“Today, one thing that’s changed, for sure, is the use of ketai - cell phones,” said the attractive, casually dressed Japanese woman, as she leaned forward over her cup of tea. “Now kids can access manga on their phones. They don’t even need to go into bookstores any more! They look at manga on those small screens. I’d much rather they read it on paper!” Her voice rose and broke into a musical peal of girlish laughter.
“Or else they buy them at the konbini – the convenience store,” added the middle-aged but young looking Japanese man seated next to her. “Only girls buy manga at bookstores these days.”
"Konbini! Really?” said the woman, shrilly. “I can’t believe it!”
We were seated around a low table in the atrium-like lobby of a hotel in the Shirokane district of Tokyo. The hotel was of that generation of hotels that sprang up in the years after the 1964 Olympics, when Tokyo began to come into its own on the world stage and needed facilities to cater to the influx of businessmen and tourists. On this day in March 2009, however, the crowd seated at the tables in the lobby drinking tea and nibbling cakes was almost exclusively Japanese. Through two-story plate glass windows, the lobby looked out over a formal Japanese garden, awash with green in the early Spring sunlight.
The woman was Naoko Takeuchi, author of Sailor Moon. She was dressed in sporty slacks and flat-soled shoes, looking much less the image of her youthful heroine – generally portrayed in skimpy skirts and high heels – than that of her more recent role in life, housewife and mother. In fact, she had recently given birth to her second child with her husband, the manga artist Yoshihiro Togashi. For all intents and purposes, in the fast-moving world of manga, she was retired, somewhat of a has-been, although the power of her work continued to attract fans globally. The youngish looking man who had accompanied Takeuchi-san to the interview was Kenji Osano, her editor from the Kodansha publishing house. On this occasion, my translator was one of Sylvie’s friends, Nadia, who spoke fluent Japanese and whose daughter was an avid Sailor Moon fan.
The planning for this particular interview had been some months in the works and had required the generous intervention of my colleagues from the large Japanese advertising agency with which I worked. Some favors had been pulled on my behalf with Kodansha, whose publications depended on advertising dollars from the agency’s clients. The connection had been strong enough, at least, to convince Kodansha to entice the semi-reclusive authoress to come to a two-hour interview with a gaijin executive and would-be writer whose project on Azabu Juban must have seemed to them fanciful at best.
So that’s how I found myself in the company of the woman whose manga masterwork, published more than fifteen years earlier, was still literally revered by zealous fans the world over. With a gentle elegance of manner and exquisite grace, she submitted patiently to what must have seemed at times like an incredibly naïve and decidedly monomaniacal line of questioning. Punctuated by ripples of laughter, her answers were both simple and honest, always considered if occasionally coy. She was the very image of a woman who was – in her own words – “on top of the world,” not because of the success and wealth her work had brought her, but because she was in fact living out her own adolescent dream: to be happily married with kids.
Any self-respecting otaku – the term used to describe the most die-hard manga fans, those who have a predilection for dressing up as their favorite characters and spending hours blogging about the minutiae of their favorite series – would have given their eye-teeth, if not some particularly valuable article of manga memorabilia, to have been seated where I was that afternoon. And yet, the sole focus of my inquiry was one that would have been for them of only marginal interest: the connection that Naoko Takeuchi had felt with my adopted neighborhood, Azabu Juban, and what part it had played in the inspiration for Sailor Moon.
It seemed natural enough to begin at the beginning, so I asked what had first brought her to the neighborhood.
“My university was nearby, in Shibakoen, close to the Tokyo Tower,” she began, referring to the distinctive red and white Eiffel Tower look-alike that appears often in the pages of her manga series. “We’d often come to Azabu Juban in the evenings to have dinner or to have fun with my friends. It was a very agreeable neighborhood.”
She paused, thinking back to the time when she was still studying to be a pharmacist, before her invention of a superhero in a school girl’s uniform brought her fame and fortune.
“I’ve always liked old-fashioned things,” she went on with a pensive air. “And then, there was the Tokyo Tower, which for me is kind of a symbol. I could see it from the university, but there was nowhere to live right around the tower itself, there are only office buildings. But from Azabu Juban, you can still see the Tokyo Tower. There’s kind of a nostalgic side to the Tokyo Tower and Azabu Juban. For me, they are like two symbols of the city.”
She turned to Osano-san. “You don’t think they’ll tear down the Tokyo Tower now that they’re building that new one, what’s it called? The Crystal Tower?”
“Sky Tower,” her editor corrected. She had inadvertently replaced the name of the new construction project, announced to be the tallest structure in metropolitan Tokyo, with the name of the imaginary palace that in the pages of Sailor Moon gets built upon the ashes of Azabu Juban, some centuries hence.
“I don’t think they’d tear down the Tokyo Tower,” Osano-san said, shaking his head.
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