Anime's Woodstock

Forty-three years ago today, cartoons morphed from entertainment into lifestyle.

Even if you aren’t an anime fan, the medium’s transformation from Japanese subculture into a pillar of global youth culture is hard to ignore. Sony paid over a billion dollars to acquire the anime streaming service Crunchyroll in 2021. Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron broke box-office records in America last December, and just recently took the Animated Film prize at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. Polygon recently declared that anime is bigger than the NFL among Gen Z. McDonald’s is launching an anime-themed promo campaign. Pundits are now calling anime bigger outside of Japan than in.

This is interesting stuff, but few stop to ask: how exactly did it happen? How did cartoons made by and for Japanese people take over the global imagination? One answer can be found in a special event that happened exactly forty-three years ago today: the Anime New Century Declaration, held in downtown Tokyo on February 22, 1981. This photo-essay is adapted from a chapter of Pure Invention: How Japan Made the Modern World.

The organizers envisioned the Anime New Century Declaration as a promotional event for the the release of the first Mobile Suit Gundam film, erecting a stage and a giant cut-out illustration of Gundam in front of Shinjuku Station. They expected a few hundred kids. 20,000 showed up.

Mobile Suit Gundam began as an animated television series. It was sponsored by a toy company who intended it as nothing more than a vehicle to sell toys to children. But director Yoshiyuki Tomino had other plans. He snuck a great deal of socio-political criticism into his creation, creating a complex world in which the motivations of the protagonists were as suspect as the villians. This utterly perplexed the children for whom the show was intended. The kids weren’t buying the toys, so the sponsor pulled the plug, and Gundam was unceremoniously cancelled.

But not forgotten.

Fans line up in the Ginza for a showing of the Space Cruiser Yamato movie, 1977.

Gundam aired at the cusp of anime’s evolution from kid’s stuff into a more mature storytelling medium. A precursor, called Space Cruiser Yamato, energized older fans and spawned an ecosystem of mainstream anime magazines that connected fans in the pre-Internet era.

It turned out that Gundam wasn’t really unpopular at all; the sponsor was only looking at the wrong demographic. The show bombed among the elementary school set. But teens and young adults were a totally different story. They loved the show, identifed with its characters, and hungered for more. Fans formed clubs, then lobbied for the show’s return in organized campaigns. A film company noticed the attention, and footed the bill for the animated series to be re-cut into a trilogy of theatrical releases. The first of these was what the Anime New Century Declaration had been intended to promote.

By the time Tomino took the stage in early afternoon, the police were warning the organizers that the crowd had grown too large to control. People were in danger of being trampled. “Everyone, take it easy!” Tomino’s voice boomed. And then he launched into an epic diatribe.

“This is more than an event! It’s a matsuri [festival]. I appreciate the passion that brought you here today. But you know what will happen if someone gets hurt? They’ll say, ‘that’s anime fans for you. Just a bunch of idiots running wild.’”

By “them” he meant grown-ups: society at large. His own series Gundam was full of venal adults pushing kids around for their own ends. That’s why the kids here loved it, saw it as more than just a cartoon. Everyone took a big step back; the crowd calmed and listened, rapt.

Kunio Okawara, the series’ mechanical designer, takes the stage.

A parade of heroes from behind the scenes took the stage: designers, animators, voice actors. Anime was “junk culture” in society at large. Now its architects finally were able to bask in the spotlight of adulation, see the effects of their handiwork on Japan’s youth.

It was also a coming out for fans. Many attendees showed up in character; some were even invited onstage, where they re-enacted scenes narrated by the voice actors themselves. The Anime New Century Declaration was also the first major public cosplay event.

Two cosplayers read what they called The Shinjuku Declaration: “We the assembled have gathered here to declare the start of a new era. Our era. A new anime century!” The crowd went wild. (The pair would go on to big careers: Mamoru Nagano, at left, became a famed animator and manga artist; Maria Kawamura, at right, a voice actress.)

Today, the Anime New Century Declaration is remembered less as a PR event and more as a coming out: anime’s Woodstock. It was the moment anime “grew up,” daring to compete with mainstream literature and film on its own merits.

The “New Century” resonated through the decades. Perhaps most famously in the title of a series that really did usher in a golden era of anime: the 1995 television show Evangelion. The English subtitle is “Neon Genesis,” but Japanese fans know it as Shin Seki: “New Century” Evangelion. (Kawamura, who read The Shinjuku Declaration onstage in 1981, played a small but important role.)

Any given weekend in Akihbara.

The Anime New Century event marked the moment anime evolved into more than entertainment or a medium. It was the moment anime became a lifestyle. That revolution began in Japan. Before long, it would spread to the rest of the world. Now we know that the Shinjuku Declaration proved prophetic: today, we really are living in an anime century.