Yoshiro Kataoka: Expressing Society's "Trends" Through Musicals

I never imagined such a social phenomenon would occur. However, I had a clear conviction that this was something good. While it was Chairman Makoto Matsuda of the stage production company (Nelke Planning) who suggested going with this manga, what clicked for me was the realization that there weren't really any other "sports musicals." There are hardly any even on Broadway. There's "High School Musical" about a high school basketball team, but that's about it. I thought it was interesting and fresh.

I thought making sports into a musical was new, but for Mr. Matsuda, it was because "the characters are incredibly popular." Moreover, the stage is entirely male, with no women. Also, tennis costumes show a fair amount of skin. That might be a reason too. So, I think a baseball musical would probably be difficult to make a hit (laughs).

Opening day was April 30, 2003. At that time, the audience was only about 60% full. But during the intermission, the women in the audience rushed out to the lobby and were all making calls on their mobile phones. Apparently, the reproducibility of the characters was very high, and they were shouting into their phones things like, "My favorite character is right there on stage!"

Yes. At the beginning, the entire tennis club team stands in silhouette, and I heard a collective sigh from the audience at that moment.

Anime characters are designed to be distinguishable by their external appearance, such as hairstyle, height difference, and body type. When we showed the silhouettes with that in mind, there was a sigh. And when the lights came on, there was a huge cheer, so I knew this would work.

As an acting method, it is often said that "playing a role" and "becoming a character" are different. Among actors, I think there are those who bring the role closer to themselves and those who bring themselves closer to the role. I told them, "Please become the character; it's okay for your individuality to come out after that."

I think that's because the original work by Takeshi Konomi depicts the characters with clear distinctions. In this work, each person strikes a "mie" (a dramatic pose), and the way they strike it is different for every character. Thinking that if we created these "mie" forms, they would become those characters, we took postures, movements, and actions during dialogue from the manga and conveyed them to the actors.

Ultimately, it was about not deviating from the principles of a musical. The expression of the musical reached nearly its current form in the 1920s and entered its golden age during the era of Rodgers & Hammerstein in the 40s and 50s. It is fundamentally a theatrical style created by Broadway, and I was very conscious that we must not break this.

When I was 37, I went to study abroad in my long-admired America for the first time. At the time, I was in charge of sales at an advertising agency called Tokyu Agency while also being involved in anime planning. Studying abroad had always been a dream that I couldn't fulfill during my university days, but an executive at Asatsu-DK asked me if I wanted to come to their company and produce anime. So, I said, "Please give me about a month and a half between leaving my current job and starting," and I went to New York for a five-week short-term study program. I lived in a university dormitory on Staten Island, took the bus to Broadway by myself, and spent all my time in theaters from 42nd to 50th Street. That was the starting point. I can still vividly remember the works I saw there.

In that experience, I felt firsthand the depth of the American entertainment industry—how it swallows everything up and surrenders itself to popular appeal, yet very new things are constantly being born.

I had been watching theater since my student days, but as I became involved in anime for work and thought about things like popular appeal, I began to think it might be difficult to achieve that same level of popular appeal with straight plays (non-musical theater).

Of course, I couldn't understand all the English in the authentic musicals. But I understood them. To begin with, I think the sensory functions humans use to receive a musical are far more numerous than for a straight play. There is rhythm. There is music. There is dance. I think it's the easiest form of stage expression to understand. What I thought was amazing about Broadway was this aspect of "I don't understand the words, but I get it."

Exactly. After experiencing that and returning to Japan, I thought that making a musical out of something I personally found most interesting would be the way I could enjoy musicals the most. That's how I created the "Saint Seiya" musical (1991).

At the time, the president of Bandai was a man named Makoto Yamashina, who was one year my senior and a graduate of the Faculty of Economics. He liked musicals, and for some reason, we became friends.

So, I approached him about wanting to make a musical out of an anime based on a manga, and specifically using a very timely subject like "Saint Seiya." At the time, the Saint Seiya figures released by Bandai were hugely popular with boys, so there was a clear justification for the stage adaptation. Also, at Comiket, there were many doujinshi manga based on Saint Seiya by female fans. When I mentioned that stage audiences are overwhelmingly female, President Yamashina said he would handle all the rights licensing on their end.

I believe Japanese manga has a system where new things are constantly being created. Only in Japan are so many manga mass-produced and published every day, and provided with venues for publication, including Comiket. Furthermore, in Japan, you can become a manga artist without studying plaster drawing at school. As long as you have paper and a pencil, you don't need anything else.

I believe manga born from such an environment captures the "trendy" sensibilities found in the corners of society and discovers the new seeds of the next generation. Manga has a system to scoop those up. Therefore, things that are well-received by manga readers should be well-received by a larger mass audience.

Conversely, it is very difficult for adults on the ordering side to plan an original anime or create a drama themselves while aiming for what's trendy. Instead, I thought I should simply play the role of taking what a single creator expressed in a manga and translating it into another form.

Exactly. It was after I joined Asatsu-DK and started creating works specifically with people from television stations. What the TV people said was, "We actually don't create anything ourselves." They were just expanding on trendy topics they found in the streets.

Ultimately, it won't be a hit unless it captures some kind of trend in society. Of course, if it's only about the trend, it might end up just being about provocative expressions, so I think it's best when universal truths are told in a trendy way.

The biggest thing was definitely the presence of friends. I witnessed for the first time that there are people in the world with wealth beyond imagination (laughs).

He was the grandson of the founder of Bridgestone, and next to the Iikura-Katamachi intersection in Azabu, there was a section—or rather, a whole hill—where the family lived (laughs). Right in the middle of a prime location, there was a proper pool next to a spacious lawn garden. I thought it was a different world. Mr. Narumo built a large studio with thick concrete soundproofing next to the pool and had a 32-channel mixing table, which was the latest at the time. He would write his own scores, perform 32 different parts, and layer them to create a single tape.

More than being surprised by the wealth, I realized that there are people who can do what they want exactly the way they want to, and that it's okay to do so. This was a great lesson for me.

I think they will spread throughout the world in the next 10 years or so. A dedicated 2.5D theater has already been built in Shanghai. Since there is only one permanent theater in Japan, it may only be a matter of time before China overtakes us.

In my sense, Japanese manga and anime have become the standard of entertainment for pure-hearted people all over the world. There are probably people who can't get used to the Hollywood movie style. In such cases, I think young people who are open to new things find Japanese manga and anime interesting. A good example is the Russian figure skater Medvedeva dancing in a perfect copy of the "Sailor Moon" costume. In that way, there are many people around the world who purely enjoy Japanese-made anime. Since these are stage adaptations of those, they should be accepted anywhere in the world.

I was involved in the establishment of the "Japan 2.5-Dimensional Musical Association," and as a goal in its prospectus, I listed the "cataloging of 2.5D musicals." This is already done on Broadway and in London, where the specs of a work are made public for people who want to perform that musical. In other words, we clarify all the specs, such as where the licensing window is, how much the license fee is, whether there is an English script, whether karaoke music can be provided, and how many male and female characters there are. If we do that, drama clubs at high schools and universities around the world will say, "We can do Tenimyu too."

2.5D musicals have become established as a genre, but because the development was so rapid, I think they are currently at a plateau. There are some works falling into low-quality mass production or repetitive patterns, and there are works being made by people who don't know the grammar of musicals. That might be a new possibility, but I think the appeal will be broader and it will last longer if it's made while properly following the grammar. After all, a style that has been refined over time has the power to repel any stones thrown at it. With that feeling, for "Prison School," which was performed this year, I asked Masafumi Hata, a director I have high expectations for.

But for me now, there is work to be done beyond producing anime or stage works. It's the problem of the anime industry that raised me.

The current industrial structure of the anime industry is very harsh on the production frontline. Even famous directors with hit works have surprisingly low incomes. Japanese anime is celebrated all over the world and the market is expanding, but the people on the frontline are not receiving compensation commensurate with that.

I have worked on the ordering side of anime for 40 years, and we have continued interactions where we say, "Make one episode of anime for 17 million yen," and they say, "Yes, understood." You could even say I've turned a blind eye to how the money is actually circulating on the frontline. Therefore, I want to provide solid support for things like negotiating the order amount from the frontline side and for contracts. There are always gaps in the secondary use of content. There are things the frontline side can request regarding the acquisition of secondary use licenses. It's a job to help with such negotiations and contracts. Recently, the number of studios relying on me has increased, and I feel I must take this seriously.

Yes, and this is exactly what I learned in the Department of Law. There are lawyers who are experts in copyright law, but they don't necessarily work on the side of the anime or manga production frontline; they are often on the ordering side. Therefore, we also have to understand copyright law, corporate law, and commercial law in general to some extent. So, only now do I find myself wishing I had studied more during my student days (laughs).