November 2016 Interview 14

-You worked throughout the 80s, but what was your impression of multi-dimensional sales like media mix?

H: Media mix is ​​well established now, but it was still weak in the 80s.
Oh, that's only for the works I was involved in. There may have been some successful works.
But compared to now, it was low-key.

-I heard that in the 60s there were quite a few strict labor policies, like "We'll crush the labor union at all costs."
For example, I heard that the chairman and vice-chairman of the labor union were under house arrest.
What was your impression of the labor measures?

H: Toei was the most notable. I didn't hear anything about anything else.

-I wonder if Okawa (the first president of Toei) just hated (the labor union).

H: That may be so.
The people in the Toei Animation labor union should know more about that story than anyone else.

-On the other hand, at Mushi Productions, the union worked hard after the company went bankrupt.

H: The labor union rebuilt Mushi Productions.

-I asked Mr. A (Chairman of Eisanro) about that, but he said, "I've given all the documents to Mr. Harada, so I have nothing to say to you."

H: All labor unions, including Eisanro, are getting older.
Everyone is pretty old, so I understand their feelings (of not wanting to deal with them), but I think that if we don't pass on the stories in various ways, they will disappear from history.

-I think that the rebuilding of Mushi Productions by the labor union in the 1970s was particularly important.
I feel that it's unprecedented for a labor union to rebuild under its own management. (*It does exist in the world of live-action films.)

H: There are many different ways of looking at that event, depending on the position of the person at the time.
Eiichi Yamamoto (director of "Belladonna") wrote a book about it from the perspective of a non-union member.

-You wrote in your book that "the labor union destroyed Mushi Productions."

H: Right. So it's all kinds of things.
I think that, including that, the people who have been here for a long time are craftsmen, and many of them don't talk about the past unless they can build a trusting relationship with the person they're interviewing, but if we don't leave behind what happened back then, we'll lose all our records.
I've uploaded a lot of materials to the online version of Anime Report (https://anirepo.exblog.jp/i3/), but the rest are still in the warehouse.
It's a pain to scan them all, but I think we should keep recording them.
I think if future generations can access them, they could be a clue for research.

When a large museum was holding a major retrospective memorial exhibition for Yoshifumi Kondo (a former Eisanro union member and Studio Ghibli animator), I had a lot of old Eisanro materials that Kondo had given me, so I offered to lend them to the curator, but there was no reply.
I have valuable materials on "Tsuru no Sugomori" (originally written by Takakura Teru), which was produced independently by the labor union at the time, but if the museum rejects them, I won't be able to share them with anyone else.
In the end, in academia and general research, discussions often proceed as if citizen and labor union movements don't exist, or don't exist at all. A freelance researcher I know also said this.