Added 14 September 2026: Errors in several personal names have been corrected — Keisuke Fujikawa, Eiichi Yamamoto, Toshio Masuda, Shogo Hirata, Nobuhiro Okaseko, and Masanori Ito and Yasuo Shibue of the founding members of Soeisha (Sunrise) — following a correction kindly sent in by a reader, Kitajima. With thanks.
Almost all anime, from the start, has something you could call a story. But speaking from the position of a man who makes his living by anime: story matters, yes, and yet what matters as much or more is the thing only animation can express — what we call animation artistry. There is a way of thinking that says the finest thing of all would be high animation artistry with a story still visible inside it. It is Mr. Hashimoto’s theme, then story, then character, read backwards.
Since the arrival of computers and AI, the things only anime can do will no doubt grow very few — and yet, as I wrote in the first half of this blog, there are still expressions in anime that AI cannot manage.
Human beings, though, are sometimes unable to be satisfied by the work of an assistant, or of an AI, however excellent it may be, and that may become the pleasure of leaving behind a territory of art that human beings alone can enter. Perhaps one day there will be such a thing as a Contest of Things AI Cannot Do. Meanwhile, a human life seems long but is short: just as one finally begins to understand things, the metabolic deadline arrives.
Many books have been written about the beginnings of anime in Japan, but as one of those who worked inside the whirlpool of Japanimation when it was still a term of contempt, I am setting down here what I saw and heard from the time Japanimation began.
It began with “Astro Boy” (1963) on television, and the second epoch was surely “Space Battleship Yamato” (1974). Yamato was born of a strange birth and went on holding an explosive popularity — one of those things you would now call content.
The producer was Mr. Yoshinobu Nishizaki, who had served as Master Tezuka’s fourth manager. The manager back when I became an assistant was the second, Mr. Yoshiaki Imai. After I transferred to Toei Doga, Mushi Pro Shoji — the studio’s trading company — was founded, and at the same time Mr. Imai took office as its president. Then came a gap of some three years, and the third manager was Mr. Shogo Hirata, an assistant slightly senior to me. A year after that Mr. Nishizaki came in, teamed up with Hirata, and became the master’s manager.
After going independent from Mushi Pro, Mr. Nishizaki founded a company called Office Academy and made anime of Master Tezuka’s works — “Triton of the Sea,” “Wansa-kun,” and others. Hirata left Tezuka Productions at almost the same time as Nishizaki; because the family home of Mr. Hajime Tsuburaya (the special-effects director), famous for Godzilla, stood across the way from Hirata’s own family home in Aizu, Fukushima Prefecture, he became Mr. Tsuburaya’s assistant. By then he must have been past thirty.
Mr. Tsuburaya could never forget the special effects of that famous film “The War at Sea from Hawaii to Malaya,” and he had proposed “Yamato” to TBS as a follow-up to “Ultraman” or something of the sort, only to be curtly turned down — that, they say, was the story he told. So Hirata suggested that if it were made as animation rather than live action it surely would have flown, and he himself wrote the proposal for that animated Yamato.
The people of Tokyo in those days were suffering from air-pollution smog and water pollution. The proposal was to make a story of a voyage toward a planet somewhere in space said to possess the technology to remove contamination. That, so to speak, is an SF version of “Journey to the West” — and Hirata said as much from the very beginning. In the end, though, it seems Mr. Tsuburaya never took it to TBS.
Around that time Nishizaki, stuck for a third project, consulted Hirata about it. Hirata showed him the Yamato proposal he had written, and Nishizaki, they say, bought it on the spot for one million yen. “Sold it for a million~” Hirata used to say. The seed of this “Space Battleship Yamato,” then, begins with the special-effects director Hajime Tsuburaya.
What a Producer Is
In turning this into a screenplay, the Nishizaki–Hirata pair first got in touch with the writer Mr. Keisuke Fujikawa, then called on Mr. Eiichi Yamamoto, whose production of “Kimba the White Lion” had finished, and the four of them pushed the scripting forward. After that, they say, Nishizaki went on to call in the up-and-coming SF writer Mr. Aritsune Toyota, the film director Mr. Toshio Masuda, and others.
The skeleton of the scenario changed from air pollution to radioactive contamination, and as the whole thing came into shape the question became who should do the character design. At the meeting to choose among five candidate manga artists, Nishizaki named Mr. Leiji Matsumoto, but the other three, it is said, were opposed. Nishizaki pressed on — “I’m a pro at contracts, there’s no problem” — and yet, some years later, the man who filed suit claiming “the copyright in Yamato is mine” was Mr. Matsumoto. In the end Matsumoto lost the case.
When Yamato became a huge hit, the media put their focus on Matsumoto, who had drawn the characters, and that was the event that gave rise to the misapprehension: wasn’t it I who created Yamato?
Even after leaving Tezuka Productions, Hirata kept an office at Ekoda Station, not far from Fujimidai on the Seibu line where Tezuka Pro stood. He had given up on becoming a manga artist, turned to publishing anime picture books, and shifted into the writing trade. One corner of a coffee shop in front of the station’s north exit served as his meeting room, and since it lay on my route to a workplace I visited one day a week, I met him there at least once or twice a month.
In those days Hirata had, some sixty meters from that same Ekoda coffee shop, the first establishment in Japan to go by the name manga kissa — a manga café. Whether he was the proprietor himself or merely an investor I do not know, but he spoke of it as “my shop,” and I do know that it seems to have put out information on manga and anime, and that it served very well indeed as a base for publicizing that Yamato.
Let me return to Yamato. Many people know Yamato in detail, I imagine, but: it began broadcasting in 1974 on Yomiuri Television (Nippon Television), and the ratings were so low — in my memory in the 2 to 3 percent range — that in the third week an order came down to end the broadcast. For the staff and the producer, heaven and earth turned over. By then production had already advanced to about the sixth episode.
The main staff were summoned and set about their remedies. If television was no good, well, there was cinema — Hirata had his experience on the Tsuburaya films, and Yamamoto had his on “Tales of a Street Corner.” They put a little work into the six episodes’ worth of film and remade it into a single theatrical feature.
They took the film to the three film companies that held most of Japan’s theatrical market share, but all three knew about the low ratings and refused, so as a last gamble they set out to find an independent theater. They booked the Tokyu Rec in front of Shibuya Station for three days at their own expense. The rest was publicity and dirt-cheap advance tickets — a do-or-die operation. From what I could see, there were signs they were handing them out for nothing.
Here is where Hirata’s manga café went into full action. It was the first place in Tokyo to appear as a gathering spot for the core fans of anime and manga; while Nishizaki, for his part, worked on the three colossal organizations that then existed for the attending of events — Min-On (the Min-On Concert Association), Rōon (the Workers’ Music Council), and Rōen (the Workers’ Theater Council) — and through them distributed advance tickets at bargain prices.
The Tokyu Rec was a small theater of barely three hundred seats, so it did not take long for them to fill. Since the house was cleared between showings, a line gradually formed outside. By the evening of the first day the queue circling the theater — shills included — was passing one and a half times around. Judging the moment ripe for the eye and ripe for the grill, the staff got on the telephone to publicity. On the second day the news ran on page three of the Yomiuri Shimbun’s evening edition. By the third day the line had passed three times around, and the television news had caught it.
On the third night the screenings continued until the morning of the fourth day, and still a considerable number of customers were left unable to get in. This became news at every company, decorating the morning and evening papers of the fourth day, and nearly every television news program took it up.
This was the beginning of the second anime boom. And so Yamato went on riding the boom, with something like ten works made over ten years. What I have written here is an outline of the one and only birth in Japan of an American-style freestyle producer, and of the process by which he brought it that far.
There is a great deal of information out there describing how Yamato came to be, but it is written from the standpoint of the many people who worked on Yamato directly. I was outside that staff — and yet many of my comrades were in it: the character designer Nobuhiro Okaseko (Oka-chan), and Shinya Takahashi (Shin-chan), who served as animation director on several of the Yamato films, had both been staff on “Ken the Wolf Boy” — and what I write here rests on Hirata, who was in close contact with Nishizaki, on Mr. Imai, and on the newspapers of the time.
Looking over what many people have said, it resembles the sight of blindfolded men each touching one part of the elephant that is Yamato and describing their image of the elephant. Being an outsider my focus is soft, but I may have seen a little more of the whole. Even in the interviews of Mr. Nishizaki, who stood at the very center of Yamato, I have been shown a great deal in which the false is mixed in with the true.
There are several episodes concerning Mr. Nishizaki that would astonish anyone, but as they have no direct bearing on animation — if one may put it that way — I shall refrain from them here.
“Journey to the West” and the Japanese
Now I would like to write in a little more detail about what relation this “Space Battleship Yamato” has to “Journey to the West.” “Journey to the West” is a tale that any Japanese, from the old to the young, knows well. The next great sustained hit after Yamato was “Gundam,” and coming not long after it, “Dragon Ball” by Akira Toriyama. This Dragon is a mixture of the “Journey to the West” everyone knows and “Nansō Satomi Hakkenden” (Kyokutei Bakin, 1814).
Hits big enough to be called great do not come along often — and yet “Journey to the West” was present in both the second and the fourth of them. I have hardly ever seen a study of why it should be “Journey to the West,” of why it is so liked, so I would like to write a little about it.
“Journey to the West” is, needless to say, a fantasy born in China and the pride of Asia. It is a tale of the fantastic that children thrill to and delight in. Call it a fantasy, and yet no prince appears in it, no princess, no wizard; there is no prince’s marriage and no coming into independence — it is a chaotic world beyond the reach of Jungian theory.
Long ago, more than forty years now, I read in a book that translations of “Journey to the West” had been issued in great numbers since the Edo period, and that by the early Shōwa era it had been written up in as many as two hundred books: plays, novels, kamishibai paper theater, picture books, manga. So I once looked into how much had been written since the war, from the round figure of 1950. The detailed data have been lost, but roughly speaking, counting translations, picture books, manga, novels, games, films, television, and stage plays, it comfortably exceeds two hundred.
There are four years of hour-long live-action television, and together with thirty-six animated versions that comes to 244 titles; there are also three Enoken films — Enoken being the comedian Kenichi Enomoto. Ms. Miyoko Nakano alone has written a full ten volumes; there are things that call themselves “SF Journey to the West”; and there are heavily rearranged versions you would never recognize from the outside — “Space Battleship Yamato,” for instance. There are several such works whose “Journey to the West” skeleton is invisible to anyone who does not know the motive behind the proposal.
Put in the manga and the novels and it passes 250, which means that with the prewar material added there have been something like five hundred pieces of content. I once asked a Chinese exchange student to look into how many there are in China, the birthplace of “Journey to the West,” but I have yet to receive a reply. Still, it is easy enough to guess that there will not be more than in Japan. For since ancient times, whatever was born in China has for the most part entered Japan without delay.
Why is “Journey to the West” accepted again and again, even changing its shape this much? The theory that the author was Wu Cheng’en of the Ming dynasty has been all but rejected, and to this day the author has not been identified. In the wall paintings of the Mogao Caves at Dunhuang (from 366 CE) there is said to be a picture already of Xuanzang, the monk Sanzō, with a monkey in tow. I went to see them myself, but many places are closed to visitors, perhaps for restoration and preservation, and I could not confirm it. Why the Sanzō of those wall paintings should have a monkey and not, say, a dog — that was the first of my questions.
The real story: in 629 the monk Xuanzang traveled on alone to Tenjiku — India — to beg for the teachings of Buddhism. It is the travel tale of Xuanzang, the monk Sanzō. Sanzō, they say, is an honorific for one thoroughly versed in the three baskets of the Buddhist teachings. Since there is more than one monk Sanzō, this one is given his real name, Xuanzang. But the tale “Journey to the West” has Sun Wukong the monkey, Bajie the pig, Sha Wujing in human form, and the dragon-horse Yulong — the beginning, I should think, of the ensemble drama.
Why India
Why go to India? Because it was a journey to fetch the teachings (a journey in quest of the Dharma) — that is, a journey in search of the Buddhist scriptures. Xi’an, then one of the world’s great cities, had reached its overripe period, and false religions — ese, meaning resembling but not the same — false men of culture, and false sciences were said to be much in fashion. Xuanzang set out on his arduous journey himself in order to set the world right, and this is the core, the very heart, of the tale.
The monk Sanzō of the tale has, if anything, the flavor of a soft, bookish sort of leader; but in an age with no means of transport it was thirty thousand kilometers from Xi’an to his destination in India. On foot, they say, that comes to 1,400 or 1,500 days. Counting the round trip, it took him seventeen years. It is a journey of a length no modern person can imagine, and when you think what an injury somewhere along the way would have meant, he was more than an Olympic champion — a super iron man, and that is the real story.
To return to the tale of “Journey to the West,” it is the journey of a boisterous band of strongly individual characters, composed of 108 tales — 108 narratives. It is a tale that never bores you, whether you are reading or watching; and the 108, they say, comes from the number representing the desires that torment human beings, the bonnō or defiling passions. To be conscious of desire and able to control it is liberation in Buddhism, and it is what is meant by ascetic practice.
Hence it is also said that whoever compiled the “Journey to the West” story may well have been a Buddhist, or a teacher of Buddhists. In any case, the Mogao Caves are countless, from small ones for practice to large. Twenty-four hours a day of nothing but practice would stifle anyone; one can imagine that the tale of the monk Sanzō was told now and then, refreshing the imagining mind.
In all 108 tales the opponents they fight are yōkai or apparitions, which had no life as living creatures in the first place, so in truth they are symbolizations of the travelers’ own defiling passions — what they are doing, I think, is continuing the journey of the 108 together with those passions. When the opponent is beyond the powers of the party itself, there are several scenes in which Guanyin suddenly steps in as judge. This Guanyin must be playing the role of mentor and adviser, or of counselor.
Incidentally, in America, said to have more counselors than anywhere in the world, one hears that one person in ten is engaged in this profession; when I asked Mr. AI whether that was true, it came to 400 million divided by 793,500 — about one in fifty. Which is still not a small number. Up to here I have been writing about the motivation that “Journey to the West” carries within it.
Carl Jung, on the other hand, famous for dream analysis, held — as I understand it — that the stories we draw are a model of human consciousness: he likened the narrative we so often see in dreams to the story of Perseus in Greek myth and gathered it into a growth story running from the setting out, through encounters with various characters, through experience and the meeting with a mentor (a wise man, an adviser), to victory in the battle with the final evil (the defiling passions?) — the establishment of the ego — and on to being blessed with a marriage partner and joined to her.
Mr. Joseph Campbell of mythology stands on a very similar theory; and Mr. Hayao Kawai, the foremost figure in Japanese psychology, likewise takes Susanoo of Japanese myth as a trickster (a clown, or a destroyer) and writes as though, by slaying Yamata-no-Orochi and marrying Kushinadahime, he accomplished the establishment of the self — and yet Perseus of the myth and Susanoo both marry any number of times afterward, their outrageous lives go on, and they trace a path to a wretched end.
Where is the establishment of the self in that? It seems to me that the Jungian professors choose out only the parts convenient to their own logic. That theory of story — modern education being what has carried down to the present day from the training of great numbers of skilled laborers and of soldiers for colonial rule in the industrial-revolution Europe of the eighteenth century — is, I think, a theory that closely resembles those same guidelines.
That is, the ideal of modern education for the cultivation of salarymen and operators of a uniform level, and Jung’s theory of story, seem to me to be splendidly in tune with each other.
Setting out — experience — education — marriage — growth — employment, or the battlefield
If that is the flowchart, then no thank you very much — that is what I want to say.
Rather than such a linear model, I would like to picture a flowchart on a three-dimensional model, like a molecular model or a chemical structural formula, in which molecules with many hands join hands with ever more molecules. In the age of AI, is it not the reality that this guideline itself, though we understand it does not fit the present situation, is very hard to change? The nineteenth-century architect François Lyotard was the man who wrote that modern architecture does not make human beings happy, and who advocated the de-modernizing of architecture — postmodernism.
And it was the German architect Bruno Taut who wrote that he had found that postmodern in Japan. The postmodern in story, I believe, lay hidden in “Journey to the West.”
Nowadays growth and the establishment of the self are spoken of in stories all the time — so why is it that we do not see them in “Journey to the West”? People will say that “Journey to the West” is not myth because a religious man wrote it; but on the point of being a tale transmitted by word of mouth it is the same as Greek myth, and explaining the difference between gods and Buddhas would not be simple. In this “Journey to the West,” not one of them marries and not one of them grows.
Mr. Nishizaki was an American-type producer who stood on his own two feet, and I rated him highly. The box office of the first Yamato film was 2.1 billion yen; the second 4.3 billion; the third 2.5 billion; the fourth 1.7 billion. A proposal bought for one million yen swelled into ten billion. Nishizaki was a great success who had grown greatly. It was only natural that he collected foreign cars and ocean-going boats — but over the use of a peculiar sort of nose powder he fell to the inside of the prison walls, and when at last he got outside the walls again and boarded the boat that was his hobby, this time he fell off the boat and was gone.
Were the late years of his life, after the establishment of his self, happy ones? May he rest in peace…
In the present day, I think, the more people are told about growth and the establishment of the self, the more solitude they end up carrying. What is so wrong with a story’s characters not growing? I almost want to ask. Grow all you like and there is still no means of stopping this warming; is the shape of war, which looks to have returned to the eighteenth century, growth? It makes one think that human beings regress as well.
Ensemble and Sanzō
“Journey to the West” is an ensemble drama; all four of the characters are highly individual, clashes between them are not few, and you could not call them close — yet once something happens they unite, and they show the aspect of a family. There are times when we feel empathy at the sight of them not shrinking even from self-sacrifice for the family. This structure is projected in strong colors onto “Dragon Ball” and “One Piece” as well, and that, I think, is why they ukeru — why they catch on.
The History of Sun Wukong
Sun Wukong, the big-brother figure who accompanies the monk Sanzō, is first of all a monkey. There was a theory that the model for that monkey was the jinsihou, the golden snub-nosed monkey that lives around Sichuan Province. But in the whole of Chinese history there is no instance to be found of a monkey entering into reading matter or into shows apart from “Journey to the West” — in antiquity, zero. Then where did that model come from, where did it begin? Nowhere is to be found but India.
India has a famous monkey called the Hanuman monkey, and moreover the Hanuman monkey is treated with care as a messenger of the god even today, especially where there are Hindu temples. Toei Doga’s first film was “Hakujaden” (The Tale of the White Serpent); the second was “The Boy Sarutobi Sasuke” — saru, monkey; and the third was “Saiyuki,” from Master Tezuka’s work. Every one of them was material with a strong ethnic coloring. I had a question about who had planned these, and I once looked into it.
For the White Serpent it seems to have been Mr. Koichi Akagawa, and I have also learned that the planner of “Saiyuki” was, likewise a returnee from China, Mr. Goro Kondaibo. For it was the custom on the floor that the person who actually moved the work forward and the official data differ from each other — and since as Master Tezuka’s assistant I attended “Saiyuki” from beginning to end, I knew it well.
Mr. Kondaibo used to say that from now on we must throw out our chests and put forward an Asian color, and the Asian color did indeed continue through Toei Doga’s fourth film. “I see,” said I. He also spoke of engaging Master Tezuka for the third film and hoping for something different from the first two — the Disney-like shading that was the master’s own particular flavor.
The sales department, together with an agency that had dealings with America, sold aggressively in America, but I also heard that the valuation, in business terms, came in lower than they had hoped. One of the big reasons for that, they said, was that the protagonist was a monkey. “Monkeys are no good in America.” More than once I heard it said that, for whatever reason, monkeys do not sell. True, outside Japan, China, and India you could not say that monkey characters are nonexistent — but I had never seen a monkey as the protagonist.
The Monkey Darwin Disliked
My own reading is that the conceivable reason monkeys do not sell lay in Darwin’s theory of evolution. Here is why. When Darwin’s theory of evolution (1859) was published, was it not thoroughly beaten down? What do you mean, monkeys and men have the same roots, you fool — the last flourish is superfluous, but go back to Adam and Eve and man was made by God in the likeness of His own form; man was God’s creation.
And so to say that he shares roots with a monkey is nonsense — whether or not those were the words, I know that criticism was showered upon him. That being so, there are said to be a considerable number of the faithful even today who cannot let go of their belief, not even in the face of heliocentrism. A monkey that would think it shares roots with human beings is an outrageous scoundrel too — and the one who takes that unreasonable splash-back must be the monkey sapiens. In Disney animation I have seen a monkey character exactly once. “Toy Story 3” — the tale in which toys do the acting.
The character who appears as Susie, the watchman and faithful subordinate of Lotso, the pink bear who rules the toy room, was a monkey. The character who, on detecting anything out of order, bangs the cymbals in both hands like mad, a character as if schizophrenic — that was a monkey. For some reason, monkeys are given no good roles. So let us look at the situation in India, the other country where monkey characters are accepted. Go to a Hindu temple in India and you find it is the paradise of the Hanuman monkey.
The Hanuman monkey is the sworn friend of the hero of India’s ancient epic the “Ramayana,” and also the character who in the final battle leads an army of monkeys against Ravana (rakshasa) and carries them to victory; and if you probe the older roots he appears to be a reincarnation of the god Hanuman — in ancient times he was a god.
Translate Ravana, the villain of the “Ramayana,” into Chinese characters and you get 羅刹, rakshasa. Haven’t I seen that somewhere? The title of the first Chinese animated feature is “Princess Iron Fan,” is it not. And the name of that Princess Iron Fan is Princess Rakshasa. The princess who holds the fan that can put out the fires of the Mountain of Flames was Princess Rakshasa. Gongzhu, “princess,” is an honorific for an emperor’s consort or a daughter of the emperor.
And if in China the one who fights that Princess Rakshasa is a monkey named Sun Wukong, then where the monkey Sun Wukong came from is easy enough to imagine. As characteristics of the Hanuman monkey in the myth:
- ① Flying about the great sky
- ② Being able to change his own body large or small at will
- ③ Creating duplicates of himself
— are these not the same as the characteristics of Sun Wukong?
Since when I do not know, but relations with India, which borders China, are said not to sit well, and so China does not say much about the roots of Sun Wukong; yet as India is a country where even the ancient monk Sanzō went to study, I do wish the two would get on good terms and have their exchanges. But it is the same for Japan: did not Kōbō Daishi, and Saichō, and Myōan Eisai all go to China to study? I know I will be told, “Before you talk about other countries, what about your own?”
What are you going to do, Japan — you’re hopeless (said firmly).
The Red Thread Between Yamato and Gundam
The talk strays a little again, but here is one more episode about Hirata, Nishizaki’s sworn friend. One time he muttered, “The idea for Gundam was mine too, you know~” “Oh, come off it,” said I. Hirata’s story goes like this. Sunrise, the company that produced Gundam, was formed after Mushi Pro’s bankruptcy around production staff from Mushi Pro: Yoshinori Kishimoto (known as Kicchan), Masanori Ito (Ito-chan), Eiji Yamaura (Yamaura-san), and Yasuo Shibue (Shibu-yan).
Yamaura-san came out of Toei Doga’s camera department; Ito-chan was a mid-career transfer from Fuji Television; the president Kicchan and Shibu-yan were raised at Mushi Pro — all of them production men, so the company started out with painting and camera work as its main business. Then one day, they say, an offer came flying in from Nagoya Television, which wanted a program on an anime proposal. Being a regional station, its budget was only about half that of a key station, but the president Kicchan was game enough for anything.
At some point Kicchan is said to have consulted Hirata, who was riding the wave of Yamato’s success, about this. He proposed: “You put a battleship up into space and it worked, so how about flying a tank into space this time~” (a joining of unlike things). Kicchan said, “Now that’s good,” and what emerged as things moved on from there was the beginning of the Gundam concept — so the story goes. I asked other staff whether this story was true, but no one knew, and there was one man who said, “No way, that’s a lie.”
Kicchan died young, so there is no way to confirm it; and while Hirata was an interesting man who came out with wild ideas, he was also very much a man who spread his wrapping cloth wide, so I remain half in doubt — still, if it is true it is an interesting story, and ideas are probably born, unexpectedly, out of just such things.
Gundam’s broadcast began from Nagoya Television, but the ratings were sluggish from the start — as I recall, around 5 percent, much as with Yamato — and around the eighth episode it must have been hit with an order to cut the run short.
(Sluggish ratings), and (cancellation or shortening of the broadcast), and (a huge hit) — these are a distinctive common feature.
In this you can read the difference between popular content already known through existing media (magazines and the like) being made into anime, and a television original. Here, no doubt, is where the reluctance of today’s television to do originals comes from.