――Please tell us about your current job, job title, and the form and main responsibilities of your work.
Currently, I work as a producer in the IP Strategy Office in the Sales Planning Division at Toei Animation Co. I started as a part-time worker, then became a contracted worker, and then a full-time company employee, and after serving as the general manager of the TV planning department, I became a planning and development supervisor and left my position as a full-time company employee when I reached retirement age. Currently, I have already re-contracted at Toei Animation under an outsourcing contract. I am now working as a producer for our company’s IPs on an outsourced basis.
――What kind of IPs are you mainly working on?
Last year was the 25th anniversary of Ojamajo Doremi, an animation series we created twenty-five years ago, and there has been a lot of excitement around the anniversary. We are doing this with the hope that we can steadily build up to our 30th anniversary and create a second generation of fans. Another series is Digimon Adventure (Digimon). This series is run by a group of young producers, and I am also working on this series as an observer and advisor, helping with planning and supervising tasks. In addition to that, our company is in charge of a lot of shōjo (girls’) series, so for works that I was involved with in the past, I contribute something every time the anniversary is celebrated, including handling communications with the original creator of the series.
――How did you get involved in the animation industry? Also, do you have any favorite anime series from your childhood or any formative experiences around animation that you would like to share?
First of all, in regards to how I first got interested in the industry, I have wanted to work in the film industry since I was a child, probably in the fifth grade of elementary school. I watched lots of different movies and, although I was familiar with movies and theater, my first experience directly with the industry was in college. When I was a student at Waseda University’s School of Letters, Arts, and Sciences, we had a film club called the Scenario Study Group where we made independent films. There were a very large number of alumni from the university who were in the industry, and I was asked to write a proposal for a TV program, so I wrote a proposal for a live-action program that was actually for the series called Sukeban Deka produced by the Toei Group. Furthermore, in the end, I was asked to join Toei Animation, which at that time was called Toei Dōga, and they were looking for a female producer. They wanted someone who could write not only a proposal but also a simple sample story scenario, if possible, and I was recommended and succeeded in sneaking my way into the company.
――You have been interested in film since you were a child! What films or plays left a lasting impression on you as a child?
First of all, in terms of live-action films, there is a very old movie with James Dean called East of Eden directed by Elia Kazan. It is in black and white. I happened to be watching this movie with my mother on some kind of TV program like the Yōga Gekijō (Western Movie Theater), and my mother was the kind of person who would turn all the lights off in the living room to make it pitch-black and turn it into a movie theater, and while watching the movie my mother cried. I was in around the fifth grade and it was the first time that I had ever seen my mother cry in my life. This is the first memory I have of my mother crying, so it left a strong impression on me. At the time, I didn’t understand why she was crying, but when I was in high school, I realized that my mother saw herself in James Dean while she watched the movie. In the case of my grandparents, from my point of view, my grandfather was my real grandfather, but my grandmother was actually not related to me by blood because she was my grandfather’s second wife. The movie East of Eden also depicts a feud between siblings and the relationship between parents and their sons. So she probably saw herself in that aspect of the movie while watching, and I think that is why she cried at the last scene of the film when the son and the father come to an understanding of one another. I realized that this movie was very much etched in the mother’s mind when she was young and in her teens. I think that was most likely the beginning of my interest in film, and from there I began to watch very old French films and then also old Japanese films. In regards to animation, since I am in the first generation that grew up watching animation on television from childhood, I remember sleeping with a pillowcase of Wolf Boy Ken and crying a lot while watching Astro Boy when Atom flew toward the sun at the end of the series. I also have strong memories of Sally the Witch and Himitsu no Akko-chan, and I remember thinking how stylish and interesting Sally the Witch was while I watched it. I also liked the music. I was thinking about if I wanted to continue to watching Himitsu no Akko-chan, in part for the music as a child, but Akko-chan in Himitsu no Akko-chan had an oval face, also called an “Urizane face,” instead of a round face, which was the standard for beauty in those days.. I think I didn’t care much for that, and I think the episode director was also influenced by Shingeki (Western-style theater developed in early 20th century Japan), so when the girl cries, she cries on her mother’s lap who comforts her, which I didn’t like very much either, but I always listened to the song. The ending song was very nonsensical and humorous, so even now I still remember the opening and ending songs clearly.
――The ending song is “Suki suki song,” right?
Yes, that one, that one. “Suki suki Akko-chaaan,” right? That one was so fun. Although I don’t like the way the performance is depicted in the show, I clearly remember the relationships between the characters and the differences in their designs and personalities, so I think this was a series that taught me how to create characters. In the case of Sally the Witch, both the original manga and the anime surprisingly had many moments that dealt with social issues of the time. To put it simply, stories about children in the school who had no mothers, or stories about rich girls in school and girls who came from very poor homes, etc., were actively produced at that time. I grew up watching that kind of thing, so the memory of it is definitely still somewhere in my head. Even when I was making Doremi and Digimon, I think these stories from my childhood that dealt with social issues became a reference for how to create characters with a sense of diversity in life experience, such as divorced families, and I wouldn’t say that these shows went as far as depicting characters that represent economic disparity, but there are children from rich families and there are also girls being raised by single fathers.
――Definitely in Doremi, the circumstances of the various families and the relationships between the children are depicted in great detail, so the source of inspiration for those depictions was Akko-chan and Sally-chan?
That’s right. Akko-chan and Sally-chan were the source. There is no doubt about it.
――Next, please tell us about your career path after you started working. I understand that you were hired as a female producer.
As I mentioned earlier, I was 25 years old when I joined this company. At that time, not only our company, but most companies did not hire women who had graduated from a four-year university. This was true for TV stations, movie studios, and so on. I think that the Equal Employment Opportunity Law (1985) probably opened the door for those who graduated from college four or five years later than I did, but that was not the case at that time when I applied, so the only way to get in was to use whatever connections I could find. So, my first position in the company was as a part-time worker.
When I was working part-time, I worked as a clerk in the planning department, writing proposals, or “dummy proposals,” if you will, for senior producers to take to TV stations. Even if the producer recommended a film called “A,” which was the proposal that we actually wanted to produce, we couldn’t just bring one proposal, so we had to prepare several dummy proposals called “B” or “C,” which were a little inferior to the original, but not too inferior. I was exclusively engaged in this kind of work. But when you are doing that kind of work, you naturally feel a sense of emptiness, right?
――Because you were writing something that people said was no good?
But, you see, I would say that by creating those kinds of things, you can hone your skills. A person who is good at golf or a person who is good at mahjong can play golf or mahjong just as an entertainer, can’t they? In other words, they lose on purpose. When a good golfer plays golf with an important person who needs to be entertained, they say, “Nice par,” while making a bogey themselves. That’s the kind of thing I would do in a dummy proposal. So, I think that was the time when I learned lots of things in terms of marketability. The next steps in my career were to become a contracted employee and then an assistant producer. I was fortunate enough to become an assistant producer about two and a half years after joining the company, which was a step up in terms of employment. Even so, it was still a time when our company did not hire full-time female employees.
――All the other people around you were men?
All men. There was one female senior staff member, but she said she didn’t like wining and dining the old men in our company, so she moved to Toei Video, which was a part of the same company group but didn’t do that kind of thing.
――You mentioned that Toei Dōga was looking for a female producer, but in what sense did they mean that they were looking for a woman?
It was because we were a company that produced not only action entertainment for boys but also works that were in the girls’ (shōjo) genre and in the family genre. At that time, our company did not even hire mid-career employees, but women who had graduated from four-year universities gradually began to take positions at advertising agencies and other places, and women who had graduated from four-year universities were hired even at Bandai, the toy manufacturer that sponsors our company. When I went to meetings with the male producers, who were usually old men, they were told sarcastically something like, “An old man wouldn’t understand, would he?” It’s a bit harsh, especially coming from the sponsors. It’s harsh coming from men, too. So, around that time, women who were willing to say small, nice things appeared in the world in small doses. I think it was because of this that I had a chance to be a part of this era.
――Wow. So, there were some changes in Toei’s main partnerships with other industries, such as sponsors and advertising agencies.
That’s right. So, although my own company itself is old, as the companies around us implement various new personnel changes, the old company itself changes little by little as its business partners and partnerships change, as is the case with any company. So, even if one company would not be able to make these changes on its own, I think it was a time when the number of women in a company had to increase little by little in order to maintain the balance of power with surrounding companies.
――What was your job like when you were an assistant producer?
For example, one of the proposals I wrote myself that became a program was a manga, Lady Lady!!, that was serialized in Akita Shoten for thirty-five or forty years, probably more than thirty-five years ago, (Note 1), which was the first show that became a broadcasted television series based on a proposal I wrote and for which I became an assistant producer. On that production, my name appeared as Hiromi Seki in a size six font under the male producer’s name, which was written in a size ten font.
(Note 1. The anime series, Lady Lady!! (1987-88) was based on Yōko Hanabusa’s manga, Lady!! (Serialized in Akita Shoten’s Hitomi Comics from 1986).)
This is a bit of a story about company internals, but the producer I was working with at the time actually wanted to work on other productions. As usual, I wrote the proposal for Lady Lady!! as a dummy proposal, but I thought it could be a quite interesting show, so I added a catchphrase like “It’s the second Candy Candy,” which caught the eye of the sponsors. There was a process by which my project had been selected by the sponsors. So I was bullied a ton by the male producer because, to be honest, the show wasn’t interesting. So I thought there was a hint of meanness hidden in the way they went out of their way to make my name in the opening credits in a smaller font and put it under the other producer’s name. I feel like it would be better to have the titles in the ending credits written in the same way as the other people’s names rather than doing that, but this type is the most common type of person in the world of creators, and I think it’s just a shocking case of the depth to men’s jealousy. I think that most women have been dragged down by jealous men and have retired or have had their career paths ruined by them. In this day and age, you could file a lawsuit for sexual harassment, but back then, people didn’t even know that such a term existed.
――So, it was an environment where you had to just be daring and put up with them?
I’m not the type who likes to just put up with things that much, so if I were to have to label myself, I’d say I’m more of the type who tries to find something interesting in it all. For example, when I observe men who do such disgusting things, I am able to see many different parts of him. Even if he seems to be a man with a big air of dignity, there are times when he waits patiently while the light changes from red to green when he crosses the pedestrian crossing. If you look at his face as he waits for the light to change from the other side of the pedestrian crossing, you can see that he looks like an idiot. After looking for moments like these, although he seems like an important man, I start to see how he is actually completely beholden to his wife, receiving an allowance from her to support his salaryman lifestyle. Both Toei’s headquarters and Toei Animation had a benevolent system for men in this kind of financial situation, and they changed the way they transferred money between seasonal bonuses and lump-sum payments for them. In other words, if all the money was transferred to the bank, the wife would be in control of that money. That means it would result in a dynamic where the husband would need to receive an allowance from the wife and lose financial independence, wouldn’t it? In order to prevent this dynamic, a lump sum of money, separate from the seasonal bonus, would be transferred to his personal account, which is a system that would make most salarymen cry tears of joy if they heard about it. The money would be directly deposited into your personal account. Everyone had a separate personal account. It was an account separate from the payroll account.
――So, it was a system where the company gave you an allowance directly?
Yes, it’s interesting, isn’t it? So, at Toei, if you married someone who also worked at our company, your wife would know about the system, so it would probably be harder to work around.
――Is the system only for men? Are women not able to get a lump sum even if they are doing the same job?
Women also get a lump sum. For women, it’s usually a system where the seasonal bonus and a lump-sum payment are just *ping* deposited straight into their account. For men, a lump-sum payment separate from the seasonal bonus is transferred to a separate account. This system is really gone now, but we used to have this kind of benevolent system for the men in our company.
――The company even took care of the transfer fee.
That’s right. That is the way it was. So, in the case of male employees at Toei, although they look very important, in essence, they are all people whose wives are holding their wallets. So I realized that without such a kind system, men could not spend money freely, so I thought, “All these people are actually completely beholden to their wives,” and it was fun to observe that.
――That’s profound.
It is profound (laughs). It was a time when I honed my ability to observe people.
――You went from being an assistant producer to a producer, but at what point did you become a full-time in-house employee?
Actually, I was still a contracted employee when I became a producer from the second half of the second season of Ghost Sweeper Mikami: The Great Paradise Battle!!, which I had started on as an assistant producer. I was still a contracted employee when I launched the next project, Marmalade Boy, but it was a hit. The success of Marmalade Boy was due to its success in merchandising and the fact that it was supposed to be a one-year show, but they decided to extend it to one and a half years. I was so highly praised for my work on Marmalade Boy that I became the first full-time female employee hired by our company in twenty-seven years, I believe.
――So you are saying that twenty-seven years prior to that, there had been a full-time in-house female employee?
Yes, there was. To put it simply, Toei Dōga is the oldest animation studio in Japan, and in the beginning, there were quite a few women among staff in the hand-drawn in-between animation, clean-up, and art departments. However, there was a labor-management dispute in–I believe–1972, and there was a commotion in which the studio laid off a large number of employees. Around that time is when Isao Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki, who were members of the union, left our studio. Therefore, after the dispute between the workers and management, we did not hire any full-time in-house employees for a while. We did not hire any men or women. So we began to hire freelance workers on a subcontracted basis or for a contracted project. That is why I was also a contracted employee. I had heard that it was the first time in twenty-seven years that our company had hired a full-time in-house employee.
――But you were the first female producer to be hired as a full-time in-house employee, right?
That’s right.
――That’s incredible! As you mentioned earlier that you experienced some discrimination as a woman in the workplace, have you experienced any other instances of discrimination in your various roles at Toei?
What was a little frustrating was that there was a producer who was about four years younger than me, a man named Iriya Azuma, who worked on Sailor Moon. He was four years younger than me, so he naturally had less work experience than me, but he became a producer six months before I did. At that time, we were both working under the same boss, and since he was a contracted employee and I was also a contracted employee, I complained over drinks with my boss, saying, “Why haven’t I gotten hired as a full-time company employee yet when he has?” And then, my boss at the time said without hesitation, “Because you are a woman.” But, you see, maybe my boss was trying not to discourage me, or perhaps he was just being kind, or maybe he thought that since I was so strong-willed, he should say something like that to make me work harder, so then he said, “Basically everyone agrees that you are a better worker than him.” That’s all he said. I was told, “But, because you are a woman, we have to make a man a producer first. Otherwise, if we made you a producer first, his spirit will be crushed because pride is everything to any man. But you are tough, so even if we make you wait six months or a year, you won’t be put down by that.” And I responded, “Makes sense.” You see, I thought that the company system was similar to the school system and its way of thinking about things. You know how they use a letter grade scale of A, B, C, D, and F on a report card? The percentages of how many students can receive each letter grade on the scale are generally fixed, right? So, only about five percent of the students in a class can receive a grade of an A or an F. What happens when all the F students are gone from the class? Well, the D students just become F’s, right? So, you see, this is just the same reasoning or logic as what a school teacher thinks when they assign grades on a report card. A child will start to perform even worse if their needs are ignored by the teacher because they are an F student, so if you take a kid who was an F student and bring them to a B or an A, when their grades go up, relatively speaking, the kid who was a D student will then just become the F student. I said to my boss that it makes sense that they promoted Azuma first. I think it was a really good learning experience for me to realize how, not only in the animation industry, but also in the Japanese social system overall during that time, work evaluations were thought about this way across all facets of society.
――That’s a very kind consideration for the struggles of men, but…
I don’t mean to say that it is kind; I mean to say that it is a system. It is a social mechanism. I’m not saying that I approve of it. I’m not saying that I approve of it, but there are people who have worked hard for more than a hundred years since the Meiji era to create that system. So, if you want to destroy that system and build a new one, you have to be willing to work hard for a hundred years as well. Therefore, I am of the opinion that the world will never change in five or ten years, and that the only time things change in a short period of time is when there is a war or a revolution. However, I think that if we were able to make about three steps forward for women’s rights during my lifetime, my generation should be okay with that. The next generation must be born to carry on our work, and I don’t think the world will change unless people who are able to continue to make change are born.
――But, I am sure that the younger generation will definitely see you as a role model for all of your hard work to make a name for yourself as a woman in an industry dominated by men. In fact, the number of female producers is increasing.
They are increasing so much. But I think everyone is looking for a role model a cut above me. After all, I am married, but I don’t have children. But these days, young women are usually married and working while having children. I think it is necessary for those who have made it to that point to become department heads or executives. In short, my existence is more like that of a defect, and I dare to call myself a defect, but it would not be right if someone got married, had children, and continued to work, and then didn’t even become a department head or an executive.
So, you see, the number of those kinds of women is gradually increasing, and looking at the entire Toei Group, I am said to be the first woman to become a department head, but starting this April, our company will have another female department head. She is in the legal field, but she has two children.
――That is progress!
It is progress. I think it is amazing progress. I think that only when this kind of thing happens can we have a society with gender equality.
――Thank you very much. Lastly, do you have a message for young women who want to work in the animation industry?
The animation industry used to be known for its bad working conditions and low pay, and it was a very hard job (in Japanese, 4K). However, nowadays, many studios are starting to have better and better working conditions, and our company, as one of the first companies to improve its working conditions, must lead the efforts to improve the industry’s conditions. So, that is why we are implementing very thorough reforms in the way we work. Even so, periods of concentrated busyness still come only when we’re in the final stages of completing a series. So, you see, if you were to compare the animation industry to other corporations, it’s not that the animation industry is getting better, but rather, considering that the number of corporations with even worse working conditions are increasing, it is important to look at your position within your company and that of other companies from the sky, like a drone. Then, you can see that your company is not the only one with certain problems, or see the parts of it that are better than that at other companies, and accurately grasp your company’s standing and positioning. For example, young people are increasingly changing jobs nowadays, and if you look at these changes in the workforce from the perspective of a camera–from a wide-angle view or from a sideways pan–you can see these things. Or if you look in the camera from an overhead view, I think you can see all sorts of things, so although I think it’s not a particularly great industry, it’s not as bad as it used to be either, so despite the hardships that come with doing what you love as a career, only those who love it will survive in the industry.