YOUR THOUGHTS ON JAPAN TODAY?
Tokyo / Rei Rei (Age 41)

Director Tomino, I’ve been a fan of yours ever since I saw your interview at the Suginami Animation Museum. Your words, “What we need is common sense,” left a deep impression on me; they gave me hope that even across different industries, there are things that carry over, points where we can truly understand one another.

Now, there’s something I would very much like to ask you. You are now over eighty years old, which means you know Japan’s war firsthand, and I’d like to hear what you have to say about it.
Last year, there were all sorts of ceremonies and events marking the eightieth anniversary of the war’s end. Attention seemed to turn, once again, to reexamining and coming to know this thing called “war,” something that is fading from so many people’s memories, with those who know speaking, and those who don’t listening. I believe you, too, have things that must be said about war, and that this is precisely why you’ve made anime and novels capable of reaching younger generations.

Since the recent election, it feels as though more and more commentary, in the newspapers and on the radio, has been voicing the worry that “Japan is finally going to start a war.” The Prime Minister, at last, seems to be after constitutional revision, military expansion, nuclear armament, the transformation of the Self-Defense Forces into a proper military, conscription, using the culling of bears as a foothold to alter the regulations around firearms and their discharge, the opening of hostilities, and, as relations with other Asian countries sour, a desire for subordination to the United States.

With anxiety stoked day after day and society growing ever more divided, please tell us your thoughts, hopes, and wishes for the Japan of today.

As you say, I have lived for more than eighty years. That said, the Pacific War ended just before I turned four, so I can hardly claim to have any real “war experience.” Even so, among my university classmates there were atomic bomb survivors, and I heard things like, “I was living in Nagasaki when the flash came,” and “I was in Hiroshima.” My own experience may amount to very little, but having that visceral sense of “someone who survived the thick of that is right here now” has, I think, allowed me to think about war at least somewhat realistically.

That is the feeling I have tried to pour into works like Gundam. And yet, plenty of Gundam fans are out there making remarks that are about as far from antiwar as you can get. They never get past the mindset of military otaku, and in the end, it may be that nothing of real importance ever got through to them at all.

Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine is now into its fourth year, and Russia is still insisting on calling it a “special military operation.” Inside Russia, the media is actually forbidden from using the word “war.” What this tells me is that President Putin simply lacks the imagination to envision himself bearing responsibility for a war. That is precisely why he can start one so casually.

And then there is the attack on Iran by the United States and Israel, which began in February of this year. The political base propping up President Trump in America is said to be the evangelicals, conservative, white Christians. In a world pushing steadily toward greater diversity, they cling to a strongman leader out of anxiety that their privileges are being stripped away. By now, Trump may very well look something like a god to them. It is startling how easily religion and the military can become intertwined.

If this conflict cuts off the oil supply, what happens then? We lose electricity, and our entire way of life becomes unsustainable. Lately there is talk of fusion power as a safer energy source, but I don’t believe it is something that can be realized so easily. And to cover our needs with renewable energy alone, we would probably have to cut the population down to roughly a third of what it is now. Humanity has been backed into a corner that deep.

One need not look as far as Nazi Germany: dictatorships are, for the most part, decided at the ballot box. Present-day Japan is exactly that, and a mob of fools, I must say, is a genuinely nasty thing. Your worries, Rei Rei, about constitutional revision, military expansion, and nuclear armament are entirely justified.

Well then, should we place our trust in the intellectuals? There are plenty of cases where the tyranny of the intellectual class has led to disastrous ends, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and on to Pol Pot’s regime in Cambodia. Politics, I believe, is something that only works when you have people capable of handling the unglamorous, practical work at the level of towns and cities. Then should we rely on the so-called experts? Many of them have no social sense whatsoever, so handing our judgment over to them is dangerous.

In the end, there is no conveniently available someone to whom you can just hand everything over and say, “You take care of it.” Each of us, one by one, has no choice but to think about these things in earnest.

I want Japan, somehow, to take action for the sake of world peace. As the wish of one single citizen, that is really all there is to it.

Source: Animage, May 2026 (page084)