In all my years as a journalist, anime interviews have become the one assignment that makes me audibly sigh immediately after the rush of excitement at an email in my inbox. Why? They’re increasingly proving to be a behind-the-scenes headache that’s quite an affront to my craft, and a huge hassle with pyrrhic payoff long before an article is published.
I’ve found that the anime industry tends to be discussed online in a similar fashion to parasocial tabloid articles of the early aughts. Fans glom onto tidbits of information from shoddy sources and hearsay, leading to an infantilized—if not periodically mischaracterized—notion about a production studio or creators spread in perpetuity with the gait of a retweet. That’s not good. The only solution to upend this phenomenon is good journalism: conducting interviews with creators, which I often have the opportunity to do, where I channel my expertise by asking pointed questions about how the art sausage is made, work culture, and the pervasiveness of AI in the space.
As much as I feel a journalistic obligation, I hate doing anime interviews; every time I conduct one, I’m met with the desire for good public relations, not good journalism.
Not discounting the circus and occasional farce that is a 7-to-10-minute time-crunch breakout-room press Zoom interview, there are standards and practices within journalism that routinely become a nuisance whenever I conduct an anime interview. These are all basic functions of the job—building blocks which cannot be ignored.
Usually, a subject is given an idea of what topics will be brought up in an interview, not the explicit questions. When the day comes, and a question is asked, if they do not want to answer, they can simply say they don’t wish to. Likewise, unless an interviewee explicitly states that information is off the record, whatever answers they give are fair game to be included in an article. After which, if there is a flagrant error—be it the spelling of a name, position and title of a person, or the recounting or characterization of events in a published article is inaccurate—it's common for a subject to request a correction and for the editorial of said publication to run a correction stating the error and correction at wherever relevant, and the journalist eats a little shit for it. That’s the way the cookie crumbles.
Anime interviews typically start one of two ways: I reach out to a company or studio with a pitch for an interview coinciding with a new release or a culture critique I’d love their firsthand account input on. The correspondence and the hit of endorphins at a reply where we flirt via emails hammering out scheduling is pretty fun. But, after an inordinate amount of time, should I get the green light, the following sequence of events is where my Sisyphean headache sets in with anime interviews:
- I’m asked to send my interview questions beforehand for ease of translation purposes.
- I get word back that the questions are “approved,” but the interviewee requests some questions be omitted.
- Bonus: I’m given a rubric of questions not to ask. In the past, these no-nos have revolved around the limited criteria of avoiding questions comparing an anime to the manga, anything outside the anime, personal life, politics, international affairs, the career of the interviewee or other projects they’ve worked on, comparing a work to another series, or anything outside the anime itself.
- The interview, if in person or over Zoom, is given a limited window of 5-10 minutes if it's a press event with other journalists queued up in waiting rooms and thusly limited depending on if the person ahead of me went over their time, leading to an improvised reshuffling of questions to ask briskly while taking translation time between questions and answers into account.
- If the interview is at a convention, either live or over Zoom, it’s given a 20-minute window if I’m lucky. If it’s an exclusive interview spurred by my own volition, I'll be given upwards of 30 minutes again, if I’m lucky. The aforementioned time-for-translation phenomenon still applies.
- Interview ends, and I get to writing my draft.
- Interviewee requests to review my draft to check for “accuracy” and “tone.” This isn’t usually a requirement for English-language interviews, but when you’re working through a translator it’s generally a good practice.
- Bonus: Interviewee requests to have answers omitted from the draft because they feel it isn’t pertinent to the conversation about the anime.
- The subject takes issue with the fact that the questions they answered are in the article I wrote. They want some of the answers that they gave on the record removed. This takes the editing process to a dead halt.
- We have a back-and-forth where I tell the interviewee I can't allow a subject to peer review an interview before it is published, which leads to a deadlock where an article is in limbo for weeks of correspondence and I’m not paid because it isn’t published yet.
- The interview is published as originally written or acquiesced to the interviewee’s above demands by an editor or me.
- I’m paid either $85, $100, or $200 (depending on what publication I’m writing for) while juggling five features a week in tandem with this interview (or other anime interviews) at the same time.
- The process begins again.
It’s within reason for a Japanese studio to request questions early ahead of an interview for translation purposes to alleviate the bottlenecked amount of time we’ll have to chat. But it invariably leads to a slippery slope where the journalism I showed up to conduct is treated as optional, a hurdle for the studio to jump over nearly every step of the way before any of my anime work gets published.
At my most sardonic, I find humor in the challenge of asking pertinent and provocative questions, given that the above process only yields questions like whether my interviewees liked the colors, shapes, and sounds they saw in a show. At my most exasperated, I ask myself what we are even doing here, grumble about how the integrity of my work is being compromised, and wonder whether I should just slide my keyboard to my interviewees so they can write it up themselves, since I’m a middleman whose journalistic purpose feels ground to dust.
There’s probably more to be said about how journalistic culture and practices in Japan differ from those in the United States, how members of a company aren’t individuals, but representatives of their company at large, and anything said needs to be refined, and also that the language barrier is not insignificant. But when the subject knows questions ahead of time, cherry-picks what they don’t want to answer, gives an interview in a limited window of time, requests to peer review an article like a middle school English class where you pass papers around to classmates, and then asks to have answers they gave to questions they knew were coming omitted, what are we even doing here?
That’s not journalism; that’s public relations. I’m not an anime studio's public relations receptacle. I’m a journalist, and boy do I hate doing anime interviews sometimes.
It's Hater Week here on Aftermath. This week we’re letting the hate flow through us by examining what it means to be a hater (and… a lover?), venting about some of our biggest pet peeves in games and life, and giving others a space to do the same.
