Feature: A Room With A View On Anime History
By Jonah Morgan
For my stay in Japan during the Tokyo International Film Festival this time around I was the honored guest of Mr. Nobuyuki Takahashi and his company Studio Hard. The media production company has created a variety of contents related to anime since first being incorporated in 1981. These include written articles that have gone into top Japanese magazines, and on the internet. Takahashi-san is an alumni of the prestigious Waseda University and was very active in anime and manga activities during his time there. Even today, he maintains close ties with the school's various otaku hobby circles. Imagine a cross between a real life Genshiken and Otaku no Video. Along those lines, many of the members of Waseda University's hobby circles have gone on to become professionals in the anime and manga business. Coincidently, Takahashi decided to start his company in Waseda.
Walk up and down the main drag (Waseda Dori) and take a look at the signage, you'd think Studio Hard owned a good portion of the real estate in the area! 5 minutes walk from the Tozai Line Tokyo Metro Subway station, my living quarters happened to be an apartment converted into a high tech otaku office space filled with internetworked computer terminals, marker boards with scribblings of upcoming projects, an Audio / Video setup for reviewing films, racks filled with entire runs of anime magazines, LP Records, DVD's Laserdiscs and VHS videotapes. There were also boxes of figures, a Pachinko game and a vintage copy of an old British fantasy RPG magazine.
Codenamed "New Media Station X-1", the setup and layout greatly reminded me of my own office I use for ANS in America. I was graciously given free reign to review any of the material contained here although my schedule kept me out of the room an average of 18 hours out of any given day.
Having my first look around among the mix of American and Japanese films, I did particularly notice a pristine condition original laserdisc copy of Studio Gainax's first animated film "The Wings Of The Honneamise: The Royal Space Force". The DVD release and even original 1987 soundtrack on LP record were here as well.
I would later learn this very office has a very special connection with Wings Of The Honneamise that stretched back to the original conception phase 20 years ago. The debut film produced by anime fans themselves would mark their big push onto the professional stage and would eventually lead to worldwide notoriety through their creations such as Neon Genesis Evangelion. Takahashi-san was one of the founding members of Gainax and was the chief promoter on Honneamise. As it turns out, Gainax used the very office I was staying in to sign and drawn up contracts and official paperwork related to Honneamise's promotion.
While many Americans I met at the film festival boasted of their booked rooms at Tokyo's Park Hyatt and it's use in the Sophia Coppola / Bill Murry film Lost In Translation, as an anime fan I was just as proud (if not more so) to have stayed in a space with deep connections to a true classic example of Japanese animation film.
