In some versions, children run around, wearing face masks of demons. At Asakusa (ó‘), there were no children taking part, but monks from the temple and guest celebrities cast the beans to the waiting crowd. However, we hear that the ceremony takes place twice at Asakusa, and the later one is attended by more famous people. Whom, we didn't find out.

• the entrance
• halfway between the entrance and the temple, looking back at the entrance
• halfway between the entrance and the temple, looking towards the temple
• inner gateway
• demon (one of two) on the left of the inner gateway
• a shrine inside the temple grounds (on your left after you enter the inner gateway)
• the temple

During the festival, people throw beans to ward off the spirits, but the bystanders must catch the beans for good luck. This is a festival children sometimes particpate in by wearing masks of demons. In some anime, you may have seen festival kiosks selling masks with the shapes of faces of popular anime characters and demons - those are the kind that were also for sale near this temple.

The festival began about 30-40 minutes late because of an improperly parked car or two. There were two announced requests for the driver to remove the car, but still the start was delayed.

Then, finally, men arrived carrying paper lanterns on poles, who then fastened them onto the railings of the temple balcony above the crowd. After about ten more minutes, the abbot and a couple of luminaries, including a politician, arrived to begin the ceremony.

The ceremony involved the monks and special guests throwing beans into the crowd, who were supposed to catch them. Apparently, children are not directly involved in this version of the festival.

Because Niko was a little hungry, we went to a standing-only udon shop. Niko had a mini-curry dish, and Machiko and Bryan also had something to eat. Ordering was interesting, in that outside of the restaurant doors, there was a vending machine with the restaurant's menu on it. Each dish offered could be ordered and paid for at the same time, before entering the restaurant. The machine accepted coins and bills, and presumably gave change, too, but I took that for granted and forgot to look.

Niko and Machiko were finished quickly, but Bryan was last to order. Machiko went to ask for directions at a kouban (Œð”Ô), a local police station which has only one or two officers on duty. Their purpose is mainly to provide visitors with directions and assistance, rather than crime-prevention, although their presence is certainly a deterrent.

Bryan was taking some video of the people walking by as a snapshot of everyday people. Because it was Saturday afternoon, some of the people travelling through the station were school students returning home after a half-day at school. Of course, they were wearing uniforms of the style we learned to expect in anime. Although it may appear obvious and natural to some of you, my impression of everything we saw in Japan that matched what I had seen in anime was changing my impression of the country and its culture. What I came to realize is how accurately anime portrays many elements of Japanese culture. This means that I had to reevaluate the impression of Japan that anime had given me, and look more closely at what I had previously not considered accurate portrayals of everyday life: the sound crows make, the layout of city streets and railways, the hustle and bustle of daily life at a train station, the zoning laws, what people wear, what they look like, how they color their hair (^_^), what they eat for breakfast, the size and thickness of one slice of bread (^_^), and so on.

Okay, you can think me hopelessly naïve to have had this kind of reaction, and you of course have the right to stop reading and dismiss what I've written as the horribly misinformed scribbles of an Ugly American Tourist. ^_^ Don't get me wrong, however. I have the utmost respect for this country and its culture. I'm just using this travelogue as a way of describing to you how my visit to Japan helped me understand it better and misunderstand it less. Of course there is a lot more that I haven't learned yet, and I may return to Japan someday to follow up on that. In the meantime, this visit was an eye-opener; I'll never watch anime in the same way ever again. I'll be better prepared to recognize which parts are grounded in fact, and which are the departures from the norm that the writer/animator has chosen to use as shortcuts, as emphasis, or as significant story elements.

In short, I'll enjoy it more.

I don't have many written notes during the tour, of course, since I was busy looking around, but I'll relate what I remember of the visit.

We met Toshi at the train station and he led us to a Sizzler restaurant (yes, the American steak restaurant chain) on the corner across the street from Gainax, where we met Ogata-san, an editor for ASCII magazine, a Japanese computer industry magazine, whose wife AOKI Mitsue (Â–ØŒõŒb) is a manga artist whose original stories and characters are due to appear in an upcoming series to be animated by Gainax. (!) Machiko, our host, knew of them through her own work as a contributing writer for ASCII magazine, in two issues of which she wrote about my roommates and I as examples of anime fans in the United States after hearing about me and my anime gatherings at work, through her husband, who is also a Microsoft employee, and met us while they were living in the States, at my 24th birthday party! Bryan had corresponded with Ogata-san in the past, trading books about comics and manga with him, but this was our first face-to-face meeting.

A note about Kare-Kano

Thanks go to Thea's Kare-Kano Webpage for the information used here.

Some things we learned while speaking with the assistant producer:

• Kare-kano had no OP animation because the story of each of those episodes was too long to allow time for it.
• The live camera ED scenes for the first 14 episodes were done by dragging a cameraman on a wheeled cart.
• The change from live camera to animation for the ED sequences coincides with the change in directorship from Anno to Sato, which has an interesting story behind it (see below).
• There are ~60 people who work in the main Gainax building. Twenty on each floor.
• There were only four or five animators present when we visited, because they generally work during night until the morning. We got the impression that this is common practice at animation studios. However, Studio Ghibli has encouraged people to work during normal business hours instead of at night to avoid having its employees' personal lives completely disrupted by work. ^_^
• Animators' desks were very closely crowded together, and often had many personal belongings strewn among the storyboards, character model sheets, backgrounds, prop models, and drawing equipment. Sadly, I don't have pictures of the messier desks, so the pictures you see linked above are cleaner than normal. ^_^
• At the time of our visit, they were working on episode 26, although the most recent episode to be broadcast on TV was 19, and the one undergoing postproduction was 23. The studio works on a handful of episodes at once, in various stages (planning, storyboarding, key animation, outsourced animation, audio recording, and broadcast), to streamline production.
• The picture of the animation desk mentioned earlier actually turned out to be of extra interest, because it contained props that were used in the making of episode 19, which was to air the next day! Note the paper cutout, backgrounds, character model sheets, and storyboards in this annotated photo. Unfortunately, I didn't get a picture of the tray on the floor which had the large panning backgrounds. I didn't know how significant they were (they were just lying there on the floor, after all!) until the next day, after watching the episode in question!
• There were receipts for Pizza-La (a popular pizza-delivery chain) here and there on some desks. It appears that pizza is just as popular in Japan as in the US for late-night fare.

• Why is it that every time there is a cut from one scene to another, the cel after the cut jumps down, left, then up? This is most noticable when the scene after the cut is static for at least a second or two. Then again, in Anno's anime, this is almost always the case, so it's particularly noticable and becomes annoying if you're sensitive to that sort of thing (and I am). This frame-centering problem is present not only in Kare-Kano, but in Evangelion.

Why we think Anno left the production of Kare-Kano

Anno objected to the restrictions placed on TV anime by TV Tokyo after the Pocket Monster incident, so in protest, he decided to have nothing more to do with TV Tokyo and left the production of Kare-Kano in the hands of Sato, who joined Gainax after having worked for the government in a public works management position.

During this time, I was jotting down the answers to the questions that we had asked at Gainax. He noticed this, and asked me if it was a Palm Pilot. I said that it was a little different from a Palm Pilot, and handed it over to him while Toshi explained that it was a Windows CE device similar to a more common model found in Japan: the Casio Cassiopia.

Meanwhile, Ogata-san's 1.5-year-old daughter, Shun, was attracting a bit of attention by knocking over drink glasses, playing with the sugar packets, and chewing on the non-smoking signs on the table.