INOUE Shinichiro（Producer, Anime Tourism Association）

I would like to talk about the Anime Tourism Association.

First of all, there are many locations all over Japan that have been used as settings for anime. For some time now, many fans have been holding events called anime pilgrimages to visit these sites. The Anime Tourism Association was established with the aim of connecting these “pilgrimages” with various businesses concerning the region and anime to promote regional development and inbound tourism. Every year, anime fans from all over the world vote for the anime locations they would like to visit, and based on the results, with the approval of each region and copyright holder, 88 anime pilgrimages in Japan that people would like to go on are announced.

Our association will also be cooperating for an event to be held at EXPO Messe for three days from April 30th to May 2nd during the Osaka  Kansai Expo to be held next year. The purpose of this event is to let the many foreigners visiting the Expo learn about the charms and culture of various parts of Japan through anime and manga. We plan to have content packed with many charms of various parts of Japan, as well as the charms of anime and manga.

Since its establishment in 2016, Mr. Yoshiyuki Tomino has served as the chairman of the Anime Tourism Association, but he has now decided to step down from this position and have Mr. Shoji Kawamori take over as the second chairman.

This event is a talk session to commemorate the handover of the role of chairman.

TOMINO Yoshiyuki

Honestly, I very much dislike the idea of an Anime Tourism Association. That’s because it’s trying to combine an element of make believe, which is anime, with tourism, which in this case fundamentally consists of a message that is trying to convince people to go on trips, which I find very distasteful.

In the first year it was held, I actually had the opportunity to look at some of the data and prospective destinations from the fans who participated in the inaugural 88-spot anime pilgrimage, but by the second year, my feelings on it had changed drastically.

The reason for this is because I saw that the fans, who I assumed were thinking about things purely through the lens of anime—of make believe—were actually heading out into the field. What I mean by “the field” in this case is the physical environment of each place.

Here’s what happened when we set up those 88 anime pilgrimage sites. I actually hardly ever travel for pleasure myself, but in my first year as president, I happened to visit Shirakawa-go. It was so packed with tourists that you could hardly see any of the sights. The biggest issue was that there were hardly any roads that go into Shirakawa-go. Access was so terrible that I couldn’t help but think that they probably shouldn’t be encouraging people to visit until they’re able to build a few more roads. 

This is part of the reason why, from the second year on, I started to think that the 88-spot anime pilgrimage that was being organized by the Anime Tourism Association might actually be a good idea. The reason being, there are almost no tourist attractions in any of the 88 locations.

INOUE Shinichiro

That’s to say, a lot of anime takes place in locations that aren’t traditionally tourist destinations.

TOMINO Yoshiyuki

That’s right. What I learned from the fans is that they were going to all these different places while basically ignoring what the adults were conveniently trying to promote for business reasons. After seeing that for the past ten years, I’ve come to believe that there must be so many more attractive destinations around the country that we don’t know about (that are worth seeing or knowing about or that are interesting) and also that there must be so many beautiful places and places where delicious food grows that locals are keeping secret—places that they want to keep just to themselves. I came to think that this event might be a good way for people to discover such places for themselves.

The fans were able to discover how there were so many more attractive destinations than what you see on television and in anime. Through these anime pilgrimages, I believe they were able to expand their horizons. 

I think this is also relevant to Kawamori’s pavilion for the Osaka Kansai Expo.

The ones who are actually going to have to bear the responsibility of preserving biodiversity in the future are the current generation of anime fans. What will their perspective on local environments be 20, 30, 50 years from now? Might they come to understand that even local environments that are not their own are not completely irrelevant to the issue of biodiversity? I think people will come to see these pilgrimages as a gateway to exploring such questions.

Still, the Anime Tourism Association is still less than a decade old, so there are still many aspects of it that remain theoretical. But I do think it’s an effort that should be carried on for years to come.

Japan truly is a land with a complex terrain. Put another way, it’s a land that is ill-suited to live in. There’s hardly any flat land. This is something you cannot appreciate just from watching anime. So my hope is that people will be able to discover new pilgrimage sites through the Anime Tourism Association. In fact, I believe we ourselves should be trying to continuously update these 88 pilgrimage sites every year. By learning to see things through the eyes of this current generation of kids and anime fans, I have come to see that the things us old folk are drawn to are not necessarily the be all end all. In that sense, I believe it has become an event that has quite a bit of real educational value. 

Still, I am of the generation that did not believe anime is culture. And yet now, we are seeing anime receive funding from the government as well as various events being held. It really brings home to me the fact that my generation was only ever able to engage in the idea of expanding our horizons through anime on a purely conceptual and theoretical level.

Now that I am handing the Anime Tourism Association over to Kawamori, it will be run by someone 20 years younger.

Kawamori is tasked with producing for the Expo while holding onto an absolute concept, but I think people today have forgotten the true meaning of an expo. When it was first conceived, expos were places where you could see and learn about anything and everything. They were not the business or industry events we have today. 

Kawamori started his career as just an anime mecha designer. But by the time he got his start, he was already part of a new generation of creators, so he is far more skilled and effective than I am when it comes to the techniques involved in fusing reality with fantasy.

Based on this foundation, Kawamori was able to take on the role of producing for the Expo and create an immensely digestible way of talking—through the lens of anime and manga (entertainment)—about environmental issues, namely through a conversation about biodiversity. At the same time, I believe the Kawamori Pavilion, which seeks to present this important concept through the medium of film at the Expo, is close to being prepared to present its visitors with a vision of the true purpose of an expo. 

His work is showing us things our generation could have never come up with and I am truly impressed by it.

INOUE Shinichiro

Thank you. You touched upon all the topics I was hoping to ask you about. 

KAWAMORI Shoji

Thank you. It truly is an honor beyond what I deserve. The first work of Director Tomino’s I ever came across was Triton of the Sea. Considering your age, I doubt too many of you have seen the final episode of this anime, but as an elementary school kid at the time, I was truly blown away. This work really opened my eyes to the fact that the values so many of us take for granted aren’t necessarily right and that anime is the medium through which such ideas can be explored.

I can’t help but feel like a student again when I’m with Mr. Tomino, but I’m grateful for all the valuable things he has shown us. Personally, I feel like the most distinctive aspect of Mr. Tomino’s works and other works from robot anime’s heyday is that they are almost all original works. 

Even Mazinger Z is more or less all original from the first episode.

INOUE Shinichiro

That’s true. Go Nagai wrote the manga with an eventual anime adaptation in mind, so I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that it’s basically an original work. 

KAWAMORI Shoji

We were part of the generation that, thanks to the robot anime that preceded us, had the opportunity to work on original works. That meant that we had to do all the worldbuilding ourselves. We would do worldbuilding from scratch, although to be precise, we were basing everything off of things that exist in the real world. We became accustomed to basing things off of reality, so when it came to doing worldbuilding, you had to know about machines, you had to know about society, you had to know about human psychology, you had to know about world art, and you had to know about how the ecosystem works. You couldn’t do worldbuilding otherwise.

With that being said, something that resonated with me in what Mr. Tomino was talking about earlier is the idea of animation being an imaginary and fictional thing, but then through tourism, you can connect that to the real world. This is an incredible idea, especially since we are now entering an age where AI will become ubiquitous. If you try to rely on AI for everything, your whole world will become imaginary. 

It’s the same with video games.

Everything is replayable. Even if you die, you can just hit replay. When you grow up too immersed in that kind of environment, you become alienated from real-world values. Once you’ve enjoyed yourself by watching something imaginary, I think it’s better for the sake of balance to go out and experience just as many things in the real world. In that sense, when I took over the Anime Tourism Association, I was reminded of how nice it would be to have that kind of sensibility as our guiding principle going forward.

INOUE Shinichiro

Mr. Kawamori, you mentioned that you actually enjoy traveling yourself.

KAWAMORI Shoji

It’s more so that since I make original works, I’m afraid that if I only experience things through novels and nonfiction books, and of course through other films and anime, my work will become derivative. I think those things are, at the end of the day, derivative, and that true design is rather about conveying what you were moved by when you actually visited and experienced a place. 

Design, in my view, is not about depicting the physical shape of a machine, but is rather a function in and of itself. Just like the function of a plane is to fly or the function of a living creature would be to swim if it were a fish, I think machines and living creatures are both impressive examples of such designs. In the same way, I believe the essence of design, of story design, of directorial design is to think about how you can effectively convey what you were moved by in whatever medium you are working in. That’s how I see it.

TOMINO Yoshiyuki

Even though we spend much of our time thinking about things through the lens of anime—of make believe—anime creators are nonetheless required to create something resembling a story using these things that resemble humans, called characters. So these stories always end up being human in nature. 

Additionally, there’s something that every anime needs for it to become a hit. It’s not a complicated plot or anything like that. It’s the appeal of the characters themselves. 

To give you a specific example, there’s Lum. 

INOUE Shinichiro

From Urusei Yatsura.

TOMINO Yoshiyuki

Characters that become fan favorites become so because there is something about them that the audience, whether it be the kids who are watching or the adults, can connect to. 

I was never able to figure out what it was about Lum that made people think she was so cute, but I’ve come to understand that she’s cute just because she is and that’s all there is to it. While the reasons for Lum’s success are a mystery, you can easily imagine, for example, what kind of parents she had. But when you think about things from a science fiction perspective, you can say, maybe she doesn’t have parents and she just popped into existence or maybe she emerged through the activation of some other kind of functional entity. When it comes to science fiction, you’re able to build a story out of these kinds of questions. 

Now, let me segue rather abruptly into talking about AI in the modern age. 

Those of us who are involved in anime production and have now started to grow accustomed to working digitally thanks to various aspects of anime production now being capable of being done conveniently and easily with digital technology have, for the past few decades, been working on creating characters and fictional worlds, but now that modern humans have started to use AI, we have begun to do in real life what was previously only done as make believe.
The question then arises of what can be accomplished by doing in real life what was previously only done as fiction.

As a specific example, let me talk about some recent footage that you all might be familiar with. The other day, there was a bombardment of 200 missiles in Ukraine. Normally, when you shoot 200 missiles at something, you’d expect it to change the tide of battle or completely decimate a region. Because of that, the side that fired the 200 missiles believed that they must have captured or decimated this region, but when they went back the next day, they found, to their surprise, that there was almost no damage. This allows them to lie and say that their enemies must have shot them down. 

What this shows is that people today believe that they can turn the tide just by leaving everything up to AI. But the question is, when have we ever broken through by relying solely on technology?

KAWAMORI Shoji

I believe the kind of eyes you are seeing the world through is very important. And it’s not an easy thing to develop. For example, as Mr. Fujiki from Biome mentioned earlier, as people living in the modern age, we can look at an insect but not be able to even identify it. Birds may all look like sparrows to us. You have to have an eye for that kind of thing to be able to make those distinctions. And it can’t just be about knowing what a certain insect is in isolation. You also have to pay attention to the relationships, such as this butterfly likes to feed on these leaves and that’s why they’re gathering here. Plus, if you don’t have discerning eye yourself, you can visit various places but not actually learn anything or experience any real emotion. All you’d be doing is, as it were, receiving existing, given knowledge that a certain place has good food, confirming that that’s true, and then coming home. Rather, what’s going to become important in the future are the relationships that are truly unique to a region and that could only exist there or the way in which we look at and feel about things.

TOMINO Yoshiyuki

ou’ve reminded me of something else I wanted to talk about. For example, I sometimes like to look at close-up pictures of snakes. I’ve never liked snakes. But when I look at a close-up of a snake’s face, I’m amazed. This started happening especially after I got past the age of 75. How is it, I ask myself, that snakes have such exquisite faces? They have their little mouths and when I look at how they open them and the way they stick out their tongues, I wonder to myself what this sense of sophistication is that I feel. At the same time, you notice that their bodies are able to move without any arms or legs, and when you look at this sophisticated movement up close, you realize how beautiful it is. 

Nevertheless, when I look at the whole while telling myself how much I hate snakes, I find them totally repulsive. But when I screw up the courage and look at them up close, they’re incredibly beautiful, and you can even see the undulatory locomotion they use to move around.      

When you think about where such movement could have come from, you realize it’s something that could have only emerged from how that species is designed. It’s not as if they are simply crawling across the ground by writhing around. When you consider the evolutionary process it must have taken to create a body that is capable of such movement, it really makes you think about how those who tend to overestimate the power of AI and computers in trying to figure things out really ought to educate themselves about the miraculousness of biodiversity.

KAWAMORI Shoji

Exactly. AI contains mountains of images and data that have been inputted to produce the information people want, but it doesn’t contain any microorganisms or even any of the creatures that are most familiar to us. The vast amounts of information that we have access to thanks to Biome are hardly contained within it. I think those are the kinds of areas where AI has a blind spot. There’s an aspect of AI that makes it very easy to trick yourself into believing you’re handling a lot of information.

TOMINO Yoshiyuki

I think a lot of people convince themselves they are looking at the whole but the whole they are looking at is the whole at a particular point in time, and they don’t have the imagination to look forwards or backwards.

A lot of people—politicians, military leaders, and mecha designers alike. But even though you’re a mecha designer yourself, Kawamori, you’ve managed to evolve in a positive way. That’s why I’m very glad someone like you has agreed to take over the Anime Tourism Association. 

KAWAMORI Shoji

Hearing the slogan “Designing Future Society for Our Lives,” I couldn’t help but feel like it was saying things aren’t looking too bright right now—things aren’t too bright right now, so we’ve got to create a brighter future (Translator’s note: The original Japanese slogan contains a reference to designing a future society where life can “shine”). 

TOMINO Yoshiyuki

Like you’re being compelled to act out of fear?

KAWAMORI Shoji

Right.

If we were able to truly see life as shining, I think it would change how we see the world. To be honest, I’m not too fond of the way people commonly refer to “environmental issues” either. That’s because it really should be a me-problem. Environmental issues are just another point along the chain of reactions that starts from where we came from and leads to where we are headed, so I can’t help but think that the very idea of separating ourselves from the environment is extremely anthropocentric. That’s why my wish is to pursue designs that aspire towards a society that is able to look at environmental issues as a me-problem, as part of one connected life that does not separate humans from the environment.

TOMINO Yoshiyuki

Some of the issues we face are contained in the very words Kawamori just used. 

The fact is, unless you frame things as an “environmental problem,” it can’t be sold as a policy issue. That’s why discourse surrounding the environment does not actually consist of thinking about the environment but is rather filled with words that are designed to keep pushing a certain agenda. There are people out there that are very clever like that. Those same clever people once brought Japan to the brink of annihilation. Those people always disappear when the situation turns against them. The same thing is happening right now.

This, despite the fact that we today face the issue of figuring out how we are going to keep living forever on a planet that is finite in nature. 

KAWAMORI Shoji

I do like man-made designs. I think they can be fascinating and interesting, but the problem is that there’s always an answer. You’re able to see that this person thought this and so they came up with this, and that’s not quite as interesting. In nature, the answers are unknown. Who designed this world and how? Is it more accurate to say that everything was designed by everything else? Where does consciousness come from? All these questions remain a mystery. It’s a mystery that is endlessly fascinating and you could say that the attempt to get to the bottom of it is one big “LIVE EARTH JOURNEY.” (Translator’s note: A more direct translation of this slogan might be “Journey of Circulating Life.”) Trying to get to the bottom of a mystery, setting off toward the unknown—such ideas are the essence of tourism.

TOMINO Yoshiyuki

When you look at the corporations who agreed to sponsor Kawamori’s pavilion, they are all companies who are capable of staying in business for a long time. What did these executives, who discovered that they were able to keep their companies going, start doing? After being in business for decades, they realized, in the course of selling vast amounts of water, where all that water comes from, and that is why they are now moving toward environmental preservation. 

So I am very grateful to the people at each of the companies who have invested. 

The major issue we face today is the need to keep living, in perpetuity, on a planet that is finite.
I am someone of the anime industry who has no scientific expertise, so if you’ll allow me to be so bold, I think we need to deal with the issue of coming to terms with a declining population.
The population of Japan slightly before the Meiji Restoration was about half of what it is today. That is part of our history. So even if the population of Japan were to decline by half, it would not mean the end of Japan. We are now living in an era where we must operate from that assumption. Restructuring a bloated infrastructure system amid a population decline is an excruciating process economically. That’s why we must stop building all these skyscrapers. 

I’m glad that Osaka has started building green spaces as if to say everyone should follow their example.      

But things can’t end with just building green spaces. We need to start thinking about why we need those spaces.

KAWAMORI Shoji

I have been handed the position of chairman by Mr. Tomino, who is my great senior and an emotional mentor to me. His works such as Triton of the Sea have enlightened me on how to see things. I would like to pass that on as well.

And this will be passed on to the next people who will see our work, come to the Expo, or use the Biome, and it will continue to spread and be passed down. It will change. I think it’s fine for it to change.

I am very happy to have had this incredibly valuable opportunity today. Thank you very much.

TOMINO Yoshiyuki

As the former chairman of the Anime Tourism Association, I believe that when the Kawamori generation arrives, he will use the Anime Tourism Association to raise a new generation that will think about things concretely, so I look forward to your guidance.