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A foreigner links Japan to its soul

By Martin Fackler
Monday, February 19, 2007
International Herald Tribune:

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/02/19/news/journal.php

 
MATSUE, Japan: As snow silently fell on the miniature garden outside, Bon Koizumi sat on the same tatami mat floor where, more than a century before, his great-grandfather had penned some of Japan’s best-loved traditional folk tales. It was the perfect image of Japanese repose, except for the sepia-toned photo of Koizumi’s ancestor, whose bushy mustache and aquiline nose showed an unmistakably Western face.
His great-grandfather was Lafcadio Hearn, the Irish-Greek author whose wanderings brought him here after a career as a muckraking journalist in the United States. And while Hearn lived in Matsue only 15 months, this castle city on Japan’s remote coast still claims him as its favorite son, displaying his face on park statues, street signs and local brands of beer, sake and even instant coffee.
Hearn’s colorful descriptions of this medieval city and its ancient tales of gods and ghosts first put Matsue on the map in the 1890s. Even now, Matsue remains a popular tourist destination, thanks to Japan’s enduring fascination with Hearn, who married a local samurai’s daughter, took Japanese citizenship and died in Tokyo in 1904.
Many countries have favorite foreign observers, who are embraced for shedding light on the local culture in ways that native authors cannot.
For many Japanese, Hearn’s appeal lies in the glimpses he offers of an older, more mystical Japan lost during the country’s hectic plunge into Western- style industrialization and nation- building. His books are treasured here as a trove of traditional legends and folk tales that otherwise might have vanished because no Japanese had bothered to record them.
“At a time when Japan was obsessed with gaining material wealth, it took a foreigner to warn that it was losing something else,” said Koizumi, 45, a college professor and advisor to the city’s Hearn museum. “Lafcadio Hearn is a way for Japan to regain touch with its soul.”
That small museum — three rooms displaying old books, photos and manuscripts — and Hearn’s former house, where Koizumi sat as he spoke, are some of ten or so sites scattered about Matsue that appear in Hearn’s books. Others include Buddhist temples and a shrine with mossy stone fox statues.
Takeshi Hatano, a 44-year-old consultant from Tokyo who made an hour detour here during a business trip to a nearby city, said that only a foreigner had the foresight to preserve folk tales a century ago, when Japanese were dismissing them as superstitious.
“We grow up reading Yakumo Koizumi’s ghost stories,” Hatano said, using Hearn’s Japanese name. “He loved Matsue, and Japan, and told us to love them.”
Matsue appears so often in Hearn’s books that most Japanese naturally associate him with the city, even though Hearn cut short his stay here to escape the bitter winters. Hearn spent most of his 14 years in Japan in another provincial city, Kumamoto, and Tokyo before his death at age 54.
Matsue’s Hearn connection led the national government to proclaim it one of Japan’s three top international tourist cities, with the ancient capitals of Kyoto and Nara. City officials say last year, the Hearn sites helped draw 8.1 million tourists, mostly domestic, to this city of 150,000, nestled on a lake near the restless green Sea of Japan.
Matsue also promotes Hearn with festivals of Irish cooking, classes in Gaelic language and, next month, its first St. Patrick’s Day parade, rare in Japan. The 300-strong Hearn Society of Matsue invites scholars for conferences. The city also hosts a national speech contest for high school students to read Hearn’s stories in English.
The Matsue mayor, Masataka Matsuura, says Hearn gives his city a unique appeal in an era when chain stores and malls are making Japanese cities look more alike.
“Tourists come to find the same original essence of Japan, which Hearn found here,” said Matsuura.
Hearn’s writings show he was enchanted as soon as he set foot in Japan in 1890. Born in Greece to an Irish father and Greek mother, Hearn made his name writing for newspapers in Cincinnati and New Orleans about macabre murders and exotic local legends, but ran into social disapproval after marrying an African-American, scholars say.
He found Japan to be a crimeless, almost utopian society — a “fairyland” populated with “the most lovable people in the universe,” as he wrote. He looked for the source of Japan’s “strangeness and charm” in the ancestor worship of its native Shinto religion, whose most venerated shrine is in Izumo, near Matsue.
But it was Matsue, dominated by its “grim castle, grotesquely peaked,” as Hearn described it, that provided a perfect setting for his celebrated retellings of Japanese ghost stories. Generations of Japanese have been spooked by his images of haunted Matsue, says Morio Nishikawa, a professor at Kumamoto University who specializes in Hearn.
In one popular story, a phantom under a Matsue bridge hands a boastful samurai a box containing his son’s severed head. In another, a mother returns from the dead to feed her infant in a Matsue graveyard. Scholars say these were local legends that Hearn heard from his Matsue-born wife, Setsu, and wrote in English. They were later translated into Japanese.
As Hearn’s descendant, Koizumi has become Matsue’s de facto steward of Hearn’s memory. Besides the museum, Koizumi leads tours to Hearn-related sites and runs a summer camp for children to learn about Hearn. While growing up, his only connection to Hearn was the Irish folk tales his father told at bedtime. Koizumi started looking for ways to promote Hearn about 20 years ago because he was afraid young Japanese were forgetting him and Japan’s traditions.
“Children now are losing touch in their virtual world of video games,” he said.
Natsuko Omura, a sophomore at Matsue Kita High School, said there was some truth to these concerns. She said she and her friends had heard of Hearn but don’t talk about him or read his books.
“I don’t understand Hearn,” said Omura, 16, who won the city’s Hearn speech contest last year. “He’s a little strange.”

Reversible-Destiny Lofts

RDB.jpg

The Discomforts of Home: Reversible-Destiny Lofts by Arakawa and Gins

an exterior of reversible-destiny lofts (2005)
arakawa + gins
photo by masataka nakano

(this article first appeared in the december 19, 2005 issue of newsweek international)

An innovative new housing project in Tokyo aims to keep residents sharp by throwing them off balance. Duck!

Most people, in choosing a new home, look for comfort: a serene atmosphere, smooth walls and floors, a logical layout. Nonsense, says Shusaku Arakawa, a Japanese artist based in New York. He and his creative partner, poet Madeline Gins, recently unveiled a small apartment complex in the Tokyo suburb of Mitaka that is anything but comfortable and calming. “People, particularly old people, shouldn’t relax and sit back to help them decline,” he insists. “They should be in an environment that stimulates their senses and invigorates their lives.”

With that in mind, Arakawa and Gins designed a building of nine apartments known as Reversible Destiny Lofts. Painted in eye-catching blue, pink, red, yellow and other bright colors, the building resembles the indoor playgrounds that attract toddlers at fast-food restaurants. Inside, each apartment features a dining room with a grainy, surfaced floor that slopes erratically, a sunken kitchen and a study with a concave floor. Electric switches are located in unexpected places on the walls so you have to feel around for the right one. A glass door to the veranda is so small you have to bend to crawl out. You constantly lose balance and gather yourself up, grab onto a column and occasionally trip and fall.

Even worse, there’s no closet space; residents will have to find a way to live there, since the apartment offers only a few solutions. “You’ll learn to figure it out,” says Arakawa. Ten minutes of stumbling around is enough to send even the healthiest young person over the edge. Arakawa says that’s precisely the point. “[The apartment] makes you alert and awakens instincts, so you’ll live better, longer and even forever,” says the artist.

Completed in October, the apartments are now selling for $763,000 each — about twice as much as a normal apartment in that neighborhood. Arakawa and Gins have received dozens of inquiries and are now in the process of showing and interviewing potential buyers. They have a certain celebrity cachet: Jakucho Setouchi, an 83-year-old popular author and respected Buddhist nun, bought one on the top floor.

Built by Takenaka Corp., a leading Japanese contractor, the apartments actually meet every building-code requirement. The artists are not worried about possible injuries or lawsuits, but make sure each buyer understands “the concept” of the building before he or she signs the contract. This isn’t the first time Arakawa and Gins have created seemingly hazardous structures; 10 years ago the pair opened the Site of Reversible Destiny — Yoro Park, a theme park in Gifu, central Japan. The popular tourist spot consists of attractions designed to throw people off balance, made up of warped surfaces and confusing directions. Visitors often fall — but so far nobody has sued.

Arakawa and Gins hope the Reversible Destiny Lofts will catch on outside Japan as well. Each unit is made up of large concrete blocks that can be preassembled, making the Mitaka complex a prototype for mass production. In fact, Arakawa says, they are in talks with interested parties in Paris and New Jersey about building similar complexes. Their ultimate goal: to turn an entire community into a Reversible Destiny town, where people of all ages live, work, study and play in their unsettling buildings. “It will be a revolution,” says Arakawa. “This will change the way people live.” That is, assuming people don’t mind living with sloping floors and no closets.

(c) 2005 Newsweek, Inc.

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Flock upload!

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Kutsuki#2

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Meanwhile: English speakers are from Mars

Kumiko Makihara
Wednesday, December 6, 2006

Despite some predictions that Chinese will become the next worldwide lingua franca, the acceptance of English as the global language, spurred by the spread of the Internet, is here to stay. Fluent English is increasingly expected, rather than respected, in the business community.
Considering Japan’s economic prowess, and how many Japanese travel and work overseas, the country has a surprisingly low level of fluency in English. So rare is fluency here that my father was nicknamed “the alien” for speaking English and being Westernized. And this was in the 1990s, when he was the president of a major Japanese trading company where most of his business was conducted in English.
A growing divide between English speakers and non-English speakers doesn’t bode well for a big economic power like Japan. Yet a government committee’s proposal to introduce English into the elementary school curriculum has met surprising protest.
“Teaching English may be necessary in the global community, but as a Japanese, one must first be able to speak proper Japanese,” declared Bunmei Ibuki, the education minister, upon his appointment in September.
Ibuki’s remarks reflect a stubborn insular mentality still prevalent among Japan’s elite. After all, Japan managed to become one of the world’s largest economies without its people mastering much English. Foreign-language study doesn’t need to be a high priority for children, they say.
The influential author and mathematician Masahiko Fujiwara even says that Japanese should be proud that their scores on the Toefl, the test that assesses English proficiency of non-native speakers, rank among the lowest in Asia. That is the result of the country never having been colonized nor forced to speak another language, Fujiwara writes in his best-selling book, “Kokka no Hinkaku” or dignity of a nation.
While Japan slowly debates the issue, its neighbors and rivals in Asia have taken the practical road and acquiesced to the English-speaking trend.
Like Japan, none of them have historical or cultural ties to the English language. China, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand have all incorporated English into their elementary school curriculums.
Poor English skills didn’t matter much for Japanese in the 70s and 80s when global customers clamored to do business with any Japanese company, says John Shook, an auto consultant based in Michigan. “The competition now faced by Japanese company A is not another Japanese company, but Chinese or Korean or American. The embarrassingly low level of English spoken by Japanese managers, while a mere embarrassment before, is now a major business liability,” he says.
Opponents of introducing English into Japan’s curriculum argue that children should spend those precious hours studying their own complex tongue: a difficult language with layers of honorifics and thousands of written characters that linguists lament young people are increasingly unable to master. But the government proposal only calls for one hour of English per week in the 5th and 6th grades, hardly enough time to confuse children linguistically or do damage to their Japanese. And that hour could go far in impressing upon children that there is a world beyond their borders accessible by language.
To be sure there are major hurdles to implementing English classes in schools here. Only about 4 percent of elementary school teachers are currently certified to teach English. And few can pronounce the language like a native speaker. But until training is complete, schools could use audio visual materials. Better to get an early start.
To forge ahead, Japanese students will also have to overcome their shyness in trying out new words.
In this extremely conformist society, even children are reluctant to stand out by speaking better or worse than their peers, so few students are eager to speak up in class. It doesn’t help that English instruction in schools never encouraged speaking.
But any language student knows that on the road to fluency, it’s no shame, no gain.
I take advantage of this cultural aversion to shame sometimes by speaking English to my son in public when he misbehaves, increasing my volume until he gets into line. It usually works.
My son doesn’t want to stand out like an alien, after all. I myself would be happy to have him be from outer space in Japan, as long as he could communicate with the rest of the world.

Japan’s succession

International Herald Tribune

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/09/07/news/edlet.php)

Your report “Princess Kiko of Japan has a boy” (Sept. 5) employs language that serves to propagate an archaic and misogynist myth, by referring to Crown Princess Masako’s “inability to bear a boy” as a cause for the succession crisis surrounding the Japanese throne.Anyone with a basic comprehension of human biology knows that it is the father who determines the sex of the child, since only the father can provide sperm carrying the Y chromosome.Such imprecise language fuels the kind of misunderstanding that erodes women’s position in society and implicitly lends support to the kind of biased feudal system discussed in the article.

Catherine Ganzleben, Geneva

What it means to be Japanese

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2006
International Herald Tribune

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/09/07/opinion/edunoki.php

TOKYO The other day I received the results of a DNA test administered by the Genographic Project, a joint project by the National Geographic Society and IBM, whose goal is to analyze human DNA samples and understand the route which mankind took in populating the world.

After submitting my DNA – obtained by simply swabbing the inside of my mouth – along with about $100, I received two months later information about my paternal ancestors.

I’ve always been interested in trying to find the origins of my ancestry. I am a Japanese male, born in Japan. Both of my parents are ethnically Japanese and as far as I know, all my recent ancestors for at least the past three centuries were born in Japan.

The Genographic Project, which I happened to stumble upon while surfing the Internet, gave me an opportunity to satiate my curiosity about my ancestral origins.

The results of the DNA test told me that my earliest human male ancestor was born in Africa about 50,000 years ago.

About 45,000 years ago, another male ancestor came from somewhere in the Arabian Peninsula or present- day Iran.

Five thousand years later, it seems, another ancestor was born in Central Asia. Then, some time 35,000 years ago, my most recent identifiable ancient ancestor was born in an isolated region of central China while the Ice Age was in full swing.

China, according to the Genographic Project, is where my genetic journey ends, or rather, where my most recent ancestor comes from. I now know that genetically I am related to more than half of all present-day Chinese males and that there is someone at the moment living in China with whom I share a common ancestor dating back some 1,000 years.

Despite knowing all this, however, I have no idea when or how my paternal ancestor came over to the Japanese islands. Perhaps he was a merchant who came over from China to trade with the native Japanese and decided to settle permanently in Japan.

In the city of Fukuoka, where my father’s family comes from, there is an area called Tojin-machi, or Tang- Town, Tang referring to China’s ancient Tang dynasty. I wonder if, many centuries ago, my ancestor came over from China and set up shop in this particular area of Kyushu.

Or maybe he was some kind of swashbuckling pirate who roamed the coasts of China and Japan and was eventually shipwrecked on Japanese shores.

I could go on and on speculating. Interestingly, the research of the Genographic Project tells us that most of the paternal ancestors of the present-day ethnic Japanese come from all over Asia. Many, however, do not have the same gene that I have which indicates an origin of somewhere aside from central China, such as Southeast Asia or the Korean Peninsula.

Some conservative elements in Japanese society take pride in the alleged homogeneity of the Japanese “race,” and ardent nationalists and racists look disparagingly upon other ethnic groups. Such DNA test results should make them think twice about what they say or think about other peoples – or about themselves, for that matter.

If we employ notions of racial superiority, look down upon other ethnic groups or consider them as “others,” we are in effect insulting our ancestors, who traveled far and wide over tens of thousands of years under unimaginably harsh conditions to get to where we are now.

We may be Japanese according to notions of ethnicity and citizenship, but genetics tells us beyond doubt that we are all related to the peoples of China, Korea and the rest of Asia. And, ultimately, all of us in the human race are Africans.

Intensive Japanese Pop Culture

If you are thinking of travelling to the Land of Wa anytime soon, you really should educate yourself on the subtleties of:

1) Bowing and showing repect

2) Eating out at a Sushi bar

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdzTOxMiFIQ

Brain training takes aging Japan by storm

Sun Apr 9, 2006 3:23 AM ET

By George Nishiyama

TOKYO (Reuters) – Tamako Kondo says 10 minutes of exercise every morning keeps her fit.

But the 80-year-old doesn’t hit the treadmill or take aerobics classes. Instead, she sits at a desk, pencil in hand, and tackles simple arithmetic and other quizzes, part of a “brain training” program that has taken Japan by storm.

Bookshops now have separate sections for workbooks with the exercises and video game versions are selling like hot cakes among the growing ranks of older Japanese who hope the drills will reinvigorate their gray matter.

“I want to delay becoming senile as much as possible,” said Kondo, who lives in a Tokyo home for the elderly.

“I know someone who gets things that happened recently mixed up with tales from the war days. I don’t want to become like that,” added Kondo, after attending a weekly “Healthy Brain Class” course run by the Shinagawa ward in Tokyo.

At the class, 30 students — all over 70 — perform the drills for half-an-hour once a week and are given more exercises to work on at home, every day for six months.

Scientists say a daily dose of such exercises improves the memory and even the condition of dementia patients.

“I wanted to make a contribution to society through my findings, to tell the world that you can train the brain,” said Ryuta Kawashima, professor of brain science at Tohoku University, whose theory has been featured in many books and video games.

“But I didn’t think it would become this big.”

BRAIN TRAIN GAMES

For video game makers eager to expand their clientele beyond youths as the number of children dwindles in Japan’s rapidly aging society, software featuring Kawashima’s brain-training program has proved to be a huge success.

Nintendo has sold a combined total of more than 3.3 million of its “Brain Training for Adults” released in May 2005 and a sequel that came out last December. Its portable DS consoles on which the games are played are constantly out of stock in shops.

“We see people who may have been to our store, but probably never to the video game section, come and buy them,” said a sales clerk at the game section of a major electronics shop in Tokyo.

Nintendo also said about a third of those who bought the games were 35 or older.

“We wanted to reach out to those who were not interested in video games … But we did not expect such success,” said Ken Toyoda, a Nintendo spokesman.

“We were able to ride the ‘brain craze’.”

Rival Sony Computer Entertainment, which has the “Brain Trainer” using Kawashima’s theory for its PlayStation Portable (PSP) console, is holding “Video Game Workshops for Grown-ups”, in a bid to appeal to older generations.

At one workshop on a Saturday afternoon, 15 participants, aged between 30 and 63, listened intently as a 63-year-old instructor took them step-by-step through how to play games, including the “Brain Trainer”, on the PSP.

Sachiko Kumagai, who had come to check out the brain-training game, was impressed after the 90-minute class.

“My forgetfulness really got bad after I turned 50 … With this, you can see the results right away, so it’s handy,” said the 55-year-old who works for a local government office.

The players are given grades on their performance on the PSP game, while on the Nintendo version, they are given their “brain age”, ranging from the optimal 20 to 80, the worst.

ELEVATE INNER SELF

Other toys and puzzles seen as stimulating the brain have also benefited from the boom.

Sales of Rubik’s cube, the famous cube-shaped puzzle, increased by fivefold last year in Japan to around 500,000.

“The brain-training phenomenon has had an effect … We purposely put ‘IQ’ on the package so that it would appeal to grown-ups,” said Kazuo Usui, a marketing official at Megahouse Corp, which sells the puzzles in Japan.

Those involved in the phenomenon agree that the interest in brain training comes from a desire to minimize the inevitable effects of aging among Japan’s graying population, but cited differing reasons for it becoming a national obsession.

Nearly one in five Japanese is aged 65 or older and the ratio is expected to rise to one in four over the next decade due to a rock-bottom birth rate and improved longevity.

Brain scientist Kawashima said people were fed up with materialism and were eager to seek other means of fulfillment.

“There is the issue of aging society, but more than that, I think people want to train and elevate their inner self.”

Nintendo’s Toyoda said it was part of a health-conscience craze which has been around for years now.

“Health consciousness is branching out … It’s a trend.”

The Award for Best Satanic Rabbit Goes to …

April 2, 2006
(New York Times)

By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
Tokyo

DAI SATO rarely wears suits, but he was in a good one last Saturday afternoon, a black salaryman special with a nice white shirt. On him, though, the get-up looked slept in, dusty and too tight — perfect, in other words, for the occasion: the Tokyo International Anime Fair, the sublimely dorky annual convention for Japanese animation. As the crown prince of anime screenwriting, Mr. Sato, at 36, is a consummate creator of the characters, busty schoolgirls and shaggy-haired heroes, that inspire Asian teenagers to devote their irreplaceable youth to the worship of cartoons. He hadn’t shaved. He was smoking American Spirits. He looked rumpled, and obscurely amused, as he almost always does.

The vast halls of Tokyo Big Sight — the Death Star-sized convention center that housed the fair, with its sprawling trade show, closed-door industry symposiums and awards ceremony — were decked with images of exuberant candy-colored anime figures. As they gazed down on the hundred thousand or so fans who ambled among the booths, their googly baby eyes (the centerpiece of the anime aesthetic), seemed to monitor the proceedings. Under this scrutiny, Mr. Sato worked up a peculiar merriment, hopping around in a boxer’s victory pose, and chanting, “Hai, hai, hai.” Yes, yes, yes — as if in assent to all that this trippy universe has offered him so far: money, girls, fans, fun, artistic credibility, international acclaim, superb pot and a working relationship with Radiohead.

What more could a guy want? And now Mr. Sato had arrived at Big Sight so that Shintaro Ishihara, the brash reactionary governor of Tokyo, could pronounce this slacker dude par excellence a credit to the great nation of Japan.

If an anime featured this meeting of Mr. Sato and Mr. Ishihara, the affable Mr. Sato, who is happy to share anime’s wealth with the rest of the world, would almost certainly have the voice of a lovable Smurf, at ease in the global village. By contrast, Mr. Ishihara, who is known for ferocious nationalism, would require a basso profundo, the kind reserved for giant warlike robots.

But life isn’t anime, or not always, and Mr. Ishihara may have more in common with the hip-nerd artists at Big Sight than it would initially seem. In 1955, at 23, Mr. Ishihara became the Jack Kerouac of Japan, publishing the scandalous novel, “Season of the Sun,” which depicted the debauchery of rich college students after the war. With his brother, Yujiro, a movie star in the Brando mode, Mr. Ishihara drew followers who dressed in Hawaiian shirts and called themselves the Sun Tribe. Sure, he later turned chauvinistic, both in the best-selling book he helped author, “The Japan That Can Say No,” and on the political stage, where he exhorts Japan to stand up to the United States and assert its intrinsic superiority. But Japanese pride, he believes, should be inclusive: business, technology and literature, and the nation’s indigenous postmodern art forms, too. As he said Saturday, of anime, “The Japanese are inherently skilled at visual expression and detailed work.”

Thus, the Tokyo International Anime Fair, of which Mr. Ishihara is chairman. Here, anime’s creators are enjoined to come up with inventive, culturally salutary and above all export-worthy cartoon concepts that will bring honor to Japan and, once and for all, unseat Mickey Mouse.

“I hate Mickey Mouse,” Mr. Ishihara pronounced acidly from the podium on Saturday afternoon. “He has nothing like the unique sensibility that Japan has.”

That Japanese-cool-is-the-new-Japanese-car ideology is fine with Mr. Sato, as most things are. If he sees the creative ascendancy of Korea and China as one day making Japanese anime obsolete, and if he moreover thinks that’s a good thing, he doesn’t emphasize those views here, where patriotism is as much the order of the day as satanic-looking bunnies and hip-hop bounty hunters.

He, and the like-minded colleagues he greets as he makes his way through the crowd, don’t see themselves as belonging particularly to their country; if they have an affiliation at all, it’s to the confederacy that the Japanese call otaku — the vast network of slovenly, asocial and diffident fanboys who spend their days watching anime on DVD; reading the heroic, erotic, cutesy or literary comic books known as manga; and surfing the Internet. The otaku are a proud group, in their way, but they’re not used to getting medals of honor from state officials.

Mr. Sato mused on the award he was there to receive: best screenplay, for “Eureka seveN,” which chronicles the adventures of a teenage boy, a pilot girl named Eureka and a traveling group of mercenaries. “Is it really that exciting to be appreciated by the regime?” he asked, through a translator. Triumphantly thrusting his arms in the air, he rendered his surprise answer: Hai, hai, hai.

AMONG the most dedicated fans of anime, it has become popular to dress up as favorite characters — not just in T-shirts and masks but in wigs, body makeup, wax prosthetics and lifelike elf ears. The spectacle of misfits turned out as sexpots and musclemen is a considerable part of the allure of most otaku conventions. But the practice, known as cosplay, for costume play, was prohibited at Big Sight. As a result, there were no giant Sailor Moons or Dark Elf Gatekeepers, and the fans seemed more obsessive than playful.

One young man sat trembling on the floor near the entrance to the trade-show arena, where he rocked rhythmically while clutching the pink DVD cover for a show called “Pretty Cure.” Someone had signed it: perhaps one of the voice actresses. The fan let a reporter hold the valuable insert for an instant, then snatched it back and continued his rocking.

Elsewhere, fans pressed in to see Mr. Sato, who was appearing with the actor Kouji Yusa to promote their latest television show, “Ergo Proxy.” Mr. Yusa, who resembles a young David Cassidy, lends his voice to the character of Vincent Row, a government worker from the provinces whose “listless” exterior, Mr. Sato explained, conceals internal reserves of “violent energy and wildness.” The fans, most of them female, were loving Vincent. Miwa Ishikawa, 23, and Fumiko Fujiwara, 27, had come to the fair just for him. “Vincent seemed weak at first,” Ms. Ishikawa said, giggling and blushing. “But the more we get to know him, the more we find he’s full of deep mysteries.”

“Ergo Proxy” is a post-apocalyptic sci-fi story of humans and androids living together in the domed city of Romdo, “a paradise that doesn’t require emotions,” as the trailer puts it. But a murder, a virus and a monster all conspire to defile paradise, induce emotions and force a mayhem in which it’s unclear who is real and who is robot. This show, Mr. Sato explained, marks a departure from past projects because it’s openly about adults and “mature” themes, including what the English-language Web site Anime News Network calls “sex, drugs and extreme graphic violence.”

“My anime has grown up with me,” Mr. Sato explained. In the past, when he wrote for younger characters, he entertained himself with references for an older generation: the hero of “Eureka seveN,” for example, is Renton, named for a character in “Trainspotting”; his father, Adrock, is named for the Beastie Boy; and a helpful duo named Jobs and Woz are named for Steven P. Jobs and Stephen Wozniak of Apple.

All of this Mr. Sato is willing to explain, and patiently, but he does so somewhat by rote. It’s plainly no great pleasure anatomizing anime for people outside otaku culture; the plots and characters sound stupid when you spell them out, and it’s much more comfortable for fanboys to be around people who just get it. But Mr. Sato indulges the naïve questions because he is determined that his work find an audience outside Japan, among what he refers to as the “foreign otaku.” Already American audiences know his work from “Cowboy Bebop” and “Ghost in the Shell” on the Cartoon Network. Where Mr. Ishihara’s sloganeering concerns Japan’s primacy, Mr. Sato’s rallying cry comes closer to “Otaku of the world unite.”

That call would please Alex Stamoulis and Richard Anderson, two American college students who were making their way through the thick crowd. Mr. Stamoulis, a 20-year-old student at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., has been an anime fan since he was a child. A shy man with a convincingly otaku demeanor, he seemed kind but nervous, and in a rush to talk about his favorite shows.

In studied contrast, Mr. Anderson, the 24-year-old president of the anime club at Drexel University in Philadelphia, had a point to make. “American fans have made anime into our own,” he said. “We have totally assisted Japanese culture. American anime artists really know their stuff.” Moreover, he said: “Japanese anime fans never leave their houses. But I leave my house. I even came to Japan! American fans are more social. I see being into anime just as another normal thing I do, like belonging to a fraternity.”

As the presentation of “Ergo Proxy” wrapped up, the fans of Vincent the listless g-man gathered their things to leave. Had they found it disillusioning to see their hero in the flesh? “Nah,” said Ms. Ishikawa, newly blasé. “We know this is anime, you know. We don’t think it’s real.”

MR. SATO and a laid-back entourage from his production company, Frognation, filed into the auditorium for the final ceremony, which some had promised would be the Academy Awards of anime. At a glance, it was clear the event had been overbilled; most of the audience wore jeans, and the stage, with its amateurish lighting scheme, looked like the kind of place where an American charlatan might hold a self-improvement weekend.

The first awards went to animators whose work had appeared as far back as the 1920’s. Several bohemian-looking elders emerged from the wings as images from their work played on a monitor. Black-and-white woodland animals jumped around and spoke Japanese like children. A waiter went to pop a Champagne cork and his head popped off.

But no one laughed. As the animation got increasingly artsy and curious, that absence of laughter grew harder to understand. Tim Burton-style Claymation cats fell into puddles and a depressing pencil-sketched crow donned a top hat. Finally in an anime called “Odeki,” a doltish cartoon man sprouted a boil on his behind that grew longer and longer, and kept getting caught in places like the spokes of his bicycle wheel. It was gross-out humor of the best kind. But no one laughed, or winced, or made a sound. The artist who created the piece, an irrepressible Osakan named Naoki Yamaji, was given something called the special award. The crowd clapped politely.

Acceptance speeches for the awards ranged in tone from modest to downright self-abasing. Kenichi Yoshida, who won for best character design, told the audience, “I’ve always considered my design line to be rather lukewarm, neither low-key nor flashy, but receiving this award has installed in me some confidence.” Another winner, Sumito Sakakibara, sold out his own film, “Kamiya’s Correspondence,” in its very tagline: “This is the first memorable ‘Neo-Realist Moving Manga’ (though it’s not a very successful attempt. …).”

When Mr. Sato was called to the stage and given the award for best screenplay he took it, typically, in stride. He grinned. Like all the other winners, he shook hands with, and bowed to, a designated local captain of art or industry while he accepted a looped trophy of hand-blown glass, whose shape is meant to symbolize, among other things, a “ring of global expansion,” or so the program notes clarified. “Eureka seveN” received, in all, three awards — Mr. Sato’s, as well as best character design and best television anime. (The Cartoon Network promptly acquired the show for an April airdate.) The gang at Frognation seemed pleased. Everyone, in fact, seemed pleased, in an extremely understated way.

But then Governor Ishihara appeared. He looked tired. Perhaps it was the two days he had just spent talking about the anime industry. Still, he marshaled his dark charm. “This is a place for business,” he began. “I’ve been at the trade show booths, and met people who are doing anime alone. What they do begins as manga, then becomes anime, and each needs our support.”

“But too much anime looks alike,” he said. It really seemed to bother him. He cautioned anime creators to think about how they’re positioning their audience. “Can’t you guys work on a story a bit more?”

“I don’t play games or watch anime,” he continued, gathering momentum. “I saw one or two. Some are interesting, but I’m not going to quit my job to go be an anime creator.”

He paused to tell a fable about a sinking ship on which some passengers fed tainted food to a cat. It was a parable about the cold war, he said; anime, he believed, should tackle such important themes. He continued, “We’re so clever, so used to doing things the so-called correct way. But why don’t you really try to raise the level of this art form? Can’t you bring in some interesting thoughts? Practice some concision, as in haiku.”

With that, he hit his stride. “We can go further,” he urged the assembly. “We can make something that’s more revolutionary. You’re talented people. Let’s make something extraordinarily Japanese. That’s what I’m hoping for.”

No one talked back, but many looked uneasy. Later, Takayuki Matsutani, the president of the Association of Japanese Animations, told reporters to ignore the statements of Mr. Ishihara, but it was impossible. In the meantime, Mr. Sato let the speech roll off him. He lit up a cigarette, and headed back to the studio, where he would once again control his own animated universe.