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Translator's Note: The quarterly magazine Great Mechanics G, published by Futabasha, is devoted to in-depth coverage of current and past mecha anime. It frequently publishes exclusive interviews and behind-the-scenes features, including Coelacanth Kazama's True Stories: Showa Robot Anime Production Site Report, a series of reminiscences about the production of classic robot anime by Yoshie Kawahara, formerly of the Sunrise planning office and now a freelance writer. Kawahara's insider history of the Sunrise planning office is an ongoing series that began in the 2022 Winter issue, published in December 2022. The following text is copyright © Futabasha. |
Have you heard of someone called Hiroshi Kazama, or someone named Yoshie Kawahara? From the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, Kazama was credited mainly in setting-related roles on many of the robot anime produced by (then) Nippon Sunrise, from Robot King Daioja to Aura Battler Dunbine. Kawahara, meanwhile, was a scriptwriter on Heavy Metal L-Gaim and the author of the Yoroiden Samurai Troopers novelization. In fact, these two are the same person, one of the few female core staff members at Sunrise, the champion of robot anime. In this series, Ms. Kawahara tells us about her memories of the past.
Text: Yoshie Kawahara, AKA Coelacanth Kazama
Profile: Yoshie Kawahara • Born in Tokyo's Suginami Ward. In senior high school, Kawahara joined Sunrise Studio (Ltd.) as a miscellaneous part-time job (1975). After graduation, she automatically became a Sunrise contract staff worker. At first she was also active as an anime fan, but soon moved on from this due to the demands of her busy workplace. After this, Kawahara accumulated experience of all kinds, driven by the needs of her workplace duties. In 1980, she was officially assigned to the planning office. Temporarily seconded from the planning office, she became the first female "setting manager," and from 1984 onwards she worked full-time in planning. (1) After her contract ended in 1989, she began working as a freelance writer.
In the spring of this year, the company named "Sunrise Inc." ceased to exist, and "Sunrise" became a brand name within Bandai Namco Filmworks.
Sunrise—officially "Soeisha Inc." which specialized in planning and business operations, and "Sunrise Studio Ltd." which was a production work site—was founded in 1972 (Showa 47) by seven people who had broken away from Mushi Production. Until the establishment of "Nippon Sunrise Inc." with 1977's Super Machine Zambot 3, it wasn't a production company in the true sense that held its own copyrights, but more or less a subcontractor.
However, in its second year, Sunrise essentially did the majority of the work on 0-Tester, from planning onwards. 0-Tester (broadcast from October 1973 to December 1974 on the Kansai Television network) began with the desire of Tohokushinsha to create an animation program modeled on the British Supermarionation series Thunderbirds (broadcast 1965~1966 in the UK, and 1966~1967 in Japan), which had previously become popular after Tohokushinsha imported it. However, this was an original work with a completely different setting, story, characters, and mecha. In short, Tohokushinsha was merely the rights-holder, and from the time it was first established Sunrise was already creating original anime.
For almost 50 years after that, Sunrise has continued creating original works. But it was the "planning office" (later the Planning & Development Office of the Planning Department), which no longer exists in the present Sunrise structure, that supported this.
Until recently, the credits of most of Sunrise's original works included the name "Hajime Yatate" under planning, original story, or original work. No such Yatate person actually exists. "Hajime Yatate" is the Sunrise planning office.
The name Hajime Yatate represents everyone involved in drafting the plan, particularly the first head of the planning department, the late Mr. Eiji Yamaura (the third president of the company). Then, after Mr. Yamaura moved over to the management side, the central planning role passed to Koichi Inoue, who may be familiar to the readers, and he became "Hajime Yatate II." (2) (Since Inoue later became my husband, I've omitted the honorific.)
I heard from my direct superior Mr. Masao Iizuka, the planning office desk chief (at the time), that the name Hajime Yatate means you're about to set out on a difficult journey. It comes from the line "Yatate no hajime" from the poet Matsuo Bashō's "Oku no Hosomichi," and incorporates the meaning "We did this for the first time!" (3) Incidentally, underneath the Senju-ōhashi bridge in Tokyo's Adachi Ward, there's a "Site of Yatate Hajime" monument at the spot where Bashō read the first lines of "Oku no Hosomichi." It might be fun to try visiting it.
For the Sunrise works of the time, which wouldn't have been possible without a relationship between product development and the work itself, the planning office was the heart and brain. But even within the company, it seems there were very few staff who understood its importance. That's only natural given that the production site begins operations after the production has already been decided. Thus, it's irrelevant to ask who was doing before that point. The only people on site who know about this are the producer in charge, the director, the main designers, the person responsible for series structure (the scriptwriter who serves as main writer), and setting managers like myself seconded from the planning office.
Until I came back from working on site to the planning office to which I belonged, the planning office had also served as "Sunrise's do-anything division," partially responsible for publicity and for matters which would be handled by the general affairs or legal departments in a normal company. (4)
This was because our desk chief Mr. Iizuka, who had been recruited by Sunrise from Mushi Production's reference department, had historically taken on sole responsibility for organizing and storing everything from planning-related documents to intermediate products from the production site—in other words, scripts and storyboards, setting materials, and even key frames and used cels.
Up until the mid-1980s, the plans themselves took the form of proposals the planning department manager Mr. Yamaura put together with scriptwriters, directors, and designers he deemed suitable for the project's objectives. These were then presented to sponsors and advertising agencies.
Mr. Iizuka served as Mr. Yamaura's right-hand man. But as I've mentioned, various jobs were being done at the same time, so crowded planning meetings and so forth were rarely held in the "planning office" itself during so-called business hours, but took place in neighborhood coffee shops and other separate locations. As a result, the people on site often thought of Mr. Iizuka as nothing more than "Uncle Cel-Organizer." But he laughed it off, saying "That's fine, it's true after all."
Looking back on it, this all seems rather amazing. But it also illustrates how, in a production company that was still in its infancy, everything had to adapt to the needs of the moment.
As far as I know, up until about 1976, the original "planning office" was a single Japanese-style room split in two, on the fifth floor of the narrow building that housed the coffee shop "Sansan" where meetings were often held. (5) After that, it moved to an apartment in the back of the building that contained the original head office. That was a Japanese-style double room.
From 1978 onward it was in an old single-floor space about 20 tatami mats in area, previously known as "Studio 3," which had been used as a production site ever since Wanpaku Omukashi Kum-Kum (1975). That was on the second floor of a grocery in front of the train station. Around 1983, it moved to the third floor of the old head office building... little by little, it was expanding.
Nonetheless, there was never enough room to store and organize the materials from the continually increasing number of works. In particular, from the end of the 1970s onwards there were more and more requests from anime magazines, and it seemed like there were outsiders going in and out almost every day. So when we were working on things that were still in the planning stage, we had to do it late at night, or at an out-of-the-way desk that was hard for visitors to see.
In the 1980s, the number of planning office members also increased a little. (6) There was Mr. Shoji Tonoike, who managed the scripts for Round Vernian Vifam (1983) and City Hunter (1987). (7) His friend Ms. Yoko Watanabe (now Yoko Tonoike), who later served as a production assistant on both programs, had started as a part-time finishing assistant on The☆Ultraman (1979). Ms. Junko Sato was later responsible for setting management on things like Mr. Ajikko (1987) and Future GPX Cyber Formula (1991). Ms. Yumiko Tsukamoto, who also began as a part-timer, wrote scripts for Giant Gorg (1984) and was mainly responsible for producing publicity materials.
This is out of sequence, but the scriptwriter Mr. Satoshi Namiki also belonged to the planning office when he was setting manager on Space Runaway Ideon (1980). So did Mr. Mitsuo (then Mitsu) Fukuda, who is currently directing Mobile Suit Gundam Seed (2002), when he was doing setting management for things like The Unchallengeable Trider G7 (1980). Mr. Tetushisa Yamada, who was a producer on Gunhed (a live-action special effects film released in 1989, produced by Toho Pictures, Sunrise, Bandai, Kadokawa Shoten, and IMAGICA), was briefly a member as well.
Inoue had been seconded to Studio 1 as setting manager on Armored Trooper Votoms (1983). Once he was done with that work he started coming in to the planning office more often, at the same time as me. The one difference between us was that, after Inoue joined the company in 1981, he'd started going with the planning department manager to visit sponsors and advertising agencies, and was already involved in product planning and drafting the accompanying plans.
That's because Inoue had been headhunted from the production engineering department of Tomy (now Tomytec), since knowledge of toy development and manufacturing was essential for the planning of Sunrise's works. But the rest of his time was spent organizing publicity materials alongside the rest of the staff, or driving Mr. Iizuka around as a chauffeur, so most of the planning office members didn't know he was doing that kind of work at the time.
In hindsight, Mr. Iizuka used to say that "Hiroppe (meaning me) is the first-born son of the Iizuka family, and Jirongu (Mr. Iizuka's nickname for Inoue) is the son of Mr. Yamaura." (8) From what happened afterwards, I'd have to agree.
A map of the various locations of the "Wandering Planning Office," and a diagram of the "Studio 6" that Kawahara describes below. The numbered locations are:
(1) Fifth floor of Sansan
(2) Double-room apartment
(3) Old Studio 3
(4) Third floor of old head office
Other map locations include the old Studio 1 and 2, the new "Studio 6," the current head office, and the Kamiigusa train station.
For a year or two after I came back to the planning office, on the third floor of the head office building, I was still working on plans for a few different works. Then a location that another department was previously using became vacant. It was a room in a condo that had been built a few years earlier, close to the apartment behind the head office building where the planning office used to be located. For the first time, the planning office had a space that would always be available for planning meetings.
Though it was called a condominium, it was a two-story building most likely made from wood, a rental property that deserved a name like "Something-or-other Co-op." When you opened the lobby door, you'd see a dining room and kitchen about six mats in area, and next to it a six-mat Japanese-style room with a built-in closet. There was also a modular bathroom with a toilet. It ws an unremarkable layout that looked like something a bachelor or a newlywed couple might rent. But it was a hideaway known only to those involved with the planning office and visited only by people who had business with us, a so-called "desert island" completely separate from the duties of publicity and production sites.
We had a phone line, of course, but there was no copy machine. And since this was almost 40 years ago, there was no Wi-Fi or Internet access. But you could spread documents out on the fairly large dining table in the Japanese-style room, or do miscellaneous drawing work, and even if you were up all night working or holding meetings, you could even flop down, roll over, and take a nap. There was also a small TV, so we could watch broadcast anime, as well as trying out trendy video games at just the moment when NES games like Dragon Quest and Gradius were taking the world by storm.
We had a gas stove and a sink, so we could boil all the water we wanted, and prepare not just cup noodles but also instant ramen as long as we had a pot ready. (There was no microwave, though.) It was supposedly forbidden, but's possible that when we were looking really disheveled after staying up all night, we may even have stealthily taken a quick shower before going to meet with sponsors.
This was nicknamed "Studio 6." (10) We'd finally been given what we'd always wanted, a place where we could continually work on refining plans. Inoue and I were stationed here on a full-time basis, and they told us "As Hajime Yatate II, you should stop being seconded to production sites, and devote yourselves to planning." (11)
I only recently heard this from Inoue, but it seems Mr. Iizuka told him "The planning office is now in your hands. I'm taking care of publicity and reference, so Mr. Yamaura's job is up to you."
From this point on, the previous "planning office" was split between planning & development, and publicity & reference. Studio 6 became the "Planning Department Planning Office," and the third floor of the head office became the "Reference & Publicity Division."
Two office desks were placed in the dining room and kitchen area of the new planning office, and one of them became mine. Usually I was doing office work such as handwriting proposals and then later entering them into a word processor, summarizing setting plans, preparing planning materials, and arranging meetings.
Inoue would head out to meetings with external relationships such as sponsors and advertising agencies, or with the producers in charge of production sites. When he returned in the evening, another round of planning meetings would begin, covering various matters that came up while he was out of the office.
Designers and young people with specialized expertise, known as "planning brains," would gather there after finishing their other work and hold discussions around the dining table in the Japanese-style room. So I was living a lifestyle where I got home much later than when I was on production sites, often after public transportation had stopped running. My memory may be a little off, but I think this was around 1985.
I spent a few years in this Studio 6 before I left Sunrise. It was to be my first and last "Fortress of Planning."
(1) The Japanese term 出向 (shukkō) refers to a temporary assignment or transfer, translated here as "seconding." It appears that, when a project moved into production, planning office staff were sometimes temporarily transferred to the production studio in question to handle the work of setting management.
(2) Written in Japanese as 二代目・矢立肇 (nidaime Yayate Hajime). The Japanese term used here means the second-generation inheritor of a role or title. This succession probably took place around June 1987, when Nippon Sunrise was renamed "Sunrise Inc." and Yamaura became its third president.
(3) "Oku no Hosomichi," often translated as "The Narrow Road to the Deep North," is a classic work of Japanese literature from the Edo period. The line in question describes the poet using his portable writing set, or yatate, for the first time.
(4) As noted in Kawahara's profile above, from 1984 onwards, she was working full-time in the planning office rather than being seconded to production sites.
(5) The term 和室 (washitsu), translated here as "Japanese-style room" and sometimes rendered as "tatami room," indicates a traditional Japanese entertaining room with tatami mats on the floor and sliding doors.
(6) Since I'm translating Japanese honorifics like "san" (which are genderless) into the English "Mr." and "Ms." (which are gendered), and I couldn't find detailed profiles for all the planning office staff listed here, in some cases I just made my best guess.
(7) Tonoike also wrote scripts for Vifam and City Hunter, among many other series.
(8) "Hiroppe" is presumably based on "Hiroshi Kazama," the alias Kawahara used for her setting manager credits. Hiroshi is usually a male name, so her Hiroshi Kazama persona would be Iizuka's son.
(9) An apartment with one general-purpose room in addition to the living, dining, and kitchen areas.
(10) Though Sunrise Studio 7 was already established by the middle of the 1980s, there doesn't seem to have been an official Studio 6 until the late 1990s, creating a gap that the planning office informally filled.
(11) Kawahara previously used the "Hajime Yatate II" name in reference to Inoue alone, but going by the Japanese text, this comment is clearly directed to both of them.
Have you heard of someone called Hiroshi Kazama, or someone named Yoshie Kawahara? From the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, Kazama was credited mainly in setting-related roles on many of the robot anime produced by (then) Nippon Sunrise, from Robot King Daioja to Aura Battler Dunbine. Kawahara, meanwhile, was a scriptwriter on Heavy Metal L-Gaim and the author of the Yoroiden Samurai Troopers novelization. In fact, these two are the same person, one of the few female core staff members at Sunrise, the champion of robot anime. In this series, Ms. Kawahara tells us about her memories of the past.
Text: Yoshie Kawahara, AKA Coelacanth Kazama
Profile: Yoshie Kawahara • Born in Tokyo's Suginami Ward. In senior high school, Kawahara joined Sunrise Studio (Ltd.) as a miscellaneous part-time job (1975). After graduation, she automatically became a Sunrise contract staff worker. At first she was also active as an anime fan, but soon moved on from this due to the demands of her busy workplace. After this, Kawahara accumulated experience of all kinds, driven by the needs of her workplace duties. In 1980, she was officially assigned to the planning office. Temporarily seconded from the planning office, she became the first female "setting manager," and from 1984 onwards she worked full-time in planning. (1) After her contract ended in 1989, she began working as a freelance writer.
Around 1985, the planning office moved to a 1DK apartment nicknamed "Studio 6." (1) I wasn't conscious of it at the time, but I think it was the establishment of this Studio 6 that effectively began the transfer of "Hajime Yatate," who had been coming up with Sunrise's original works since 1973, to a second generation.
As I've mentioned before in this series, rather than an actual person, Hajime Yatate is a pen name representing all the members who collaborated to create the plan for a work. However, at their core was Mr. Eiji Yamura, a founding member of Sunrise who served as the first head of the planning department and the third president of the company itself.
To me, Mr. Yamaura was a big man who was always frantically running around, laughing loudly and heartily, an impatient and careless boss full of anecdotes that made me burst out laughing every time I heard them. When it came to planning, though, he'd set you challenges that made you think "That's ridiculous!" But from the 1970s to the first half of the 1980s, most of the works that probably come to the reader's mind when you hear the name "Sunrise" existed only because of Mr. Yamaura.
As I've frequently mentioned, in a nutshell, "planning" is what's required to achieve consensus and cooperation with the sponsors, advertising agency, TV station, and so forth when an anime work is being created for TV broadcast. In other words, it means thinking about the work with the question "Will each of them make money by broadcasting this anime on TV?" constantly in your mind.
However lofty the narrative, or however elaborate the work's designs, images, and animation, Mr. Yamaura would say "If your partners don't make money, it won't lead to your next job." That's what creating commercial anime is all about. In the works created with this conviction, when they write "Planning: Hajime Yatate," it wouldn't be wrong to say "Planning: Eiji Yamamura." In fact, if you ask the veterans who were involved in planning with Mr. Yamaura back then, they'll all say "That was Mr. Yamaura's plan."
That was a lengthy preface, but the point is that the location known as Studio 6 could also be described as "Hajime Yatate's room." And just as Mr. Yamaura had called in people like Director Tomino and Director Takahashi, Mr. Kunio Okawara, Mr. Yoshitake Suzuki, Mr. Hiroyuki Hoshiyama, and Mr. Yoshikazu Yasuhiko to create all those plans, those of us in the next-generation planning office would have to give birth to a second Hajime Yatate, along with new talent to follow in that membership's footsteps.
The actual work, however, wasn't divided quite so literally. Sometimes (Koichi) Inoue, who should already be familiar to readers of this magazine, would work together with Mr. Yamaura on a plan, and veteran designers and writers continued lending us their support. Mr. Yamaura himself, though he must already have had plenty of work to do on the management side, would sometimes appear at Studio 6 to ask if we could somehow put a plan together or to request changes, so the original Hajime Yatate was still alive and kicking. And sometimes people from the production site (like producers or series directors) would come to consult us, seeking ideas for setting or mecha and costumes that would appear in the work.
At times like these, "brains" with specialized knowledge and skills became very important. In particular, many Sunrise works at the time were science fiction based on robots. Ever since Sunrise was established, Studio Nue had been helping us deal with this.
As we entered the 1980s, students from the Tokyo Institute of Technology joined in to provide setting support. The first of these was Mr. Noboru Mao, who is now in a leadership position at one of Japan's flagship heavy industrial companies, and has also appeared in this magazine in a dialogue with Inoue. He was followed by Mr. T-Guchi, who is now a world-class researcher in a field called "bioinformatics" and a professor at Chuo University. (2) I believe he also appeared as an academic commentator in the early days of the popular NHK program Chico Will Scold You! There was also another student named Mr. S-Mura (unfortunately, I don't know what he's up to these days).
People like these, who could help us with scientific research and the accompanying idea generation, were indispensable for Sunrise works in those days. But when they graduated from university, they each followed their own paths as described above, and it became hard for them to act as freely as they could in their student days. It was imperative for Studio 6 to seek out new brains, including new designers.
You can't find new brains or collaborators just by hanging around the studio. So, outside the working day—for example, on our days off, or after business hours—Inoue and I would go to event venues or drop by "drinking parties" with mutual acquaintances (although I'm a bit of a lightweight).
Since Inoue and I were originally interested in creative fields such as manga, our mutual contacts included many people in those fields. In the course of these interactions, information like "I know a person like that" or "Come to think of it, it seems ◯◯ has some free time right now" would come up. Since there was no such thing as e-mail back then, we'd make appointments via their acquaintances, contact them by phone, and then go meet them in person to establish a connection.
Of course, with friends we'd already known for a while, if they were right for the job we'd just ask them to drop by Studio 6. Mr. Masahisa Suzuki, an illustrator and designer who suddenly passed away last year, and Mr. Kazunori Nakazawa, who debuted as a game designer while in high school and later entered the anime world by doing mecha designs for Mashin Hero Wataru, were among those we recruited as brains via such personal acquaintances and introductions.
As youngsters chat about this and that in the next room, Kawahara attempts to keep up with the constant flood of packages from Junya Ishigaki.
There were other members who came to us in somewhat unique ways. Among them was the mecha designer Mr. Junya Ishigaki.
I think this was soon after we'd established Studio 6. One day, we received a massive envelope, roughly A4 size, addressed to the planning office. (3) Inside it were dozens of robot design roughs drawn in pencil, along with a letter. It had been sent to us by the young Mr. Ishigaki, a third-year high school student living in a provincial town. He said he loved drawing mecha, and was especially fond of Sunrise's robots. In short, he was "an aspiring mecha designer."
The company received letters like these fairly frequently. But very few of these people actually went on to become designers. Usually, when we replied that they needed to address this or that issue in order to become a designer, at most we might get a response along the lines of "I'll do my best" and it would end there. So when I wrote a letter in reply, I expected the same kind of thing would happen this time. (4)
What was different about him, though, was the amount of material he'd sent us. He was the first person who'd ever sent us this much stuff. However, his design drawings were a lot like those of already popular designers, so it was obvious he was a fan. In my reply, I wrote something like "You need to have a variety of viewpoints, rather than just following established designers."
Normally that would be the end of it, but just a few days after I sent my reply, an even thicker envelope arrived. It included a letter saying that he'd tried to think about what I said while he was drawing. I was amazed by this unexpected turn of events, but I thought I should give him some more specific advice.
Every time I gave him a challenge, he'd write back a few days later and send another mountain of design roughs. This back and forth continued for a while, and then one day we received a letter saying "I'm enrolling in a design school in Tokyo, so I'll be moving there." When he told us that, there was really no choice. "In that case, why don't you come see us sometime?"
After that, he started visiting Studio 6 after classes and on his days off. We told him he wouldn't be able to start doing actual designs right away, and that school had to come first. In between, we asked him to learn about designing mecha for anime by copying various mecha designs. By completing these assignments, Mr. Ishigaki grew as a mecha designer. In that sense, you could call him a trueborn mecha designer of the Sunrise planning office.
Then there was another person, or rather, five people. They were an SF-loving dōjin group. (5)
I'm sure it was at Comiket. (6) As Inoue and I were going around the original dōjin area with Inoue, looking for promising talents, a group of lively young men were calling out to the attendees. They showed us some of the dōjinshi they'd made, and we got in touch with them afterwards.
This was Viscial Design, a group of five SF-loving university students who shared the same hometown, which has previously been mentioned in this magazine. It was interesting that each of them had a different special skill—one specialized in three-dimensional modeling, one was good at drawing, one was good with stories, one loved coming up with setting, and there was one who was good at leading the others. So they'd naturally arrived at a division of roles.
After classes, the members would gather at Studio 6 in twos and threes, breathing fresh air into our projects by giving us various opinions and design roughs based on the ideas we provided.
Among the members was Mr. Shigeru Horiguchi, or "Daimyōjin Horiguchi," who later served as setting manager on ∀ Gundam. Another was Mr. Takanori Tsukada, who's now a producer on things like the Armored Trooper Votoms OVA series. After graduating from university, the other members all progressed in their fields of expertise, joining game companies and three-dimensional modeling companies.
Thus, little by little, the membership of Studio 6 was expanded and reinforced. None of these people had any previous relationship with Sunrise, and in some cases they were close to being "former fans." In the same way, I was recruited by the planning desk chief Mr. (Masao) Iizuka when I visited what was then Sunrise Studio as a fan. Inoue, who was working in manufacturing at a toy company, was invited to join the planning office on the basis of a photo he'd happened to send. So I think the same sort of thing had actually happened with us.
Rather than simply copying the previous knowhow, we inherited personnel and experience, while gradually bringing in some fresh air... Perhaps it was accidental, but in this way, the Sunrise planning office continued to play the role of "Hajime Yatate."
What we couldn't forget, though, was that Yatate had to have a "core."
Whatever anyone says, planning has to proceed with an unwavering core, just as it did under Mr. Yamaura. And it's only when you have a leader with the backbone to display unyielding strength that the Sunrise planning office can become "Hajime Yatate." So would Studio 6 be capable of that?
At this point, it was still an open question. And in any case, our goal at the time was to create a new show to replace Gundam.
Even as we said that, though, the reality was that we were spending our days racking our brains over the tasks that were brought to us, like what kind of funnels to give the Nu Gundam in response to Director Tomino's orders, or what to do about the mecha design and story for the personal computer game Cruise Chaser Blassty.
And then Mr. Yamaura handed me a project like nothing I'd ever done before, which made me say "You want me to do that?!" It's a story that shows how the long-held conventional wisdom of the Japanese people still applies even in the anime industry...
(1) As mentioned in Kawahara's previous column, Sunrise didn't have an official Studio 6 at this point, so this became a nickname for the planning office. In the previous installment, however, she describes it as a "1LDK."
(2) I think this is probably Yoshihiro Taguchi.
(3) A4 paper size is 210mm by 297mm, roughly equivalent to the 8.5" by 11" size popular in the United States.
(4) Kawahara doesn't specify that she wrote this reply herself, but I think it's pretty obvious given that she was essentially Studio 6's office manager.
(5) A dōjinshi (同人誌) is a self-published work, similar to a Western "fanzine." The term dōjin refers to the fan groups that create them.
(6) Comic Market, or "Comiket," is a huge dōjinshi convention held in Tokyo twice each year, in August and December.
Mobile Suit Gundam is copyright © Sotsu • Sunrise. Everything else on this site, and all original text and pictures, are copyright Mark Simmons.
