the cardboard roll in the middle, cutting it in half, and taping the halves over his eyes. Then we ran around saying he was a Tusken Raider from Star Wars. But there was one snotty little kid who kept tearing off chunks from our friend’s costume, saying, “You guys are weird.” We gave the little brat a good smack on the head for it, but then someone standing off to the side came rushing up and informed us we’d just whacked the child of none other than Aritsune Toyoda . Oh well. I guess we’ve passed the statute of limitations by now… Fun aside, here I was, fresh from Seto-Con and the Space Science Exposition, and I’d had a whale of a time at both events. Ashino-Con, on the other hand, just didn’t have a thing going for it. I feel bad for the hosts when I say this, but that’s really how much of a letdown it was. Maybe they’d say the problem was that my expectations were too high, but it looked like we weren’t the only ones feeling a little bored. After dinner one night, I got together with Okada and some of the other guys from the sci-fi club. Since we didn’t have any place to hang out, we plunked ourselves down in front of some vending machines and began one of our pointless conversations. Okada and I had met for the first time only a few weeks earlier, but we started going off about things like, “What if Uchu Senkan Yamato (”Star Blazers“) had been made in China?” We were just making things up as we went along, having a blast talking and acting out sci-fi movies like Godzilla and Star Wars. As we continued to entertain ourselves, a small crowd started to gather. They listened to our silly conversation and really started getting into it. That only encouraged us, so we tried doing something else. They got into that as well. It was the first time I realized how enjoyable it was to perform for an audience. Or maybe I was just caught up in the moment. Either way, our little performance in front of the vending machines, which had started at around 10:00 at night, ended up going until sunrise the next morning—about eight hours, all told. By morning we were almost ready to drop from exhaustion. Neither of us even had the energy to get up and eat breakfast. Before we knew it, there was talk of us being put on stage prior to the closing ceremonies. Apparently, someone on the convention staff had seen our routine, and thought it’d be even more fun if we performed in front of a bigger crowd. They’d already worked us into the schedule before presenting the idea to us. As it happened, the staffer in question turned out to be Mr. Komaki, who would later go on to be editor-in-chief of Animec magazine. Okada heard the proposal, and said (in our native Kansai dialect), “Hey, they gave us 30 minutes! We could do this!” “Forget it”, I shot back. “I’m beat.” “What’re ya talkin’ about‽ We’ve already come this far—how could we not do it?” I was about to retort with “Whaddaya mean, come this far‽” but he was so insistent that I had to give in. Of course, neither of us had been on stage before. But in a way, we had been rehearsing all night long, and we had the jokes and the timing down pat. I don’t mean to toot my own horn, but again, our audience ate it up. “Sci-fi standup” they called it, and from the looks of things, no one had done anything quite like it before. We were dubbed the “Kansai Entertainers”, and we would end up alighting a number of different stages over the next several years. I guess we made quite an impact, because all of a sudden it seemed like everyone knew our names. With Ashino-Con coming to a close in that fashion (among other things), I couldn’t help feeling my future would be all about sci-fi. Or maybe it’s just that I learned how great it felt to be accepted by an audience.

Holding the 4th annual Sci-Fi Show [pg 36-38] Our first stint as stage performers now over, those of us heading back to Osaka stood at the bus stop, talking smack about the convention while we waited. “The end was fun…” “Conventions have been kinda rotten lately.” “We could probably do it better ourselves.” “Yeah, we could.” “Why don’t we hold our own convention?” And so forth. As for me, I was so unbelievably tired I just sat there on the bench, my mind unplugged. You wouldn’t think it, but all that talk we were throwing around sparked something inside us—something that would lead to us hosting our own Sci-Fi Convention. By the time we arrived in Osaka, though, even I was all fired up to host a Japan Sci-Fi Convention. The first thing we did was tell the guys in the Kinki University sci-fi club what we wanted to do… but the upperclassmen were unanimously against it. Basically, they didn’t think we could just jump in and host such a major event. They thought we should start slow, do a few smaller conventions, and then once we’d gotten the hang of things we could move on to the Japan Sci-Fi Convention. The thing is, we didn’t want to hold small events—we wanted to do the Convention. So we didn’t discuss it with them anymore. But because of that, we later found ourselves running into a real doozie of a problem… The next thing we did was take the topic up with the Confederation. We ran into a few bumps along the way, but in the end we all agreed to do it, and our Kinki University club would take the central role. The “few bumps” I mentioned were, of course, dissenting opinions and calls for a more conservative approach from various members of the other sci-fi clubs. But this was no time to break ranks. We met with the dissenters and naysayers and somehow convinced them to get on board. A guy named Musa from the club at Osaka Prefecture University told me that I should write up a plan. I’d never written anything like that before, but I gave it a shot. I put my schooling to good use and drew up a report, like I would have done for an experiment. (I was a science student, after all.) And in those days there were no word processors, so I wrote the whole thing by hand. When I showed Musa my grand scheme for hosting the Japan Sci-Fi Convention, he said he had no idea I could write something like that. I remember not knowing exactly what that was supposed to mean, but more than anything I felt relief that I’d now be able to count on his help. So that’s how it went, and little by little the Confederation as a whole decided to go along with it. We found a hall and posted an announcement in Sci-Fi Magazine. That’s when the whopper of a problem reared its ugly head. We were contacted by an organization called the Fan Group Association . Their full official title is the “Japan Sci-Fi Fan Group Association Committee”. Founded in 1965 by Masahiro Noda and Takumi Shibano , the organization is supported by the membership of sci-fi fan groups from all over Japan. I’d never even heard of it (though later, I would go on to chair this committee until 2001). Apparently there was a system in place whereby the Japan Sci-Fi Convention could only be hosted by organizations pre-approved by the Fan Group Association, but I had no way of knowing that. Our biggest problem was now with the upperclassmen, who we’d snubbed during the planning stages. We newbies lacked the lateral ties to fans that they had, nor were we a part of their information networks. Because of this, we were soon informed by Mr. Kadokura , then chairman of the association Committee, that next year’s Japan Sci-Fi Convention was being held in Nagoya. We were stunned. When we got the full story, it was clear that we were in the wrong. We accompanied Mr. Kadokura to Nagoya to speak with the host for the next year’s convention, and immediately withdrew without any further argument. The problem was, we already had the hall reserved, so we were at a loss for what to do next. But in good time, Space Force Club representative Hiroaki Inoue had a brilliant idea. According to him, there was an event called the Sci-Fi Show that had originally been sponsored by Masahiro Noda. It had been held three times already, so sci-fi fans were well aware of it. “Why don’t you guys hold your convention under that name instead?” he suggested.

My first event [pg 39-41] I first met Mr. Inoue at a regular meeting for the Osaka chapter of the Space Force Club. I wasn’t in the club myself, but I’d heard that a top representative was coming from Tokyo to attend the meeting—and since Okada was a member, I tagged along in order to introduce myself to Inoue. after that, I went all the way to Tokyo to meet with Noda and obtain his permission to host the event. Once that was taken care of, I borrowed the big “4th Annual Sci-Fi Show” sign and set about getting preparations underway. As it turns out, Inoue would later join me as one of the founding members of Studio GAINAX… There was someone else I met through the Space Force Club, a fellow by the name of Takeshi Sawamura . He had quite an unusual background. His father had been a choreographer for bunraku puppet theater, meaning he grew up surrounded by show business. He also told me he’d done some work as a child actor. He had all these stories, like how he’d landed a role in Daiei’s Daimajin , only to get so scared by the huge Daimajin statue that he broke down sobbing and couldn’t perform… or how he’d been a candidate for a role in Magma Taishi . Ultimately, though, he didn’t want to be an actor, so he didn’t pursue it past childhood. Sawamura knew Okada through the Space Force Club, and Okada had told him something about our Confederation. As soon as Sawamura heard about it, he went off and formed a sci-fi club at his own university, and then petitioned to join the Confederation! That was the kind of guy he was, a real go-getter. Meeting Sawamura added a lot of energy to our later activities. He was the most brazen of us all, almost larger than life. As it was only our first event, the rest of us would sort of hang back and hesitate to interact with some of the professionals around the stage, but not Sawamura. He’d walk right up to them and start name-dropping some of the people he knew through his father, and before you knew it he was just chatting away. Afterward, I said something about how he sure knew a lot about show business, to which he replied, “I don’t know the first thing about it. All I did was throw out the names of some of my dad’s friends. That’s all it took.” Needless to say, I was very impressed. But getting back to the Sci-Fi Show, the Confederation was hosting it and it was to be a stage-centered event. The “Kansai Entertainers” made an appearance, but the rest of it was stuff like magic tricks, stand-up comedy and sci-fi themed ballet. Basically, anything we could think of. We packed that event as full as we could. Still grumbling about how boring Ashino-Con had been, we were determined to make this one as fun as possible for the attendees. For the opening film , we used the rocket liftoff scene from the Apollo 11 documentary film Moonwalk One. Sci-fi writer Sakyo Komatsu was at the event, and I heard he was so surprised by our opening film that he wondered aloud how in the hell we’d managed to acquire it. The simple fact was, we’d borrowed the footage from the Japan Shipbuilding Industry Foundation. They’d hosted the Space Science Exposition we attended on our way to Ashino-Con, and we learned that the Foundation owned a number of space-related items (especially those dealing with NASA) they would lend out at no charge. We’d simply borrowed it like you would something from a library. It was interesting that our experience at the Space Science Exposition would eventually affect our Sci-Fi Show, though… The Seigun Society helped with preparations for the show, which is how I ended up meeting Hiroe Suga , the woman who would later become my wife. I say “woman”, but then, she was just a 14-year-old kid, still in the ninth grade. We met and that was the end of it. But it was still a real eye-opener to meet someone like her. My friends and I hadn’t gotten into sci-fi fandom until college, but here she was, still in junior high but nevertheless quite involved in fan activities. It was surprising to meet someone so young creating her own original stories, hoping to one day make it as a professional writer. I know I’m probably belaboring the obvious here, but when we met I didn’t have the foggiest notion that we would later end up together. As for the Sci-Fi Show, we were able to get Studio Nue to participate—in the costume portion, no less. We would go on to collaborate with them on Macross (discussed later), and they would even help out with the opening of the General Products store. In many ways, they’ve been a great “big brother” studio for us, right up to the present. I have an especially close relationship with Haruka Takachiho , and both my wife and I owe him a great deal. Of course, I had no idea at the time how close we would later become. When all was said and done, I was quite pleased with how the Sci-Fi show turned out. We got a lot of positive feedback from the attendees as well. But we still hadn’t hosted the Japan Sci-Fi Convention… which is why in 1979, we set our sights on DAICON 3.

The road to hosting the Japan Sci-Fi Convention [pg 42-43] Doing the Sci-Fi Show gave us both the confidence and the connections we needed for the Japan Sci-Fi Convention. We even managed to gain a little experience—one of our upperclassmen’s many suggestions for such an undertaking. The show had been the perfect dress rehearsal for the Convention. Truth be told, though, while we were confident we could make the Convention a success, when it came time to actually host the event, we quickly learned that we didn’t know much. First off, we didn’t have the purest of motivations for hosting the event. We didn’t like Tokyo fans, didn’t like the Fan Group Association, and we sure as hell weren’t going to stand for defeat at the hands of a bunch of Tokyoites. These die-hard fans all seemed to brag about the advantages of living in Tokyo, like how close they were to writers, publishers and other industry types. But what really got our goats was how no matter what we said, they’d turn it around and start lecturing us. We just couldn’t stand their “Sure I know that—I know everything!” attitudes. It seemed like almost every Tokyo fan we bumped into thought he was better than everyone else, and wouldn’t stop running his mouth until he’d made himself the king of the molehill. In retrospect, I think maybe the fans themselves—us included—were just childish. That probably explains why ever single “debate” among sci-fi fans would quickly degenerate into a shouting match, like kids fighting over a toy. Another part of it was that we felt excluded as newcomers, even among the other Kansai fans. It wasn’t like we were running around biting everyone’s heads off or anything, but from an outside perspective we probably seemed like troublemakers. We certainly didn’t mean any harm, but looking back, I have to say we did have a little chip on our shoulders. But I digress. We did the Sci-Fi Show with the intent of eclipsing the Convention. Even then, there was the widespread idea that sci-fi was big enough to accommodate anything, which is why we actively promoted anime and tokusatsu special-effects films that weren’t considered “true sci-fi” by the old-timers. Most of the staff was a mixture of sci-fi and anime fans anyway, which I’m sure had an impact on our planning. We were moving further and further away from the approach of our upperclassmen… but on the other hand, it brought favorable attention from the pros. I guess they noticed the amount of energy we carried with us, even if our ideas were all over the place. Sakyo Komatsu had apparently taken a liking to us, and decided to throw us some work. He called and asked if we’d help out backstage with Osaka Philharmonic Festival , a public symphony concert held at the Osaka Festival Hall. We were basically acting as gofers, running around backstage. We weren’t even close to playing any kind of administrative role, but we still got to see what it felt like to be backstage at a major event, and I think the experience was well worth it. We even got to see conductor Takashi Asahina in person. But the most powerful realization of all was that someone like Sakyo Komatsu had finally noticed us.

Formal candidacy [pg 44-45] Having resolved to host DAICON 3 , we quickly announced our candidacy at the next convention. It goes without saying that this time we followed all the official procedures and curried all the right favors. DAICON 3 would be held in 1981, so we planned accordingly. The staff for the Sci-Fi Show had been composed mainly of Confederation members, but as with any convention, the inevitable always happens. Either the volunteers enjoy themselves and decide to stick around, or they want nothing more to do with conventions and leave for good. It’s been the same in all my 20 years of experience, an endless cycle of grouping and regrouping. As we Sci-Fi Show holdovers and other Confederation members were making the rounds of university clubs in search of volunteers, we ran into a few crotchety guys who told us to knock off all the “propaganda”. We were only asking if they wanted to do an event with us! At the time, I didn’t even know what “propaganda” meant, but I do remember thinking that those guys were idiots, not to mention rude. Other people would say things like, “It’s not that I don’t want to do an event. I wouldn’t mind helping out. It’s just, I’d rather do this sci-fan thing the right way, and not rush into things.” Our way of doing things must have seemed a little extreme from their standpoint. I seem to recall quite a few people leaving the group after the Sci-Fi Show was over. After all, we’d assembled that staff from the same crowd we were talking to here. But on the other hand, some of the guys who helped out have remained with us for 20 years now. As they say, to each his own. The most important thing was always the success of the event. It didn’t really matter whose feelings got hurt along the way—resolving friction within the group just wasn’t one of our priorities. Between Okada’s bizarre statements and Sawamura’s overbearing pushiness, we had our share of discord and internal strife. And of course you had people calling out things like, “What’s more important—school, with your so-called tests and reports, or doing the Convention‽” We were that gung-ho. At first, we mainly wanted to use Confederation members to staff DAICON 3, but one thing or another conspired against us, and eventually we had to branch out and find volunteers from various clubs in the area. By the time we were finished, the DAICON 3 executive committee felt more like a band of mercenaries. The year before DAICON 3, we all traveled to the U.S. to check out Worldcon in Boston. We wanted to see with our own eyes the event that had started it all, and bring back as much of that atmosphere as we could. We also seized the opportunity to visit Disneyland (Tokyo Disneyland hadn’t even opened yet). We thought going to a theme park would give us ideas for planning our own entertainment segment for DAICON 3. We wanted our convention to be enjoyable for everyone. Incidentally, all this fun meant I would end up repeating my sophomore year for the second time, but I couldn’t have cared less.

The DAICON 3 decision [pg 46-47] At Tokon 7 the following year, we announced our candidacy for sponsorship of the following Convention, and were formally recognized. We were filled in on a number of things by Mr. Kadokura of the Fan Group Association, whom we had met during all the hubbub of the previous year. Inoue of the Space Force Club also gave us a number of tips. With their help, we spent some time wheeling and dealing and generating a buzz for DAICON 3. We even made some promotional items. At first, we threw around the idea of emblem patches and whatnot, but after due consideration of our budget, we opted for something that would give us more bang for our buck. We distributed packs of cigarettes (Mild Seven, a popular Japanese brand) with a picture of a Powered Suit on the package. The illustration was done by Kitayama , a guy from the Kinki University sci-fi club who dreamed of becoming a manga artist. He drew an amazing image of a Powered Suit with a big cigarette for a bazooka and a lighter for his finger. We also sold these cigarette packs at DAICON 3 as official goods for the event. This time around we played by the rules, and we glided into sponsorship of the Japan Sci-Fi Convention without a hitch. Even the nickname for that year was a no-brainer—it was the third Convention to be held in Osaka, so the obvious choice was “DAICON 3” (again, because the “o” in “Osaka” can also be pronounced dai). Once our sponsorship of the Convention had been finalized, our next step was to make Sakyo Komatsu honorary chairman to the executive committee. We thought that since it was being held in Osaka, who better to ask than one of the biggest local literary figures around? But he turned us down cold. “Nah, I ain’t gonna do it. But tell you what, I’ll introduce you to Musashi Kanbe . Get him to do it.” Those were Komatsu’s exact words. We asked Kanbe, and he accepted… but I still nurtured the dream of having Sakyo Komatsu as our honorary chairman. It would end up being another 20 years before he graciously accepted for the 40th Japan Sci-Fi Convention, which was hosted at the Makuhari Messe. Actually, after DAICON 3 was over, someone brought up the idea of us doing another convention. We jokingly responded, “Yeah, sure. How about in, say, another 20 years?” Well, the 40th Convention wasn’t in Osaka, as DAICON 3 had been, but imagine my surprise when I later found out we would indeed be hosting the event again in 2001!

Meeting Anno, Yamaga and Akai [pg 47-50] Having secured the position to host the Japan Sci-Fi Convention, we began preparations for the event—and were faced with the decision of the opening film. For the Sci-Fi Show we’d screened borrowed footage, but for DAICON 3 we wanted (if at all possible) to make our own original film. At that point, Okada spoke up. “I met this guy named Nagayama at the Ultra Q screening, and he says he knows someone who can make anime.” Nagayama turned out to be a man of many talents. He would later go on to the work for General Products writing technical manuals for our do-it-yourself garage kits, and he even played a major supporting role in Yamata no Orochi no Gyakushu (“Orochi: The Eight-Headed Dragon”), a live-action DAICON film. Tragically, he died in a car accident the year of the Kobe Earthquake (1995), but if he were alive today I’m sure we’d still be great pals. Nagayama introduced me and Sawamura (I’m pretty sure he came along, too) to Anno and Yamaga at a place called Solaris , a sci-fi themed cafe in Kyoto. They had both just enrolled in the Osaka University of Arts . I had very little interest in anime back then, so I wasn’t expecting anything spectacular. When I was introduced to Anno, I said something like, “They say you can make anime. What kind of stuff can you do?” At this, he whipped out a pad of accounting paper and started drawing. After a bit, he held the pad up and flipped the pages rapidly. A Powered Suit ran across the paper. I was stunned. I remember thinking, This guy’s incredible! It’s hard enough drawing a single Powered Suit with all the lines and complex shapes, but here he was animating one right in front of us. I’d seen a flipbook comic before, but this was the first time I’d watched someone actually make one. And for something he had just drawn up on the spot, it was really, really good. That settled it—we were doing an anime for the opening film. And while Sawamura and I were getting all fired up and excited, Yamaga, who was sitting next to us, leaned back too far in his chair and crashed to the floor. The table was in chaos. “What happened‽” we cried, scrambling to help him back up. “Are you alright?” His response: “I had the hiccups, so I was holding my breath to get rid of them. I guess I forgot to breathe again.” A man who can make Powered Suits moves, and another who collapses because he forgot to breathe. What a pair! It was a meeting I’ll never forget. Blue Blazes episode 07: Takeda meets Yamaga & Anno to discuss creating the DAICON III anime I actually have another funny story about Yamaga. When he was in junior high, he took an I.Q. test. After he had finished, the teacher angrily called him aside. “Now listen there”, said the teacher. “I’ve had enough of your fooling around! There’s no way you could have made it this far with a score like this!” Apparently, the test results showed Yamaga’s I.Q. to be 40. Someone with a score of 100 is considered to have normal intelligence, so a 40 is ungodly low. Almost no one in the general population would ever get a score like that. But Yamaga hadn’t been fooling around—he’d gotten that score because he’d thought so hard about every single answer that he ran out of time. According to the story, they even called his parents, worrying them to no end in the process. Once we heard about this, we all started calling him “40”. I met Akai some time later. Yamaga brought him in to help with the anime, but apparently Akai had been less than thrilled at the prospect of working with a bunch of weirdos. I later found out that he had only agreed to come because we might actually pay him for his work, and that was a heck of a lot better than sitting around studying. Yamaga and Anno seemed to be in complete agreement with him on that. Since their freshman year, they had been taking on jobs making video footage for various projects. Of course, these were non-paying jobs—all they got were their production expenses. Blue Blazes ep 07: Takeda decides to take Anno/Akai/Yamaga to meet Toshio Okada Blue Blazes ep 08: Anno/Akai/Yamaga enter Toshio Okada’s modernist house; entering the bizarre house, they are met by creepy taxidermied deer & bears. Blue Blazes ep 08: Anno/Akai/Yamaga meet Toshio Okada: the short & portly Okada emerges from an elevator to greet them, exhibiting creepy & narcissistic mannerisms; passing their fallout shelter, he meets with them in his room/SF-library, where he explains his idea: an audacious SF animated film freely pirating any characters or designs they want (Okada explains his family made its fortune by blatantly pirating brand-name clothing like Lacoste polo shirts). Akai is awed by Okada, exclaiming, “This guy… He’s got dead eyes, but everything he says is so full of life—!”, while Anno believes they have entered the lair of the evil organization Shocker from Kamen Rider. Whereas I had lost any future “vision” I had the moment I joined the sci-fi club (and instead ended up going wherever the wind might carry me), Anno, Yamaga, and Akai had a clear idea of what they wanted to do. They knew they had talent, and that they were going to take the world by storm. Over the 20-plus years that we’ve been friends, they’ve done nothing but prove that talent to me over and over again.

The opening animation [pg 50-54] Anno said he could make anime, but he had never attempted a cel anime before. That wasn’t a major problem, because we had all kinds of people on our staff willing to offer up random information. Apparently, there was a shop called Animepolis Pero that sold anime cels for insane amounts. Each second of anime footage burns through several cels, so if you have to buy each individually—and at a high retail markup—your budget is blown before you can even begin. Blue Blazes ep 03: Honoo visits an art store with animation supplies in Umeda (Animepolis Pero?) to watch a TV loop of anime openings; Anno et al join him and Anno demonstrates his sakuga knowledge. But we had a plan. We bought a single cel at Animepolis Pero and took it to the vinyl yards in East Osaka . “’Scuse me, you have anything like this?” we asked the guy working there. “Sure do!” he replied, bringing out a roll of sheet vinyl. he said he’d sell it to us for ¥2000 a roll (about US $9 in 1981 dollars). Now we’re talkin’! we thought. We bought one, took it home, and cut it up. Then we tried painting on it… and it was nothing like a cel. You could get the color on there alright, but as soon as it dried it would peel off. And if you stacked the cut pieces while the paint was still wet, they’d stick together. But then again, it wasn’t like we had any other options. So we kept right on working with the vinyl sheets. It was bad enough that this was our first-ever cel anime, but using the wrong materials for the job only doubled the headaches. Our production site was an empty room in the factory/house where Okada’s family lived and ran their business, Okada Embroidering . For animation paper we used B5 (176 x 250 mm) sized accounting paper, we made our own tap by hand, and punched the holes for the tap into the cut vinyl sheets with a two-hole punch—the kind that office workers us. Blue Blazes ep 08: having agreed to do the film, Okada introduces them to their staff of hundreds of workers housed in the Okada house; Akai panics again, and Yamaga runs after him, while Anno organizes a screening of Space Runaway Ideon to ensure that the workers have their “fundamentals down” Blue Blazes ep 10: DAICON III film production goes on; the women complain to Okada that Anno has not bathed in weeks (Anno argues that no one ever died of not taking a shower and bathing is, strictly speaking, unnecessary), and that while he does not smell terrible (due to being a vegetarian), the knowledge of this still repulses them. Yamaga makes Anno & Akai go to a bathhouse. Anno & Akai reenact the King Joe–Ultraman sea fight from Ultra Seven 14-15, “Westward, Ultra Garrison!” Anno, Akai, and Yamaga were working full-time on the opening animation. There were always others around as well, though, and things could get pretty cramped. What’s more, we didn’t divide our production process into the appropriate stages (unlike how we do now, as pros). Okada would discuss things with Anno, Akai, and Yamaga, and between the four of them they’d lay down the general outline. Then Anno and Akai would get to work on drawing the frames and Yamaga would be in charge of direction and art. I don’t know what kind of “direction” was going on exactly, but I strongly suspect it was different from what we would call directing today. This was a homemade anime, after all. If I had to say who did what, I guess Okada was the producer, Yamaga the director, Akai the character animator, and Anno the mecha animator. The rest of it was just grabbing whoever happened to be there and forcing them to trace cels, slap on paint, or do whatever the situation called for. For the filming, we set up a tripod on a platform, fixed the camera in place and started shooting frame by frame. And we didn’t have a timing sheet , so Anno would just stand off to one side going, “OK, frame one… OK, frame two…” By April of 1981 we’d begun production on the line art, and by June or so we were painting the cels. As it turned out, we were working on that anime right up until the morning of the convention. Okada was by far the biggest troublemaker on the set. One day, he was having it out with the rest of the anime staff, arguing about a scene in the climax. A signal fire is coming from a Powered Suit, and the smoke from the fire is supposed to turn into the Ide Gauge . But Okada didn’t like it. “The Ide Gauge is just weak!” he exclaimed. “It’s got no impact, We should definitely have it form, like, a stylized version of a girl’s pussy! Now that would be impact! We need to do something that’s never been done before—otherwise, there’s no point in doing this at all!” He started going off about this and just wouldn’t back down. The rest of the staff turned to Kazumi (this was before she married Okada, so she was still Kazumi Amano at the time) and begged her to say something to make him stop. Even then, she was famous for her ability to control him. “Well, if you really wanna do something no one’s ever done before”, she began, “why don’t you have a shit-eating contest instead? You want impact? That’s impact.” Okada didn’t say another word, and the “pussy proposal” was thankfully laid to rest. That, however, wouldn’t be the last time Okada chimed in with some insane suggestion. After that, every one of his wild ideas was answered with the chant, “Shit-eating contest… Shit-eating contest…” Blue Blazes ep 10: Okada meets with Takeda, Anno et al to discuss a change to the film. To have greater impact and ensure no one can repeat the DAICON III intro anime, instead of an Ideon icon being used in one scene, they will use a stylized drawing of a vagina. They are horrified by the proposal but unable to deny that the change would ensure no one would ever repeat it; fortunately, Amano Kazuki (Okada’s future wife) intrudes and defeats the proposal with her common sense. We packed a large number of student staffers into our little anime sweatshop and set them to coloring cels, but it’s still safe to say that the ones who actually made the anime were Anno, Yamaga and Akai. With everyone being amateurs and all, it’s no surprise that the process was so painfully slow. Like I said, it literally wasn’t finished until the last possible moment. We finally presented the fruits of our labor at the opening ceremony, and it was extremely well-received. We were happy. We had them hooked. Blue Blazes ep 10: The opening of DAICON III and the screening of the anime; the sound goes out but the audience is still amazed. Osamu Tezuka couldn’t make it in time for the opening, but he joined everyone for the nighttime party at the hotel. During the celebrations, he heard some discussion about the opening anime and said he wanted to see it. So they scrambled around for the footage and showed it again, right there on the spot. Afterward, Anno, Yamaga and Akai introduced themselves to Mr. Tezuka, and Yamaga’s self-introduction was hilarious. Sitting nervously in front of this legendary man, he said, “My name is Yamaga. That’s spelled yama plus the ga in gassho (or”New Year’s greetings“).” He then proceeded to draw the symbol for yama in the air, index fingers of both hands working in tandem. (In case you don’t know Japanese, yama means “mountain”, and it is so simple to write that children learn it in the first grade.) Yamaga still introduces himself like that. I wasn’t there myself, but I heard that after Akai and Yamaga showed Mr. Tezuka the film, he commented, “Well, there certainly were a lot of characters in the film. A lot of characters… However, there were also some that weren’t in the film.” At first they couldn’t figure out what he was getting at, but then it suddenly hit them—they hadn’t used a single one of Tezuka’s characters in their film! Blue Blazes ep 11: While Osamu Tezuka had been in the original DAICON III audience, he had made his displeasure known afterwards (cameo role of Tezuka played by Toshio Okada) because none of his characters appeared in it. For DAICON 4, not only did Mr. Tezuka make a special point of showing up in time to see the opening animation, he was also kind enough to help us with the convention planning. So you better believe we used some Tezuka characters that time! Our little opening anime for DAICON 3 generated a lot of buzz. A magazine called Animec featured it in an article of theirs, and those who’d seen it were discussing it with their friends. Pretty soon we started getting requests from interested people, asking us to make it available to the public. This was a good thing, because hosting the convention had plunged us into the red . We decided to form a deficit relief committee by selling videos and 8mm reels of the film. For a group of amateurs, I have to say we were bending over backward to cater to the fans. We included stickers with all-new illustrations, and we threw in storyboards and bonus items for free. The videos sold much better than we’d expected. No only did they pull us out of the red, we even made a tidy little profit. That profit would later be invested in preparations for DAICON 4 and production costs for the DAICON film series.

DAICON 3 [pg 55-58] The basic premise behind DAICON 3 was to create a meeting place for sci-fi fans, writers and the like, where they could gather and have pointless discussions about goofy things. DAICON 3 took that collection of silly conversations and turned it into a show. We’d make it loud, and we’d make it real. That’s the stance we took. All told, there were 80 people on staff. While the main activities were going on in the large hall, there were side attractions all around. And then there was the dealers’ room . Our policy from start to finish was to make sure attendees had fun, and to make the Convention as exciting as we could. We blazed new trails with DAICON 3, taking directions that had never been explored by previous cons. It became a model of sorts for the mainstream Japan Sci-Fi Conventions of today. The large hall had a maximum capacity of 1500 people. We got so many applications that by spring we had to stop accepting new ones. There was a lot of hype surrounding it before it even started, due in part to the mount of press we received. News of the Convention was posted in magazines —even ones other than Sci-Fi Magazine—and the editor-in-chief of Animec was himself a big sci-fi fan. I think a lot of it had to do with the simple fact that there were a lot of avenues out there for promoting our con, and they were quite busy doing so. On the day of the Convention, I was busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest. For starters, the truck I’d rented for hauling things stalled out, and ten or so staff members on the scene had to drop everything and help push-start it. Most of the staff was running around like mad, but one guy—Kamimura from the Osaka University sci-fi club—just sat around watching the costume show. Even today, 20 years later, that story is still told as an example of what you’re not supposed to be doing when you’re on the staff. Kamimura swears up and down it was an honest mistake, but no one believes him. Since most members of the staff were students, there were very few of us who actually had driver’s licenses. Because of that, I was forced to play chauffeur to the transport team the entire time… on top of my other responsibilities as a member of the executive committee. As we were packing up after the Convention, we soon discovered that there was way too much stuff to fit into a single truck, so I rushed over to a nearby car rental agency and told them to rent me the biggest truck they had. The clerk pointed to a four-and-a-half ton long-bed monster. I’d never driven anything close that size before, but I went for it all the same. I literally thought it was over for me when I had to back up to the loading dock at the convention hall. I mean, none of the guys giving me directions could even drive! As it turns out, I would later go on to drive almost every kind of vehicle possible, everything from super-compact utility vans to four-and-a-half ton trucks like this one. Another perk of DAICON 3 was the dealers’ room. We’d seen people making and selling original items when we went to Worldcon for research, and we brought that idea back with us. When we’d gone to Worldcon, none of us could speak any English, but we still had fun wandering through the dealers’ room. All you needed to know was that people were selling everything imaginable—some people were fashioning fantasy-style swords out of metal and selling them right there! There were commercial dealers too, which was very interesting, because at that time in Japan, a commercial booth at a sci-fi convention was a rare sight to see. But even the dealers’ room can get pretty boring if the only action is vendors selling merchandise. So we asked a Star Trek fan club to set up a space where people could play a Star Trek simulation game on PCs (incidentally, a PC was called a “My Com” back then, which was short for “my computer”). We built a cockpit-like enclosure out of plywood and cardboard and set up eight NEC PC-8001s inside. Some staff members dressed up in Star Trek garb to explain the game to interested passers-by. In those days, hardly anyone had ever seen eight whole PCs in one place, so that attraction drew quite a crowd. The executive committee produced all kinds of items to sell as official goods at the Convention. Between the tiny mascot figures (all hand-made, of course) and little Nahaha heads (Hideo Azuma’s manga character), the female members of the staff were like indentured laborers in some attic sweatshop, working feverishly to try and meet their quotas. We also had some Powered Suits made out of polyresin. We weren’t calling them “garage kits” yet, but that’s pretty much what they were. We must’ve had a dozen or so varieties in all, and every single one was sold out within minutes. That made quite an impact on Okada. He saw what a huge demand there was for little trinkets. Apparently, seeing it first-hand was what gave him the idea to start up the General Products store later on. DAICON 3 was a huge success. Now I knew for certain that we’d gone in the right direction with it. I think the rest of the staff was equally pleased with the outcome—DAICON 3 was the perfect example of how things should be run. We’d lost a lot of people after the Sci-Fi Show, people who were fed up with the hassle of working on an event. But a lot of these staff members stayed on to work DAICON 3 as well, which shows how great the experience was for everyone. I had a fantastic time myself, and so did the attendees. DAICON 3 really exceeded all of our expectations.

After the party [pg 58-60] Missteps aside, we’d managed to make DAICON 3 a gratifying experience. We had hosted the Japan Sci-Fi Convention and DAICON, and both had been successes. But I was literally burned out—that’s why I returned to school, still a sophomore after six years. Since entering Kinki University, the only time I’d actually gone to class was in my freshman year. I joined the sci-fi club at the beginning of my sophomore year, and gradually went from skipping classes to not going at all. The reason: I’d finally made friends I could really talk to, the kind of friends I’d always dreamed of having. My days were filled with too much fun to be ruined by school. Because I hadn’t been attending classes, my “return” to school wasn’t much of a return at all—and it was a foregone conclusion I’d have to repeat my sophomore year again. On the one hand, there were professors telling me I’d be better off actually quitting the university and reapplying, because at this rate I’d never be able to graduate. On the other hand were my parents, who kept nagging me to buckle down and get serious about education. But I didn’t want to think about it. For the moment, I just returned to my pre-convention lifestyle of hanging out in cafes, drinking coffee and reading novels. I basked in the absence of a convention to plan; the truth of the matter was, the Sci-Fi Show and the Convention had worn me down to indifference. I thought of quitting school for good and getting a job. I even went on a few interviews. I thought since I’d been so successful organizing different events that maybe I should make a career of it. I interviewed at two or three places for that kind of position, but it didn’t work out. Even though I was unable to find a job, I dropped out of school in the fall anyway. I had no intention of reapplying. I just spent my days loafing about, not doing much of anything. I had been ablaze with enthusiasm, but for too long. Now all that was left of me were cinders. There have been several times in my life that I’ve lost every ounce of energy and completely deflated, and this was the first. The reasons were different each time, but the result was always the same—utter lethargy. I didn’t feel like doing a single thing. There was a three-bedroom apartment in a place called Juso in Osaka that we converted into our base of operations during the latter stages of DAICON 3 preparations. It was the same area where the movie Black Rain was later filmed. One of the staff members, Masaharu Ueda , was living there on his own. Ueda was a member of the sci-fi club at Osaka University. As a high school student, he’d participated in Ashino-Con. It turns out that when he first saw us he made a solemn vow never to get involved with our kind, but soon after that he ended up participating in the Sci-Fi Show. By DAICON 3, he was on board as a full-fledged member of the staff. It wasn’t long after meeting him that I moved into his place, and for several years it was our den of operations. We brought DAICON 3 to life in that apartment, which meant I was there pretty much all the time. I continued to stay in Ueda’s apartment even after the Convention was over. In other words, I was freeloading. I had dropped out of school, was living rent-free in my friend’s apartment, and spent my days going to cafes in Umeda to read novels and shoot the breeze with my pals. That’s the kind of life I was living. No energy, no drive, no plans for the future. I’d taken to drinking almost every day, either at home or in a pub somewhere. It was about that time that people began to notice a foreign man with steel clogs roaming the streets of Juso. It was Steven Seagal, before he became a Hollywood star. I once saw a man of that description myself, and I’m pretty sure now that it was him. Coincidentally, Anno would go on to cast Seagal’s daughter Ayako Fujitani in one of his own films. But I digress…

Opening the General Products store [pg 61-65] I was still content to loaf around all day, but Okada, spurred on by the success of the dealers’ room at DAICON 3, was planning to open a sci-fi specialty shop . I wasn’t particularly interested in commerce at the time, so I gave it little thought. That’s when he approached me. “If you’re just going to sit around doing nothing, why not help me open up the store?” he asked. Honestly, I didn’t want to do it, but it wasn’t as if I had any other prospects (not that I was really looking). Plus, this was a friend asking for my help, so what else could I do? I reluctantly agreed to come on board. The store would be opening in February of the following year, so I promised I’d help out through April. General Products was Japan’s first sci-fi specialty store. The name was taken from Ring world , the novel by American sci-fi author Larry Niven , and referenced a trading company managed by a race of aliens known as Puppeteers. We received permission from Niven himself to use the term for our shop. I had no business experience whatsoever, and I certainly never imagined I’d be fit to work retail. Little did I know that we would later incorporate General Products and that yours truly would become the company president! Once I actually started working for General Products, I soon found that it was a lot more than a retail business. We did product planning and licensing negotiations with companies like Toho and Tsuburaya ; we commissioned illustrations from professional artists like Hideo Azuma and Kazutaka Miyatake ; we even produced our own merchandise. It was rewarding work, and I had fun doing it. To give an example, when we went to the Toho offices to ask for the rights to make a Godzilla model kit, they initially turned us down. Around the same time we went to see Tsuburaya about some other licensing matter and they agreed. The next time we met with Toho, their representative was stunned to hear that Tsuburaya had given us the OK to use their trademarked characters. Eventually, negotiations were reopened and we secured the rights to do Godzilla! It was really invigorating being part of deals like that, back when “garage kits” were just starting to crack the surface of traditional product rights business. Whenever you start up a new business, there are always those who envy your success. Once, when we were visiting Kaiyodo , we got introduced to a model wholesaler who just happened to be there. He took one look at us and said, “Oh, right. Those tight-fisted hucksters.” He was probably speaking out of both ignorance and denial of the up-and-coming garage kit industry, but we took the insult as a call to arms. We would prove ourselves to people like him by changing the face of the market—someday garage kits would be sold in every modeling store throughout Japan! And it didn’t take long to make it happen, either. By the time of Evangelion, our vision was realized in full. I acquired both an increasing amount of stress and a growing sense of fulfillment as our place in the industry began to shift. What started as a motley crew of amateurs became one of real professionals with enough money to make things happen. Having languished in the wake of DAICON 3, I began to imagine that the next “festival” coming to rescue me from my lethargy was in fact General Products. The store opened as planned on Valentine’s Day 1982, one year after DAICON 3. On opening day we were greeted by a line of 200 customers. Among them were two future GAINAX employees: Hiroki Sato , who later joined the staff for the next Sci-Fi Convention and currently works as a company director, and Jun Tamaya , now a game director. Much later, Sato told me that he remembered Okada and I passing out “I ♥ Sci-Fi” stickers to the people in line. He said Okada was telling people to take only one sticker each, whereas I was cheerfully handing out fistfuls to whoever would take them. He says he still has his sticker from that day. Unfortunately, I remember none of it. We were completely sold out soon after our doors opened for business. We’d prepared what seemed to be an adequate quantity of product, but the unexpected level of patronage had quickly depleted our stores. Over half of the customers entered the store to be greeted by nothing but empty shelves. The night after opening day, some part-timers and I stayed in the shop and labored long into the night churning out huge numbers of our own vacuum-formed garage kits. After 3:00 AM my body completely gave out, so I laid a sheet of cardboard on the floor and used it as a bed. Just as I was falling asleep, someone burst in the store. Still groggy, I opened my eyes… and was greeted by the boot of a policeman in my face. Our store was on the ground floor. The second floor was an apartment. The neighbors living above us had apparently reported us for making too much noise. But the cops didn’t do anything. They just said something like “it’s already so late, even if you do quiet down it won’t make much of a difference”, and then left. All the fuss notwithstanding, the grand opening of General Products had gone pretty well . But I don’t know any of the financial details. I was just a regular employee with a nominal monthly salary of ¥80,000 (about US $360 in 1982 dollars). The company itself existed only as a part of Okada Embroidering. April came rolling around, and Okada approached me asking, “So, what’re you gonna do now? You can quit, but you’ve got nothing else lined up. Why don’t you stick around and help out at the store?” I was more than happy to do so. I’d grown rather fond of the business of planning and producing garage kits, and I don’t think I could have quit. It was different from doing contract work. I discovered the joy of manufacturing your own designs, and seeing that succeed in the marketplace. Some of the students from the sci-fi club that I’d met through DAICON 3 built garage kits for us part-time. I think for them it felt more like a continuation of the Convention than an actual job. The ones who did the pouring for the plastic casting were mainly guys from the Osaka University club. Most of them repeated at least a year of school. On average, they graduated within five or six years, but there were some who dropped out, never to be heard from again. Late at night, it’s easy to mistake a botched piece of resin for a rice cracker, and a few of us got burned on that one. Plus, we were always spilling the epoxy liquids on the floor and making sticky messes of our shoes when we walked over it. Basically, it was a great time. One of the Osaka University students was a guy named Gyoten , a very unusual name indeed. Just looking at the kanji characters, I had no idea how to pronounce it. So I asked him. When he told me it was pronounced “Gyoten”, I teased him about it, saying it sounded like some Buddhist monk’s name. But as it turned out, he really did grow up in a Buddhist temple! After he graduated from college he worked as a teacher for a while, and then became a professional monk himself. That’s what he’s doing now. It’s really weird to look back on those times and think about what an interesting gang of characters we had working at the store.

Ideon Festival [pg 65] Through an introduction from Mr. Komaki , the editor-in-chief of Animec magazine, we were commissioned to promote the theatrical version of the Densetsu Kyojin Ideon anime. Anyway, we thought up an advertising plan at SUNRISE, and also came up with a few promotional items for the film. Part of the plan was for Okada and myself to appear on TV and in person as the so-called “Devil Twins”, in order to ensure the film’s success. It was then that we became acquainted with anime director Yoshiyuki Tomino as well as Mamoru Nagano , who was still a college student. To this day, if someone mentions the Ideon Festival , I immediately get red in the face. I don’t know if it’s because we were young and stupid, or because we just got too carried away, or what.

The Sci-Fi Convention revisited [pg 66-68] Amidst these events and projects, a lot of different things started happening at once; in order to talk about them all, I’m going to have to jump back and forth a bit. While I was helping Okada set up the General Products store, I was still freeloading off Ueda, living rent-free in his Juso apartment. Things were going quite well with the store, but my personal life was going nowhere. It turns out that Sawamura and another of my friends, Nishigaki , couldn’t stand to see me like that anymore, and had gotten together to hatch a plan. They ordered me to move out of Ueda’s place, and even went so far as to locate a cheap apartment for me. I haven’t told you about Nishigaki yet. He was another member of the Osaka University sci-fi club. He used to play rugby, and stood a burly six feet tall. In truth, he was the very embodiment of a gentle giant, and was affectionately referred to as “muscle-head”. He was quite popular in the sci-fi club. Maybe a little too popular—it took him eight years to graduate! Nishigaki’s father did business in the Momodani area of Osaka since way back when, and everyone seemed to know him. In fact, we found out about the shop space for General Products through one of his connections. Anyway, it would be about another month before my apartment was ready, so I decided—though I forget the exact reason why—to move out of Ueda’s place and stay with Okada and his parents. Only this time, it wasn’t exactly freeloading. After all, General Products was owned by Okada’s family business, Okada Embroidering. On top of that, it was only a temporary thing for me until I could secure a place of my own. Living with Okada also made it easier for me to work at the store, mainly because I could discuss business with him whenever the need arose. In the middle of all this, we somehow decided that we would do another Sci-Fi Convention. I think the impetus came from one of our coffee shop discussions. All of us remaining sci-fi clubbers were chatting it up as usual in some cafe in Umeda, and I recall someone piping up, “hey, let’s do the Convention again!” I thought to myself, What, again? Talk about a waste of time, but everyone else was still ecstatic over the success of the last Convention. Their eyes sparkled with anticipations as they began to chant, “Yeah, let’s do it!” Why are you telling me all this? was my feeling at the time… but the fact is, they were all looking up to me and counting on me to make it happen, and it was kind of flattering. They kept badgering me, and finally I relented. I was still feeling somewhat sluggish even then, so part of me wanted to do something to wake myself up. A convention probably wouldn’t be a bad way to get the jumpstart I needed. I started feeling more and more positive, until I was finally psyched about it. If we’re going to do this, I thought, we need to make this the best convention in all Japan. And how, you may ask, were we going to make this the “best”? Simple—we would have the craziest content, the most activities, and, of course, the most people. That was our goal. It was a matter of common sense that university sci-fi club members should be the people running things. Seeing as how Okada and I were busy with the store, the role of head of the executive committee fell this time on Nishigaki, who was still a student and sci-fi club member himself. It wasn’t our intention to sit behind the scenes and pull the strings, but that’s just how things worked out. Even if Nishigaki hadn’t been chosen to head the committee, I’m sure he still would have played a pivotal role as a member of the core staff. The next Convention’s location had already been decided on, so we set our sights on the following year. We began to prepare ourselves for candidacy to host the Convention in 1983. With two years before the actual event, however, there wasn’t much preparation to be done. Even so, we had several dozen staffers ready and standing by. To us, making the “best” convention in all Japan meant that we had to have 4,000 attendees. Why 4,000? Simple—the Osaka Koseinenkin Hall, which is where we planned to hold the event, had both a large and medium-sized hall. Between the two of them, there were 4,000 seats. For that many attendees, we figured we’d probably need more than 200 people on the staff, in which case we’d need to start scouting and training them. One way to do that would be to hold a minor local event prior to the main show, but the prospect of planning another convention was less than thrilling. That’s when someone posed a better idea—making our own independent films!

Establishing DAICON FILM [pg 68-71] In the spring of 1982 we set up the DAICON 4 executive committee, establishing at the same time the independent film production group DAICON FILM . Our primary goal was to train the DAICON 4 staff, but the “official” reason was to make films for promotional screening at next year’s Japan Sci-Fi Convention in Tokyo. Making a film is itself a kind of event. The idea is to create a production process where you and the staff grow and learn to work as a team. We thought that something like producing a film—a worthwhile activity in and of itself—would be the perfect way to build a workable chain of command, and also keep the staff motivated for an event that wouldn’t happen for another two years. There was something else we had going for us. When we sold copies of the DAICON 3 opening animation to cover our mounting debts, we ended up not only coming out of the red but also making a tidy profit to boot. We were now in a position to turn that profit into working capital for the films. This is backtracking a bit, but when Studio Nue saw the DAICON 3 opening anime, they contacted us with an “urgent business” matter to discuss. They wanted people to work on the production of their new original TV anime Chojiku Yosai Macross (also released in the U.S. as one of three story arcs for Robotech), which was still in the planning stages. So when production began for the new show, Anno and Yamaga went to Tokyo to join the staff . It was their first professional gig, and the experience would prove useful in producing their own amateur work. During the Macross production, Studio Nue called up asking for more people who could handle the work—which is how I ended up meeting Mahiro Maeda . As it happened, Akai knew a fellow, Hiroshi Yamaguchi (who is now a famous anime scriptwriter), and Yamaguchi introduced us to Maeda. In that same way, I was also introduced to Yoshiyuki Sadamoto , who was from the same university as Maeda. Sadamoto and Maeda were still students when they were hired onto the Macross production team. Later, they would both return to help us with the DAICON 4 opening animation. I think it would be safe to say that the core of GAINAX was formed by this point. We’d all come together through our mutual involvement in the oh-so-literary sci-fi clubs in the area, but it felt more like being in a sports club. Everyone had so much energy! Now that the General Products store was open for business, we used our customer base as a pool to scout new talent. If someone showed interest in what we were doing, or even if they just seemed to have a lot of time on their hands, they were immediately propositioned and added to the staff. General Products functioned both as a hangout for DAICON 3 veterans and as a place to find potential recruits. The first three films we planned were Aikoku Sentai Dainippon, Kaettekita Ultraman and Kaiketsu Notenki. We also intended to do a few live-action films, including a version of Thunderbirds, but in the end it was reduced to these three. We got to work on producing them… all at the same time! Most of the plotlines were hammered out over drinks at the local pub. With talent like Okada, Sawamura, Anno and Akai at the core of these admittedly rather silly back-and-forthings, the films turned out to be a snap to produce. It was actually a workable system. We rented some office space in Umeda for the DAICON 4 executive committee to use. Film production was underway in Ueda’s Juso apartment, General Products was open for business, and everything was moving right along. My first period of lethargy was finally over.

Kaiketsu Notenki [pg 71-72] This was a parody of hero shows, with yours truly playing the main role. It was originally intended as a satire of Toei’s old tokusatsu (“special effects”) TV series Kaiketsu Zubat with Hiroshi Miyauchi as the indomitable Zubat. Now, I had personally never seen Kaiketsu Zubat—I’d never even heard of it. But Okada was a huge Zubat fan, and it was his idea to do the parody. As for me playing the lead, that was Sawamura and Akai’s idea. The reason, I’m ashamed to say, has to do with the main character’s name. Notenki means “carefree” in Japanese, and apparently my face is so jolly-looking they just had to use it in their parody. Heh. Unlike the other two films, which were shot on 8mm , Notenki was done on videotape partly because it would acquaint the staff with shooting and film production on a simple, easy-to-use format. Another thing about this film was that it had no director. Maybe I shouldn’t say there was no director; that wasn’t exactly the case. The direction would just change hands from one scene to the next. That’s why there are about a dozen names listed under “Director” in the ending credits. At first, I really hated the fact that I got stuck playing Notenki… but after four productions, I have to admit that I still have the costume. Despite the fact we were doing a simple parody of a hero show, I must say that after years of playing the character I feel decidedly more heroic. Of course, when I tell friends about this they all laugh at me (I guess I would laugh, too). Oh well. It’s a little-known fact that many actors who played heroes in the past tried to keep their roles a secret. After all, no matter how you look at it, “masked hero” shows are little more than afternoon theater for kids. Some of the actors in the Godzilla movies kept their involvement hidden for years before finally admitting to it in public. It’s the same with amateurs. I guess all I’m trying to say is that even after all these years I’ve still got a soft spot in my heart for Notenki. I even appeared in the costume show at the 2001 Japan Sci-Fi Convention along with my three-year-old daughter Yukino, for whom I’d commissioned a cute “little Notenki” costume . She had a wonderful time doing it, and keeps asking me when we can go on stage together again. I might have created a monsters…

Aikoku Sentai Dainippon [pg 72-75] Compared to Notenki, production on Dainippon was a serious undertaking. We put a lot of careful consideration into the props, costumes and casting, and we made Akai the director. The show was about a squad of heroes, which meant we had a lot of lead roles to fill—five in all. We gave the characters silly names, like Ai Kamikaze, Ai Harakiri, Ai Geisha, Ai Sukiyaki, and Ai Tempura. Naturally, the actors we cast were all rank amateurs. For the role of Ai Kamikaze (the leader) we cast Shuichi Hayashi , a guy from the Osaka University sci-fi club who was more than a little odd. I heard he was originally from the city of Hakata in northern Kyushu, and while he looked completely normal, he was the most hard-core geek you’d ever meet. He studied German in college just so he could read the Heidi books in their original language . The character of Ai Geisha was played by a fledgling nurse who I hear is now married to a hospital director. All told, the cast breakdown was three from Osaka University, one from Kinki University, and one from a nursing college. Sci-fi author Akira Hori even made a cameo. This film was a parody of Toei’s sentai (fighting squad) series of TV shows, and at the very least, our explosions were every bit as good as the originals. If you’ve seen the film you’ll know what I mean. Explosions were our thing. True, it was just a parody, but that’s no reason to take the easy way out by settling for cheap store-bought pyrotechnics. At first, we followed up with some contacts and found a special-effects explosions expert, but we weren’t impressed with the results. They weren’t what we’d hoped for. Because the explosions used real gunpowder, they were a step up from ordinary firecrackers, but not enough of a step up. We demanded more explosions! This hiccup in the project was probably what kicked our fledgling independent film production group into high gear for the first time. We decided to make our own explosives . Most of the production staff were college students, and many of them were science majors of one sort or another. This was a lucky break for us. What we did was (and still is) rather illegal, so I’ll have to omit the details . Suffice it to say we succeeded in manufacturing our own explosives, and because of that, our little 8mm special-effects film turned into something truly amazing. Of course, explosions weren’t the only draw for the film. We were amateurs, but we took the production very seriously. A lot of effort was put into both the props and the costumes. We filmed all over Osaka, from the then-empty lot on the Osaka University campus, which was earmarked for a new medical research hospital, to various parks around the city, including the one by Osaka castle and the one where the World Expo of 1970 was held. We got a lot of onlookers while filming in the Osaka castle park, and ladies selling souvenirs at nearby booths were extremely supportive, always cheering us on. When one of those nice ladies asked us when our “show” would air, one of the staff members responded with “Sometime next April.” What a meanie. We also met up with kindergartners on field trips, which led to a number of impromptu “PR” sessions. I remember one little kid piping up that he’d never heard of us or this show, to which a fast-talking staff member shot back “That’s because it’s still a secret; this is a secret TV show starting next year, so be sure to watch us when we get on the air!” He was a meanie, too. Our film finally premiered the following year at Tokon 8 , the 21st annual Japan Sci-Fi Convention. On the whole, it was well received, but one sector of the fan community denounced the film, complaining of “antisocial” and even “right-wing” story elements. What an idiotic thing to say. It was just the kind of half-witted argument sci-fi fans love to toss around. Seriously, the whole point of our film was simply to make you laugh, and crack jokes about what fools we were making of ourselves onscreen. If you gave it half a second’s thought (if you even had to think about it at all) you’d realize that Dainippon certainly wasn’t trying to foist any kind of nationalistic ideology off on the audience—we were just having fun. I guess that concept was lost on some of the more marble-headed members of the sci-fi community. But maybe it was more subtle than that. Maybe some people who didn’t like our group saw the film as their chance to get in a hit. Old school sci-fi fans certainly didn’t mind telling us that special-effects films and anime were not “true sci-fi”, whereas our position was that they were. As a side, the theme song for the film used the music from the previous year’s Taiyo Sentai Sun Vulcan, to which we wrote our own silly lyrics. Even now, there are a lot of sci-fi geeks who sing our lyrics at karaoke instead of the real ones.

Kaettekita Ultraman [pg 75-77] Today, this film’s official title is DAICON FILM-ban Kaettekita Ultraman, reflecting that it was our version of the Ultraman character. Now, 20 years since its original production, it has actually been released on DVD with Ultraman-originator Tsuburaya Production’s full permission. I’m still very proud of this work. It’s a fine example of an independent, 8mm special-effects film. But it was a long and windy road to success. Since the project was originally Anno’s plan, we made him the director. When I first heard the pitch, my thoughts were, This sounds like fun and I really want to do it… but can we? Still, we were linked by the common goal of making next year’s Sci-Fi Convention the best in all of Japan, so there was no way we’d let ourselves be done in by something like this. The finished product ended up quite good, and I’m personally proud that we decided to tackle the project. It wasn’t easy, but it was a great experience. Ultraman was the largest in scale and by far the hardest of the three films to produce. I think it was our karma for doing three films simultaneously. Production on the film even ground to a halt at one point, but in the end we pulled it off. The production site may have been populated with paper-bagging volunteers, but there was a sense of everyone being there because they all wanted to create something. We didn’t finish it in time from Tokon 8, but the following year we showed it at a special screening party to rave reviews. You can still buy the DVD from GAINAX, and if you watch it I’m sure you’ll get a sense of the amount of energy we had back then. People always ask me what the “Kaettekita” part in the title means, so maybe I should answer that question here. The world means “returned” in Japanese, so the overall sense of the title would be “Ultraman is back!” To understand what that means, you’d have to know that Anno had already produced two Ultraman short films for class projects at the Osaka University of Arts. In the second of those films Ultraman leaves Earth to return to space, so in the third film he’s come back. That’s all it was.

DAICON 4 [pg 77] Getting back to the topic at hand, the major preparations for DAICON 4 were well underway. (It wasn’t like we focused all our attention on making movies, you know!) Thus far, the Japan Sci-Fi Convention held in Kobe and hosted by Yasutaka Tsutui had attracted the largest number of attendees. It was viewed almost reverentially among fans, which mean if we wanted to make DAICON 4 the best in all Japan, we had to outdo this one. Our basic ideas for the Convention were the same as with DAICON 3. Today manga, anime and special-effects films can generally be included in the category of sci-fi, but back then anything that wasn’t a novel wasn’t seen as “true” sci-fi, and was generally looked down upon. Even now, 20 years later, there are still people who cling to this outdated definition of sci-fi. What we wanted to do was introduce those pariahed formats into the mainstream, and judging by the current state of affairs in the sci-fi world, it looks like popular opinion has won out in our favor. But it was a lot of work getting there. We took plenty heat for our ideas, for reasons that would be unthinkable from today’s perspective.

The Osaka Philharmonic [pg 78-79] One of our plans for the Convention was to get the Osaka Philharmonic to play for us. Thanks to Komatsu’s earlier introduction we had the contacts in place, so without further ado we headed over to their office to negotiate. We didn’t even make an appointment. We just showed up on their doorstep asking if they could put on a performance for us, so they didn’t even believe us at first. Who would? Here we come out of the blue, asking the entire Osaka Philharmonic to play for our club party. “Do you kids have any idea how much it costs for the entire orchestra to do a single performance?” we were asked. No, we didn’t. “How about the conductor? Who’ll do it? And what about the score?” We were absolutely clueless. “We don’t know anything. We haven’t even thought it through, yet. You tell us”, we said. In the end, the Philharmonic arranged for us to meet with a conductor… but the guy wouldn’t listen to a word we said. We had all kinds of music ideas already picked out, but he wasn’t having it. We went back and forth with him until he just gave up and left the bargaining table. What we’d wanted was music from Star Wars and Star Trek, Akira Ifukube scores, themes from Ultraman, Gundam, and Yamato… stuff like that. But with no conductor we were dead in the water. We decided to take the matter up with one of the music producers from Toho that we knew through General Products (as you can see, all kinds of good connections came from the store). He was kind enough to introduce us to another conductor, and this time the guy immediately understood what we wanted to do. But we still had no musical scores. Back to Toho’s music department. We were able to acquire some scores from them, but the conductor had to transcribe the rest from old LPs, with the help of local music students. After filing an application with JASRAC (Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers, and Publishers), our preparations were in order. We asked Osamu Tezuka to be the commentator for each piece of music, and he gladly accepted. But afterward, he was stunned to learn that almost none of the Convention staff had actually seen the orchestra perform. “Why didn’t you let them listen?” he asked me, and I replied that they had work to do. “Their satisfaction comes from a job well done”, I said. Maybe some people would think that’s silly, but if you ask any of the staff present on that day, they’d give you the same answer.

Ken Hayakawa, Priv