――To begin, could you please share with us the overall male to female ratio of your company’s employees, and also the ratio of male to female employees by job category?
In terms of the ratio of male to female, I would say that there are about four men for every five women. We have a rather strange sorting system for the division of labor in our studio, so I am not sure how to put it, but one hundred percent of the clerical positions, such as general affairs, accounting, human resources, systems, and web production, are occupied by women. Manga production is also one-hundred percent female. Animation production is fifty-fifty male and female.
――In the case of the animation production division, do you feel that this ratio in various roles, such as, for example, that of the episode director, changes with the production of each series?
The reason I mentioned that our company is weird is that we have career advancement positions for staff who came in through the positions in animation to transfer into a variety of other positions in the production process, including scriptwriting, storyboarding, episode directing, character, setting, and prop design, overall design, animation, clean-up, art direction, CG, photography, and editing. And recently we have started to branch out into offering advancement positions in sound direction as well. This gives anyone who raises their hand a chance to try another position out. If you don’t have the basic skills or intuitive understanding of a certain area, it’s easy to feel like helping out with other departments is just practice. However, as a company that believes that it is better to have jobs with a wide scope of responsibilities, it is commonplace for staff who have completed their assigned parts of the animation process to go around to help out the clean-up or the photography departments. After helping out other departments for two hours, they go back to their work animating. We also do not have a production manager, which is usually referred to as a scheduler or a departmental liaison. We ask each staff member to handle these tasks on their own. In terms of the heads of each department, a male director is in charge of scriptwriting, episode direction, animation, and training, and a female director is in charge of design and animation quality. A woman oversees the clean-up department, a woman oversees the art department, a man oversees the CG department, a man oversees the photography department, and a woman oversees the editing department. Although the person in charge of this department has been decided, the person in charge of clean-up sometimes takes charge of animation, and the person in charge of CG also takes part in the development of photography and processing. Since everyone is working in this mixed-up way, there is not a set percentage of male to female ratios for any of the positions.
――Really! In the case of this arrangement where someone says that they’re going to help out with another department, does someone in charge oversee and manage the process by telling staff which departments to go to, or it is one where the staff in question says which department they want to go to?
Since we work in a way where everyone knows what work needs to be done on a given day, people are aware of which departments need help. For example, if the person in charge of clean-up shouts, “I’m in a bit of a pinch with clean-up today,” someone may say, “Well, I’ll help you,” or if someone says, “I don’t have any tasks for my main work responsibilities today,” they may say to another department, “I’m free today, is there anything I can do to help?” However, when they first join the company, we have them start with training for in-between animation. When the training for in-betweens is over and they begin actual production work, they are given clean-up training at the same time, and when they have finished drawing their portion of actual in-between production material, they are given compositing training as well. In this way, in an eight-hour workday, six hours are spent on their main work, and one to two hours are allocated for training on related tasks using actual production materials. We encourage everyone to increase the number of tasks they have the skills to take on and for everyone to get together to help each other out when departments become busy with work.
――The fact that the staff can multitask and do many different things makes everyone into all-rounders, right?
Yes, I would say so. It takes time to develop staff to become specialists, but I believe it is easier to develop them into generalists and then find the field that is right for them.
――When you say that your studio is “weird,” do you mean that there are only a few studios that conduct their operations like this?
Yes. Maybe it’s just the other studios I know, but I think that animation production is usually based on the division of labor. Our production volume is low. Since we don’t specialize in the division of labor, there is a wide range of skills to learn. It takes time to learn a certain technique, so it is difficult for us as a company to establish a system that enables mass production.
However, it has been possible to make animated films on your own for more than twenty years, and, in such an age, it is strange to me that people who want to make animation join a production company. So, at this point, I think the solution to this problem in the present moment is that it would be nice if making animation together itself became a value.
When we started the company, I often said to our staff, “Let’s at least try out the work of the people in the next step of the production process.” I meant that if we knew what the people in the next step of the production process were doing, there would be fewer deficiencies in the materials we passed on to them. But, as we continued to expand the scope of our work, the number of departments within the company increased, and the things that were passed around between staff members and the flow of the work changed in various ways. We are certainly struggling with a lack of speed, but because each staff member is emotionally attached to the work, it is easier to notice small mistakes and to make suggestions on how to improve them. It’s a natural part of the production process, but there is no way that people in the CG department do not know people in the photography department, or people in the photography department do not know people in the animation department, and so on. No matter which part of the production process is the main focus of our work at a given moment, the studio is designed in such a way where you can go across departments to talk to the staff member in charge about any problems you’ve noticed. We are now trying to bring the entire process in-house as much as possible, and we are talking about how, even if AI emerges in the future, if everyone knows the entire process, they will be able to become managers.
――That is a great idea! Next, please tell us more specifically about yourself, Ms. Shiraishi, and your current work.
Basically, it’s general management. I’m either exploring new business startups or working in a kind of a follow-up role for each department.
――You mentioned earlier that you have a manga division, but are your new businesses in areas other than animation?
I want to increase what I can do by being adjacent to animation. I often tell people, “In the future, it will become more difficult to get a job just by saying that you make animation.” In this age where it is possible to make films on your own, and, even further, with the emergence of AI as a tool, there will no longer be a demand for people who just make animation. Since you cannot get paid for something for which there is no demand, the only thing you can do is to explore how to make sure that the animation you create will meet the demand. We have talked about such things, and although it is not clear if we are turning out well now, we are also creating original characters, including regional revitalization projects, etc.
――There are a lot of municipal initiatives these days. Some municipalities have created original animations that can only be seen in the local area.
That’s right. We can organize various events in all across Japan, even in places where local communities have not interacted with each other that much. I hope that we can create a work that will serve as a facilitator for this kind of thing.
――When studying the history of voice acting in my research on voice, I found that many companies separate the video and animation parts from the sound part, and I think it is amazing to see how they come together like magic at the end. How is sound direction and the sound department approached at your studio?
In terms of sound, if you’re making something like a short film, nowadays, the sound can honestly be done completely by a single individual at your disposal. However, when it comes to commercial animation, it is safer to have a sound production company take care of the sound, including the operation of the cast, so we generally outsource to a sound production company. However, recently we have also been able to stand in for the part of the sound director in our work. I give instructions to the voice actors during post recording, make requests for the texture of the sound during dubbing, order the music, and give instructions called an M-line on how to put the music in and out. When the animation is not working well, our staff is in charge of sending out instructions for supplements to the images, and we work together alongside a sound crew that was assembled by the sound production staff.
――Thank you. Will you be more deeply committed to this as a production?
That’s definitely the case.
――Next, please tell us how you got into the anime industry and into your current job. Were you inspired by anime as a child, or was there another reason that got you interested in the industry? What kind of work did you do before you got into this field?
In terms of my childhood, I watched a lot of animation when I was really young, but there was a period when I did not watch much TV itself. If anything, I read and drew a lot of manga. But in high school, I started watching anime again because my friends were into it.
At the time, the magazine, Animage, had a special volume on “How to make animation.” I saw it and made an animation about the constellations and mythology that was exhibited by the astronomy club at my school’s culture festival. We wrote the screenplay, had the art club draw the backgrounds, finished the celluloid film frame by frame with all of my good friends, had the kids from the photography club develop the film, and had the kids from the broadcasting club add the sound. I was also in charge of narrating the film, which would make me want to crawl into a hole out of embarrassment if I watched it now, but it was fun to make. The kids from the cooking club made cookies of the constellations, and I made a mascot character of the constellations, which the visitors to the culture festival bought as souvenirs. The money from the sales was given as a donation to the welfare facilities in the city via the school’s social welfare club.
――You were already a producer, weren’t you!
At the time, I was doing it as a culture festival exhibition with my close friends, so I had no awareness of my role as a producer at all. But it was fun.
The generation three years above me is the second-generation baby boomers, but our generation still had some cultural remnants from that generation, and it was common for students to take university entrance examinations two or three times after failing the first time. I was also a student who had failed the entrance exam the first time and was still aiming to go on to higher education, but even if you were a student trying to retake the entrance exam, you still needed money to live. I had to work several part-time jobs to make ends meet. Some people said that working that many part-time jobs was why I failed the exam. But then I came across an article in From A (Note 1) that advertised an opening for a production assistant position at Shaft. In the article, there was also information about what it was like to work on screenplays for animation, come up with production plans, and so on. I had drawn scenarios for manga and my friend’s stage productions, so I went in with a very optimistic feeling, thinking, “I might be able to do this.” Then I found out that it was some really hard physical work.
――Your first experience in the industry was a part-time job!
It was through an outsourcing company. I was working about seven part-time jobs at the time. I was bored, and once I had learned something to a certain extent, I would look for my next job elsewhere while still doing the job I was doing before it. Looking back on it now, the person who had hired me must have thought, “The gradual accumulation of skills is where we all start.” But at the time, I was thinking something like, it’s still the same volume of work, whether I’m digging deep into a single area or going wide and shallow across several fields. Because digging deep into one thing is hard, but going wide and shallow is actually easy, as long as you have an entry point and don’t do anything too awful.
Nowadays, AI like Perplexity is much more convenient, and knowledge alone is not a selling point at all anymore, but in the past, having knowledge based on actual experience was highly valued. I was aware of this, and when I started doing one thing and was entrusted with some degree of work, I would take on other work in the time I had off from that job, and I began to work more part-time jobs. That was when I found the From A part-time job, and I applied for it, wondering if it would be like being a scriptwriter.
――What was the first job that Shaft asked you to do?
It was production management. However, unlike now, at that time, the company still had several gross sub-contracting productions running wild, so I remember that the gap between times busy with work and free time was quite drastic.
I used to draw manga, and although I was not very talented, I was not opposed to drawing pictures at all. So, I thought that if I put in the effort to join an animation production company, I would like to learn the entire process to be able to create animation myself. They were happy to have more help, so as long as it didn’t interfere with my main production management work, the studio staff welcomed my practice.
――So, if someone had experience or talent, did the staff encourage them to just go ahead and give it a try? Did they entrust you with anything they wanted you to work on, asking like, “Draw a little bit of this scene,” or “Come work on some in-betweens?”
It was not like we spent a lot of time on training, but, since it was technical work, many staff members must have had a strong sense that those without skills should not touch the technical work. Compared to the studio’s situation now, they were not working on that many productions, so it was easy to keep the higher-ups on top.
However, I was hired just at the time when Shaft was shifting from a gross sub-contractor-centered company model to a total gross and prime contractor-centered model, so when I was put in charge of design production, instead of fumbling around as I learned what to do, I had no senior staff to compare my work against and had to figure it out on my own. In addition, I was able to make a list of designs necessary for making the film and search for reference materials by drawing manga and working part-time at my previous jobs. In my part-time job working backstage for a theater—which was one of the many part-time jobs I had—I also made the artwork and costumes needed for the stage, and since, in that kind of work, you work on making things while you imagine what you need from what you ultimately don’t have, I was essentially asked to do the same thing for my work in design production for animation. Also, since the work of organizing collected materials in an easy-to-read manner was also in line with what I was expected to do when I was working part-time as a newsroom researcher for a reportage writer, I think I was able to be seen as a credible asset within Shaft relatively early on. As I gained credibility, I was able to poke my nose into more and more work. As a result, I was able to take on a variety of challenges due to the skills I developed from my other work, such as telling the other staff things like, “This is not showing up on the screen, and I would like you to make the colors based on my in-betweens.”
Since the material used at the time was paper, carrying around a large amount of paper material as a part of the work of production management was quite physical labor. I used to carry around a lot of paper materials, thinking about how it was lighter compared to the small pots I used when I was working as a part-time cook. But I think the fact that there was physical labor was a big reason why there were no women in production at the time, so in that environment it was easy for me to be evaluated as hardworking while I was having fun energetically working on the more physically intensive tasks.
――So, you were the only woman in the studio? All the other staff members were men?
I was the only woman in production, but on the other hand, I think the clean-up department had like thirty women to a single man.
――Clean-up is often done by women, isn’t it?
For animation, there were probably two to three women in the team of about fifteen people working in the department at the time. In production, I was the only woman working in a team of about ten people. There were plenty of times when I was spoiled because I was a woman, like when I found a senior employee smoking outside, I would say to him, “This load is heavy,” and ask him to carry my luggage from the car to the office. But there were also many frustrating times when I was told, “Women quit after marriage anyway,” or when I was threatened by someone banging on my desk, saying, “If you weren’t a woman, I’d beat the hell out of you.”
――The things that we call harassment now were just a normal part of daily life then.
That’s right. But it wasn’t just in the animation industry; things were like that back then, and, looking back on it now, I was quite the mischief-maker to begin with. I didn’t physically hit or act out, but I did cause my bosses a lot of trouble. When I was working in a friendly team environment alongside people the same age as me or when I confronted older people on the job, I always had a strong sense that everyone was mean like that, so I would just think to myself, “This place is for jocks,” and not care too much about it. I am sure that they thought I was cocky, but I was thick-skinned, so I have made it this far without getting too hurt and that is what made it worthwhile to continue. I am still indebted to my bosses at the time for many things.
――So, would you say that you’re a little tougher because you’ve been exposed to a lot of different professions and had a lot of different experiences?
In any case, it is my nature to end up doing things in excess after I verbally commit to doing something that I want to do.
――It seems that you enjoyed your work at Shaft quite a bit.
Yes. If I didn’t enjoy it, I would have quit already, just like all of the part-time jobs I had passed through.
――Did you gradually shift your focus from working part-time to fully entering the animation industry?
No. When I came for the interview, I was told that it was difficult to work with other part-time jobs, so I quit my other part-time jobs when I was hired at Shaft. There was a turnover procedure, so I had to wait almost half a year before I could take over the job for the position that I applied to and was hired for.
When I weighed other occupations against a job in the animation industry, the reason I chose this one was that people of our generation were graduating from college. After graduating from high school at 18, two or three attempts at the college entrance examination were the norm. And then there would be another four years of college after that. So that would be seven years in total before you enter the workforce, right? The 25 year–old me who had just wasted that long period of time completely absorbed in working part-time was thinking about the future. I thought, “When everyone else starts working, I won’t have time to chat with them if I’m just absorbed in working part-time all the time.” That was all I could think about. Especially in the restaurant business, which was my main business at the time, the time when everyone else was resting was the time to earn money.
My closest friends of the same generation were my friends from school who I made the animation at the culture festival with, my friends from the theater company I worked at, and my friends that I met at Comiket (a biannual convention for doujinshi, fan-made comics) who made manga, so we used to talk about our favorite anime and video games on our days off. But as everyone got busier, it was easy to predict that our time to communicate with each other would decrease, and so the main reason I decided to enter the industry was that I thought, “Since we talk about anime, joining the anime industry would be fastest way to get a full-time job…”
So, I asked a friend of mine who had already found a job in the animation industry, and they encouraged me by saying, “I think production is the right job for you because it’s the kind of work you did at the culture festival.” I responded, “You think so?” and I jumped at the chance.
I took the job because I wanted a job where I could talk about anime, and, sure enough, I found myself talking about anime, but I was surprised because it turned out that I no longer had time to watch it.
――You were too busy.
Yes. But I liked making things in the first place, so I thought I’d continue as it seemed to suit me..
――Thank you very much for the valuable story of how you got started in the industry. Did you end up becoming a full-time employee at Shaft?
I was a subcontracted production manager, and after about a year and a half I would break down. I don’t think that this happens now anymore since this was how things were a really long time ago, but I would come in to work at 10:00am on Monday morning. Then the next time I would go home was Sunday morning.
――You mean that you were in the studio for the whole week?
That’s right. As I said, it did not feel like a hardship because, even though it was called work, it was half an extension of my hobbies. However, I was the only girl in the production department, so Shaft’s president lent me a couch in the reception room because he thought it was too much to sleep in a huddle with the other girls in the production department room, and I would usually work until the wee hours of the morning and then stay in the reception room until 10:00am when I would start work again. I would go to the public bathhouse to take a bath in time for my work outside of the office, go out for dinner with the female animation staff and chat with them, and once a week, after the delivery of the company’s work, we would have a party with all the staff to celebrate the completion of the episode, so there was not any time to go home. In fact, there were production staff who left early in the morning and came back to work in the evening, so I myself chose to live that way because I didn’t want the requests to have to stop during the day when the other staff were around. Nowadays, this kind of thing is against the law, so the company would send me home even if I said I was okay with it, but there was a certain zeitgeist at the time that viewed that lifestyle as a demonstration of effort or perseverance, and as a result, my stomach broke after about a year and a half.
It was right around the time that I had been promoted to the production desk for a series for which Shaft was to be the sole grossing contractor from Gainax. I was introducing myself to people in various fields, and I was telling them that I was quitting due to health problems, so I went to meet with Gainax to say, “I’m sorry, this is the reason why I’m leaving the company.”
――You had to quit Gainax and Shaft, both at the same time.
The series that Shaft received from Gainax as the sole grossing contractor was called Mahoromatic: Automatic Maiden, which was the first of four works that followed, including the second season of Mahoromatic, This Ugly yet Beautiful World, and He Is My Master. I was in charge of design production and producing episodes 1 and 12 of Mahoromatic. When work on the second season started, I continued to work on the design production, but it was during the transitional period when the clean-up and photography processes changed from celluloid to digital, and the production desk staff from the first season left the production when the celluloid production was completed. So, when I was told that I did not have to hold onto the number of episodes that I managed anymore and that I could take care of the new hires and handle desk duties instead, naturally I went to say hello to the people at Gainax. That is when I got sick and had to quit. I went to greet the staff at Gainax with my boss and the production staff member who was asked to take over my position as the production desk, saying, “I’m quitting because I’m ill, but this person will be my replacement, so thank you for continued work with us,” and then this happened next. When I returned to the office, I received a call from Gainax. They said, “We want to set up a production department in our company, so why don’t you come to us?” They continued, saying, “We don’t have that many things to turn in yet, so for the time being, we definitely won’t be as busy as Shaft.” Naturally, Gainax and Shaft would continue to communicate with each other, so I said, “I’ll have to ask Shaft about that, and there’s no way I’m going to go to Gainax right away when I am saying that I am quitting due to my health,” and went to get confirmation from my boss. I got an unexpected reply of “Yes!” The bottom line was that even if I quit my position as the production desk at Shaft, if I was hired by Gainax, he said that “Since this is a joint production between Gainax and Shaft, you will be the point of contact for Gainax, and you will manage the director, character design, and chief animation supervisor.” I thought to myself, “If that’s the case, I can work on the series all the way through to the end!” So, I asked him to put me up as the company liaison with Shaft, and was hired by Gainax.
――It was a win-win situation for both companies, and the transition seems to have gone very smoothly. But you were sick, so did you take some time off and then continue to take time off while you were working at Gainax? I don’t think I rested during the month of my leave of absence. I had a stomach ulcer and went to the hospital, but it didn’t get to the point where I had to have surgery, so I started going to Gainax while taking medication. However, since it was reported that I quit my previous job at Gainax due to a physical breakdown, they were very careful about my workload. DieBuster was in the works, and I started with the design production work for it. The design production itself was work that I had experience with, and besides, when I was at Shaft, it was a normal workload to manage the production of two to three series while doing design production at the same time, but there was only one design production for an OVA series in the works at Gainax. I was in charge of communications with Shaft, but it was very relaxed to the extent that I was just checking on inquiries that came in and passing them on to the staff in the studio. …However, the production desk for DieBuster left the company in the middle of production of the first episode, and I was promoted to the production desk. The person who was standing in as a production producer at the time was originally a strong PR person. His love for the works we produced and respect for the creators really humbled me, and I learned a lot from him, but there were a lot of ways in which it was difficult to make progress on our work in the studio due to him calling himself a production producer without understanding the work of production. The directors saw how I was struggling to move forward, and with the series Gurren Lagann they suggested to give me the position of the production producer, and the production department was strengthened so that we were able to produce the TV series in-house.
The director of this series, Hiroyuki Imaishi, was also a first-time director of a TV series, and Atsushi Nishikori, the character designer, was also a first-time character designer. I was also a first-time production producer, and, thankfully, many people with high technical skills were able to gather together to make this a great series. However, as I’m sure you can imagine from what I’ve said so far, I don’t make calculations for what I can do, but rather for what I want to do. I think the job of production is to keep the staff who’ve worked together on a series connected for the next series, but, apart from Gurren Lagann’s reputation as an anime series, the fact that half of the staff stayed on the project with us to the end and half of the staff left saying that they didn’t want to work in this kind of environment anymore remains a major reflection on the working conditions of production.
However, receiving the opportunity to be the production producer for Gurren Lagann became my reputation and my most major source of experience in the industry, and was one of the reasons why I did not lose any work after I left the company to start my own business. I think that, for production staff, creating good works of art is the way you make connections for the future.
――It’s a great series. Its quality is very high.
The young staff was competing with each other while making the series, which makes the work interesting, but something about the show itself is energetic overall. (Laughs.)
――How many years did you work for GAINAX before going independent?
About twelve years.
――You started your own company after that, right?
Yes.
――What catalyzed you to start up your own company? Had you always been interested in eventually starting your own company?
I didn’t think about it at all. However, when I was over 30 and wanted to have children, I took advantage of the fact that I was working on a series called Hanamaru Kindergarten, and every time I made a scene, I would show it to my husband and say, “Look, aren’t children cute?” However, my husband was a freelance staff member, not a company employee (Note 2), so if he stopped getting work, that would be the end of him. As long as he had work, he could earn more money and have more freedom than an in-house employee, but freelancing was still a severe world where if the work stopped coming in, you would assume that it was a reflection of your abilities. When he joined a company that was producing a series that he was really into and was assigned to direct it, he had to step down as the director due to a lack of success in the studio.
However, from my point of view as a member of the production staff, what can and cannot be done in the studio naturally depends on the skills of the studio, and it is a tough task for a freelance staff member to direct a production where they do not have a grasp on the skills that the studio as a whole possesses. No matter how skilled an individual director may be, animation is usually a division of labor with various people involved in varying degrees of skill and energy, and it is the combined strength of all these people that makes the finished product. Perhaps, even in our company today, I think that if a freelance director came on board to take charge without knowing the ins and outs of our studio, they would not be able to produce a proper anime series. The only way to manage it is if the director has a really high level of talent navigating the studio, and if there are no aspiring directors among the studio staff, or if the director has more outstanding charisma than any of the aspiring directors. But once you are labeled as an incompetent director, you would assume that opportunities for work would go away, right? When my desire to have a baby went away, I tried to think of something I could raise together with my husband and realized that starting a company could be an option… Which is about how our studio got started.
From the point of view of my boss at the time, he let me do what I wanted to do, was very flexible, and I seemed to be enjoying my work, right? So, it was all very sudden when I then talked to him about leaving to start my own studio. But he agreed by simply saying, “Please wait it out until we can train your replacement,” and I went independent after working only two more series at Gainax, The Mystic Archives of Dantalian and Medaka Box.
However, during the production of The Mystic Archives of Dantalian, the Imaishi Team became independent by starting a separate company. The Imaishi Team… That was just the tentative name for all of the highly skilled staff who went on to produce Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt after Gurren Lagann was finished. My boss and I, who wanted to create a series that would be able to utilize the fighting strength of the staff members who were not yet skilled enough to be the main members of the Imaishi Team, were working to develop a separate production line while Panty & Stocking was being produced, and I started to think about going independent. However, the Imaishi Team went independent first, and immediately after they became independent, they participated in the Young Animator Training Project, “Anime Mirai” (Note 3), an event that requires companies to have already been training animators in their studio for a number of years in order to participate. There is no way that a company in the first year of its independent operation would have someone in their staff who had already been trained by the studio for a number of years… In other words, they had to pull out someone from the junior staff at Gainax to participate. I can imagine what they had to say, since they were all junior staff members from my time at Gainax, and I must have taught them many things. However, Gainax had already decided on their next series, and they were going to lose their staff. At that time, I was selfishly planning to start up my own studio, but I couldn’t take a staff member who would be able to train others at Gainax with me, so I asked a freelance staff member who I had known since my days at Shaft and who was helping me set up another production line to continue to hire new staff and train junior staff at Gainax. And in 2013, the company, Millepensee, was founded with just my husband and me as the only career-long team members.
The company started with one production staff member and two in-betweeners as new hires, and I was transferred with the new production staff to the prime contracting studio of the series that I was contracted out to as the production producer. We form a teamed with the prime contractor and an outside company to all work together on the project, and our company only brought back the amount of material that we could manage and taught our employees about the production process while they worked… That was how we got our start, and conversely, there was no time to make divisions between people taking on tasks for production management or for drawing the animation. There were only four or five staff members, and when a call came into the company, the production staff, including myself, would be at the prime contractor’s studio, so the animation staff would receive the call and contact me… That’s how our company started its operations, and even as the number of staff increased, when I got a flat tire, someone from the animation staff would come over to help. The current company culture in our studio is probably an extension of the dynamic that was established back then.
――Really! It must have been quite a difficult experience for you, but I get the sense that you did not feel that such a predicament was actually a predicament. I feel like you were very considerate of the situation and everything going on around you while working.
When I was working on The Mystic Archives of Dantalian, there was another person, a junior staff member, who jointly held the position of the production producer with me. I thought they would learn how to be a production producer if we worked together, but there was a tie-up with the Lolita fashion clothing store called “Baby, the Stars Shine Bright,” a tie-up with the British Village—a park in Izu stylized to look like Great Britain, the music was being worked on by Gainax’s production team, and the president started a CG company with a company affiliated with the studio to handle background art, so it was a lot of firsts for me, and I got to enjoy many parts of my work. Gainax had a company culture that would consider the things that the staff wanted to do and which studio they wanted to work in, so it really was a wonderful environment for creating art. I was allowed to do whatever I wanted there, and it became so much fun that my boss said to me, “It doesn’t feel like you’re teaching the job of a production producer to your junior. There’s no hierarchy between the two of you.” My boss was appalled, and said, “You shouldn’t be held in equal position when you’re teaching someone how to navigate the studio.” For the next production, Medaka Box, I was assigned to train a new production assistant and served as support for the production desk and the production management for another year as design production staff. However, at that time, my boss said it was okay for me to work on the start-up of my company in parallel to my work at Gainax, so I was able to say, “I’m going to go out for a while” and work on establishing my studio, and I was able to have work at Millepensee from the moment I left Gainax without any downtime in between. Really, I was very lucky.
――I really get the feeling that you keep attracting good luck. I get the sense that you are able to bring happiness to those around you and feed that luck back into yourself, making you able to attract an amazing flow of good fortune. Could you tell us about your vision for the future, such as your plans for anything you want to do going forward?
We are so occupied with all the work that is in front of us that we don’t think much about the industry as a whole, but what we keep saying is that we want to become a company that can contribute to society through the animation we produce, not just a company that produces animation.
――I would like to ask if you have experienced any benefits in the industry because you are a woman, or if you have experienced any detriments because you are a woman.
If I were to say that I benefited because I was a woman, I would say that it was a benefit that I was still entrusted to do the heavy lifting work even after saying, “I’m a girl. Are there any younger guys who can help?” Then again, many people seem to think I am powerful, and I sometimes wonder if I get that because I am a woman, even though men tackle their work in the same way I do…
One of the things that harm women is that they are prone to hormonal imbalance. It is a really common reason why female staff to quit. If you don’t work while also paying a lot of attention to things like lifestyle rhythms, you end up wanting to quit, not because you actual have the intention to quit, but because you have to do it for your health. This is a problem that men do not have.
I also employ a number of outsourced key frame animators, and when I interviewed one who said, “I want to work from home as an in-house employee,” I told her, “You can’t be an in-house employee remote.” I asked her why she wanted to work from home, and she said that she has children, and she can’t leave them at daycare, so she is taking care of them at home. As a result, she said that she couldn’t keep to a fixed schedule. She wanted to draw key frame animation as her job, but it was difficult for her to meet the set quota, so she wanted me to let her work more flexibly and to prepare a job for her that would have a lot of leeway going forward. When there was no more work, I had no choice but to say, “I can’t give you any work at this time.” We had a relationship with her on an outsourced basis, so I said, “We have staff members who are willing to do this, so let’s make something that has a comfortable schedule.” But it is difficult to support staff like this if they ask if they can be made into in-house employees under such conditions. All the in-house employees would have to fight to meet a set schedule and quotas and pour their hard-earned money down the drain to help out staff members who can’t equally confront these challenges of the work together. However, if a child cries at night or has a fever, it is not a problem that a mother can have any control over, and I wonder if there is anything that can be done to make things easier for her to work. I wish the government would provide us with subsidies for that…
――Definitely. After all, women tend to be more heavily involved in child-rearing and housework, so even if they have the same skills, they are inevitably at a disadvantage, right? Not only in regard to child rearing, but also with issues around elder care…
I think it depends on the husband, though. I know that birthing children is a job that only women can do, but there is a couple that I’m acquainted with where the husband is an animator and a stay-at-home dad, and the wife is the character designer and chief animation supervisor. Even so, it seems that children tend to miss their mothers more, so…
――For sure. I don’t mean to say that it is a burden on the mother. It would be nice if we could somehow find a balance—and this is not limited to the animation industry.
Conversely, nowadays there are more and more people who do not even know whether they are male or female, so they rarely think about the distinction between male and female unless they are directly asked to think about it. However, if I had to say, I have the impression that many men are able to concentrate on one thing or are very particular about something on the one hand, while on the other hand, many men are too particular about their interests and are socially awkward. Conversely, I have the impression that women don’t get deeply attached to a single thing, and many of them value comfort, so I feel that many of them can easily become the core of teamwork. Even when they are doing their work at the workplace, it is like how, when they are doing housework, they are also doing the laundry and cooking while cleaning. They are scuffling around like, “This person is doing this, and this person is doing that, and this person is almost done, so let’s ask them to do this next task.” Looking at the distribution of positions on our studio team, the reason why there are so many women in our management staff is because they are good at that kind of coordination, and I think that, though you need a basic level of technical skills, that level of detail in one’s leadership abilities is important for a management position… I am not saying that all women are good at this because they are women, but if I were to use probability theory, I would say that women are better at this kind of thing.
――Now, lastly, do you have any messages you’d like to impart for the next generation of young people, especially women, who are aspiring to work in the animation industry?
I often tell this to the kids of the staff in my company, when you move forward believing that you can do something, only about twenty percent of people fail to then do it. When you move forward with the belief that you can’t do something, eighty percent of people fail. There is only a twenty percent chance that you’ll fail to do the things you believe you can do. When you think about it, no matter what comes your way, the best thing to do is to believe that you can do it, and move forward with the thought, “How do I do it?” As I mentioned earlier, many female staff members are good at getting others involved. If you have to do something anyway, I think it is best to be positive about everything without keeping things to yourself and to involve everyone and work on a variety of things. I think working on a team is more fun when you do it together than when you keep to yourself.
――I know you are very busy, so thank you very much for your time today.