The Loot Report: Production I.G.'s Need Kajima Ads

By Jonah Morgan

Flipping through the pages of The 19th Tokyo International Film Festival official program book, on page 11, I happened across an interesting full page advertisement containing the accompanying image of a futuristic cityscape and the words "Need Kajima". I saw the same image plastered around Roppongi in late October, 2006. My first thought is this looked like a colored stoyboard still from some Ghost In The Shell animation. And it turned out my cursory thought was not far from the truth. Scanning the page for more information, in the lower lefthand corner are an art credit to Shuichi Hirata (Art Director for GITS: Innocence) of Production I.G. Inc. Now that was surprising...... and to the lower right of the page was the logo of the construction company Kajima Corporation. Among other things, Kajima is credited with building the Suez Canal Bridge in Egypt and most of the skyscrapers in the newly renovated Shiodome district of Tokyo. Doing some digging, I found out the underpinning of this union.

Kajima needed some powerful and impressive imagery for its new promotional campaign, "Need Kajima" and actively sought out Hirata, based on his work in Innocence which included conceiving those wild futuristic cityscape fly overs. What they wanted to conceptualize was a city of the near future combining both a high-end metropolis coexisting mutually with the natural environment around it. The slogan was coined with the desire to show people that they needed the company to build the brick and mortar infrastructure of future cities with people and the Earth in mind. The company ran the ads in various media such as magazines and newspapers, signboards around the Roppongi Hills Mori Tower (which they also designed and built), the Tokyo Metro Akasaka-Mitsuke Station underpass, and Keisei-Ueno Station.