The Notenki Memoirs: Studio Gainax And The Men Who Created Evangelion

By Yasuhiro Takeda (2002) Japanese edition:

• Photography: Kazuyoshi Sakai • Yasuhiro Takeda Illustration: Mitsue Aoki • Writing Assistance: Yu Sugitani (EHRGEIZ), Yasuhiro Kamimura (GAINAX), Takayoshi Miwa (PAQUET) • ISBN 4847014073 • © 2002, Wani Books

English edition:

• Translation & adaptation: Javier Lopez, Jack Wiedrick, Brendan Frayne, Kay Bertrand, Gina Koerner, Hiroaki Fukuda and Sheridan Jacobs • Design & layout: Natalia Reynolds • Cover Design: Jason Babler • ISBN 1–4139–0234–0 • English text ©2005 published by A.D. Vision, Inc., under exclusive license from Wani Books, Co. (Tokyo)

Editor’s preface

This unofficial electronic edition is derived from the 1st book printing by ADV, and formatted in Pandoc Markdown; the source code is available, as is a PDF1 A 200MB scan is available for anyone who wishes to check the original print book against this edition. Many of the formatting conventions differ - for example, in the book, endnotes are divided into biographical endnotes and non-biographical endnotes, and the latter appear as a consolidated section in the middle of the book while the former appear in the last section of the book; in this ebook, the notes appear intermingled as endnotes (although one can tell the difference: all biographical endnotes start with the name in bold). The convention report in the middle

1The PDF is generated by obtaining a copy of the gwern.net website repository and running markdown2pdf --xetex docs/2002-notenki-memoirs.page.

1 of the text was originally formatted as multiple columns on a page with no whitespace and photographs inserted out of order; I have taken the liberty of interpreting large text as section titles and converting the run-on paragraphs to list items. Similarly, no attempt has been made to preserve the exact formatting on the page of the 2 linked chronologies. No attempt has been made to be slavishly exact to the prose (while strictly preserving the sense): spelling errors are rife, and especially in sections set after GAINAX’s move to Tokyo, there are sentences where the translator(s) apparently changed their mind half-way through; such sentences are silently copyedited to something more sensible. The Japanese edition of The Notenki Memoirs has a number of errors; working with Google Translate to check the birth-year corrections, they seem to have been already incorporated into the ADV edition. Links to Wikipedia and the Internet are my own insertion, as are the additional endnotes & commentary signed ’—Editor’.

Preface

In the summer of 2001, we hosted the 40th annual Japan Sci-Fi Convention (SF2001) at the Makuhari Messe center in Chiba, Japan. It had been a full 20 years since DAICON 3, the very first sci-fi con we’d hosted, and it’s going on 24 years since we first became active (as they say) in the biz. In the beginning, I was a kid who didn’t think much about anything, who preferred the pleasures of the moment to any long-term uncertainties about the future. I was just a regular kid. What changed me was a series of encounters, an unbroken procession of chance meetings that thrust me from my young and vigorous but ultimately clueless boyhood, and transformed me into the man I am now. More than anything, it was DAICON 3 that played the greatest role in many of these encounters, and now here we were again, hosting SF2001. I guess you could say the convention marked an era in my own career, so I decided to treat the occasion as an opportunity to synthesize the past two decades into the form of a record of my youth. Naturally, most of the things I remember happened to me personally, so those are the things I mainly write about. And there’s a distinct possibility that this account of mine may not even be accurate, in the sense of being based on hard, objective facts. At the very least I’m trying not to write any outright lies, so please forgive me of any faults in my memory, or if others happen to remember things differently. That’s just the nature of the beast. I hope this book will serve as an aid to readers who want to learn the truth behind the rumors of how we got from DAICON to GAINAX, as well as infor-

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