January 4: Voice actor poll

On this day, a TV variety show titled New Year’s Special Program! Generation Z Voice Actor’s Choice! allowed viewers to vote for their favorites out of a roster of 800 anime voice actors. The list cut off at 50 with a large percentage of finalists from the Showa era. For example, Toru Furuya (best known as Gundam‘s Amuro Rey) placed at number 1.

Yamato actors were plentiful: Kenichi Ogata (original Analyzer) at #5, Takeshi Aono (original Sanada) at #6, Kazuhiko Inoue (Archduke Erik Dessler) at #18, Ichiro Nagai (remake Tokugawa) at #22, Nachi Nozawa (original Alphon) at #23, Norio Wakamoto (Zoellick) at #26, Shigeru Chiba (remake Dr. Sado) at #30, Houchu Otsuka (remake Sanada) at #31, Akio Otsuka (remake Domel) at #40, Kei Tomiyama (original Kodai, pictured above) at #41, Akira Kamiya (original Kato) at #42, and the mighty Koichi Yamadera (remake Dessler) at #49.

See the entire list here.

January 11: Showa 40 Man magazine Vol. 77

We’ve heard from Showa 40 Man many times before in Yamato world. The title of this magazine from Crete Publishing refers to readers with a birthdate of 1965 or thereabouts, and is loaded with articles on the culture and entertainment those Japanese kids grew up on. (If such a magazine existed in America, it would be called something like “Early Gen X Man.”) Their attention often turns to the anime titles of the era, and Yamato has gotten its fair share of coverage over the years.

The cover story on this particular issue was titled Terebi Manga Matsuri [Festival], referring to the multi-feature anime matinees for kids pioneered by Toei. Major titles were examined for their specific contributions to the zeitgeist, and Yamato was profiled for its revolutionary music. For this, they scored an interview with the foremost expert on the subject: Akira Miyagawa.

Read the interview here.

January 27: Naoko Yamazaki in the news

Yomiuri Newspaper Online published a welcome reunion with JAXA astronaut Naoko Yamazaki (52), whose mission took her to the ISS in 2010. Why does that rate a mention here? Because her road to space began with Yamato. The article offered a biographical interview, beginning with this paragraph:

It all started with Space Battleship Yamato

When I was 4 or 5 years old, I lost a channel war with my older brother, who was three years older than me, and we watched Space Battleship Yamato together. I wasn’t able to follow the content in depth, but I understood the essence of the main characters fighting in space to protect the Earth, and I found myself more absorbed in the story.

My interest in space was further piqued when I was in the second grade of elementary school in Sapporo due to my father’s job transfer, and I attended a “star gazing party” organized by the PTA. Looking through the telescope, I could clearly see Saturn’s rings and the moon’s craters, which impressed me even as a child. There was a planetarium near my house, and I went there with my brother. I was excited to listen to the explanations of myths related to the constellations.

The rest of the article is in Japanese, but a browser with a translator function will punch through that like paper. See it here.

April 9: Hochi Shimbun article

Once in a while, we hear from the original Yamato superfan himself, Ryosuke Hikawa, and his words are always worth listening to. On this day, the Hochi Shimbun (newspaper) sat down with him on the occasion of his latest book debut, and here’s what they discussed…

Yamato and Gundam are the Newtypes of Japanese Anime

By Kazuki Ota. See the original article here.

Ryosuke Hikawa, 65, is a researcher of anime and tokusatsu (special effects). In his book, The innovation of Japanese anime: a structural analysis of the changes that marked a turning point in history (Kadokawa), he thoroughly discusses the anime innovations he has studied. He says that the greatest innovations occurred during the production of Space Battleship Yamato in 1974 and Mobile Suit Gundam in 1979, and that “both of these works had a great impact on later works.”

Order your copy of Hikawa’s book at Amazon.co.jp here

“Space Battleship Yamato started when I was in high school,” Hikawa says. “Before that, I liked anime and tokusatsu and used to watch them a lot.” But what he was most interested in was, “How is anime made?”

“I could understand that cel images are shot one by one, but the concept of how they were made was a bit fuzzy. I thought it was the cartoonist’s assistant working hard to draw the cels.”

Hikawa became interested in the production of anime and visited the actual studio. What he saw there inspired him to do research on anime.

He said, “It is not a case of just drawing on the spur of the moment, but creating a kind of design document for dozens or hundreds of people to draw in a unified way. I learned that there are good reasons to draw great works. But what made me like it? I wanted to know why I was moved.”

It is no exaggeration to say that Japanese anime is now at the top of the world. Japan’s first full-length anime, Hakubenden, was produced by Toei in color in 1958. There is a variety of works in this world. Among them, the most innovative periods centered on Yamato and Gundam.

“In 1974, Yamato was the sole production, but in 1979, Yoshiyuki Tomino created Gundam, Director Rintaro made the Galaxy Express 999 movie, and Hayao Miyazaki made Cagliostro Castle. All of the people I just mentioned were born in 1941. Their works all came together like a frenzy in 1979, and have had a great influence on later works.”

There is a reason for this.

“People born in 1941 would enter the workforce 22 years later, in 1963. That was the year Mighty Atom made its debut and TV anime began. People who started working on Mighty Atom reached their late 30s in 1979. Noboru Ishiguro, who directed Yamato, recognized that people do their best work in their late 30s, and Hideaki Anno, who directed Evangelion, said the same thing. He made Eva at 35.”

There have been some revolutionary events in the history of anime. In the same book, Hikawa fears that the essence of anime has been hollowed out.

“Many people seem to think that they should make anime because anime characters sell, but the opposite is true. Why do characters sell? Why do we keep characters close to us? I haven’t noticed anyone asking this.”

Although the economy is currently revolving around the sale of goods, he says, “I believe the anime industry will taper off. For example, when I watch a movie, all I remember is the characters and the story. I forget the emotions I got from the work. A miraculous moment in the movie is stored away somewhere as a memory. The essence of the character business is to commercialize the characters so that we can remember those moments. However, these days, we often create anime in order to sell characters. I think the means and the end are reversed.”

He expects that anime is based on calculation.

“They are produced based on engineering and technical calculations. It costs a lot of money to make anime, so it has to reach more people than manga or novels, by one or two orders of magnitude. In that sense, when it comes to popularity and the masses, it’s not enough to just rely on sensibility. You have to have technical logic, or you won’t get anywhere. Makoto Shinkai (who made Your Name) is all about calculation, isn’t he?”

Before studying anime and tokusatsu, Hikawa worked as an engineer at Fujitsu, where he was in charge of digital phone development. He says that his work as a researcher made him realize that anime is an “industrial product.”

“Anime is considered to be a world of art, but it is basically an industrial product. As it proceeds through the process, if it’s animated an animation director will check it, and things are decided in detail, such as how the direction is locked down. In the 1990s, standards were established for industrial products, and I thought, ‘That’s exactly what it looks like’.”

The telephone evolved into a digital phone, which evolved into a cell phone. Anime production is evolving from analog to digital in the same way. He believes that AI will be the key to the future of anime.

“Maybe they’ll also incorporate AI to meet the public’s desires, or arouse a bit of material desire. AI is evolving at a very fast pace. I think that the unknown nature of AI will make it useful for anime, or at least help it to evolve.”

Ryosuke Hikawa Profile

Born on February 15, 1958 in Himeji City, Hyogo Prefecture. He is 65 years old. He started writing for an anime magazine while still a student at Tokyo Institute of Technology, and joined Fujitsu after graduation where he worked on digital phone development. He became an independent writer in 2001. He has served as a member of the judging committee for the Agency for Cultural Affairs’ Media Arts Festival and the Mainichi Film Contest.

Read a 2017 interview with Hikawa here.

Read a series of Yamato essays by Hikawa here.

April 20: Shizuoka Shimbun article

You just never know when Yamato content is going to jump out of your newspaper and hit you square in the face. Watch out, here’s one now!

Shiro Sanada of Space Battleship Yamato: Reflecting the social situation of “Science is the Enemy”

Anime critic Ryota Fujitsu introduces some of the important supporting characters from older anime works.

Supporting characters also have their own lives. In the anime industry, the times when a spotlight falls on such characters is called “The time of duty.” In Episode 18 of Space Battleship Yamato (“Floating Fortress Island: Two Men Brave Death”), Yamato‘s chief engineer, Shiro Sanada, is on duty.

Yamato began airing in October 1974. To save Earth from destruction by an alien attack, Yamato and its crew take on an unprecedented adventure, a voyage of 148,000 light-years. The enemy aliens, Gamilas, attack Yamato in various ways.

In Episode 18, a computer-controlled unmanned space fortress appears. Sanada and the main character, Susumu Kodai, attempt to destroy this fortress from within. In the course of this mission, Sanada’s past is revealed. When Sanada was in elementary school, he lost his older sister in a rocket car accident at an amusement park. He himself had to take on prosthetic limbs.

Sanada says, “I don’t want machines to kill people.” His path in science was based on the belief that science is for the happiness of human beings, and that human beings are above science. “For me,” he says, “science is an enemy to be subdued.”

In the 1960s, many parts of Japan were suffering from pollution. In the 1970s, “reflection” was provided in Progress and Harmony of Mankind at the Osaka World’s Fair. The “apocalypse boom” represented by the bestseller The Great Prophecy of Nostradamus also appeared in the 1970s.

If we just innocently celebrate scientific civilization, might we end up destroying ourselves? This is the reason why Sanada, who is portrayed as a brilliant scientist and engineer, calls science the enemy.
　
Ryota Fujitsu Profile

Born in Fujieda City. He has been writing articles on anime for magazines and the web since 2000. His main publications include Anime and War (Nippon Hyoron Co.) and Declarations of an Anime Critic (Chikuma Bunko), among others.