The Notenki Memoirs: Studio Gainax And The Men Who Created Evangelion, Yasuhiro Takeda2010-12-27 (, ; backlinks)⁠:

Fulltext annotated e-book of 2002 memoir by anime producer Yasuhiro Takeda, discussing Japanese SF conventions & fandom, formation & history of Gainax and its productions up to 2002, including the origins of Evangelion & the tax raid.

An annotated e-book edition of The Notenki Memoirs: Studio Gainax And The Men Who Created Evangelion, a short autobiography by a founder of Gainax who became active as a fan and in the anime/manga industry in the late 1970s; it describes the student fan club scene around SF conventions, the creation of the famous Daicon video shorts, the founding of Gainax, its subsequent successes & travails (although with less emphasis on Neon Genesis Evangelion than one might expect), terminating around 200123ya. Much of the information Takeda discusses may have appeared in English-language sources before, but in obscure or missing sources and never pulled together, and it is a valuable source for non-Japanese-speakers interested in that time period.

For people interested in the history of the anime industry, Takeda fills in many gaps related to Gainax—it’s hard to think of any source which covers nearly so well DAICON III, DAICON IV, General Products, or throws in so many tidbits about surrounding people & Japanese SF fandom. It is an invaluable resource for any researcher, and I felt compelled to create an annotated e-book edition in order to clarify various points and be able to compare its claims with stories by other people (for example, Okada’s extensive Animerica interview)

Those reading it solely for Evangelion material will probably be relatively disappointed: Takeda clearly finds NGE not very interesting, may have bad associations due to being targeted in the tax raids, and he was writing this in 200024ya or so—too close to the events and still working at Gainax to really give a tell-all, and it’s not a terribly long or dense book in the first place. Nevertheless, NGE fans will still find many revelations here, like the origin of NGE production in the failure of the Aoki Uru film project (an origin undocumented in any Western sources before Notenki Memoirs was translated).