The Daicon Chronicles, Part 1
As long-distance consumers of anime, our familiarity with Japanese fandom is slim at best. But it should surprise no one that it’s just as vibrant and diverse and combative as ours, with stories that get richer in the telling the farther back in time you look.
There were high-visibility, transformative events, such as the overnight vigils at theaters for Space Battleship Yamato in August 1977, or the Anime New Century declaration at the Gundam movie premiere in February 1981. Those were inflection points in which fans presented a united front to the mainstream world. In August 1981, a different kind of inflection point was reached in which one faction of fandom presented itself to another faction, and things were never the same afterward.
It happened at an SF convention called Daicon III, and the instrument was an animated film just over five minutes long.
Before I get into that, here’s some parallel perspective to help set the table. I had my initial brush with American SF fandom that same year when I attended my first convention. From here on, I’ll call it a “con” since everyone else does. Anime cons are almost a weekly occurrence now. In the 80s they were inconceivable. But SF fandom had already seen generational shifts. Cons and similar events were originally formed around literary and illustrated SF and slowly, grudgingly, began to admit “multimedia” SF around the edges: Film, TV, comics, audio drama, etc.
When I turned up, multimedia was dominant. “Founding fans” had long since stopped grumbling and accepted that they were no longer the gatekeepers. The word “anime” was barely known in 1981 (even by me), but it began to creep in over subsequent years when I and people like me hauled our VCRs over state lines and into hotels where we’d hack the TVs. We’d find our brethren, swap VHS tapes, and chain our “machines” together to make copies all weekend long. These turned into watch parties and then into dedicated video rooms with anime programming.
As the audience grew, another generational shift took place. The latest gatekeepers grudgingly made room for anime and were eventually marginalized like the gatekeepers that came before them. I seldom partake in anime cons any more, but am proud of the role I played in helping them to become a reality.
I don’t think Japanese anime fans went through that process the same way we did, but I do know that they faced the same barriers. their SF fandom went through similar generational shifts, and despite anime being a home-grown commodity, it was not at all welcome in the hallowed halls of “serious” SF appreciation. The October 1980 issue of Starlog (Japanese edition) summed it all up in this headline: The SF Anime Boom Strikes! Yamato, Gundam, Conan…is SF anime actual SF? (Read the full article here.)
Imagine, then, that you’re a typical fan in August 1981, attending Daicon III in Osaka, Japan. You sit down for opening ceremonies and a “welcome film” starts rolling, made by some of the convention organizers. It’s animated, but not as slick as the stuff on TV or in theaters. It dawns on you that it must be handmade. It’s got all sorts of visual references in it, obviously the work of fans like you who love SF. And it goes over really well, despite the fact that the sound isn’t working. It goes over so well that it gets shown a few more times during the con.
This film is a statement. This is anime fandom saying, “We’re not only here among you SF fans, we are claiming part of this turf that was once all yours.” The gatekeepers scoff, “That’s not SF.” But deep down, they know another shift is coming. The convention organizers themselves have started the clock.
Of course, I’m talking about the now-famous Daicon III Opening Animation. It was a clunky, haphazard, jalopy of a project that nevertheless captured the hearts and minds of those who were open to it and changed the dialogue of Japanese SF fandom forever. With this in mind, I’ve assembled the following artifacts for the first installment in a three-part series. (Next time: Daicon IV!)
1. The Film
“Daicon” is wordplay. It can be translated as “Big Con,” short for “Big Convention.” The first character (in kanji form) is in the name “Osaka” where the convention took place. And it is also the word for “Radish.” Hence the spaceship design at the end.
There is only one line of dialogue in the story, a caption that basically reads, “Take this cup and water the radish.” All the villains are trying to stop the girl from accomplishing that mission.
The music heard in the film is all borrowed from pre-existing sources. This includes tracks composed by Yuji Ohno, Bill Conti, and Kouichi Sugiyama.
Main staff members: Hideaki Anno (key animator), Takami Akai (mecha designer), Hiroyuki Yamaga (character designer), Yasuhiro Takeda (chief director). Only Anno had made an animated film before, as a one-man student project. And this would certainly not be his last.
Click here to watch a raw scan of the 8mm version on Youtube.
2. Contemporary coverage
In 1981, there were six regular anime magazines. One of them, named Animec (from a publisher named Rapport), stood out from the pack in two ways: it was the only one published bi-monthly, and it was the only one to devote coverage to the Daicon III opening animation. The others all kept tabs on fan activities, but a homemade anime didn’t rise to their level of attention, and to be fair nobody could have predicted that Daicon III would later prove to be ground zero for a whole new generation of talent. (The fact that they came from Osaka also counted against them, since Tokyo was the hub for all the high-profile projects.)
Animec‘s editorial style is best described as “freewheeling.” They looked like pros but wrote like fans, which was part of their charm. They talked about the Daicon III animation over three consecutive issues without providing a cohesive story of how it was made, but there were just enough hints to put a frame around the picture.
Read all the coverage here:
3. The Legacy
Ever heard of Neon Genesis Evangelion? If so, you’ve been exposed to the legacy of Daicon III.
The group that came together to make the opening animation went on to found a legendary anime/SF store in Osaka called General Products, which became the nerve center for Daicon Film, which begat an anime studio called Gainax. Three of the Daicon creators were founding members: Hideaki Anno, Takami Akai, and Yasuhiro Takeda. Established in December 1984, Gainax became a powerhouse, delivering Evangelion, Gunbuster, Nadia, FLCL, and Gurren Lagann just to name a few. (See an overwhelming credit list here.)
In 1981, they planted their flag as fans making anime for fans, and they managed to hold onto that mantra all the way through the studio’s eventual closing in June 2024. Hideaki Anno continues to carry the flag with his own company, Khara.
As you can imagine (if you didn’t see it for yourself), the volume of media coverage for Gainax productions over the decades is immense. The most accessible of these is the autobiography of Yasuhiro Takeda, titled The Notenki Memoirs (ADV Manga, 2005). The preface reads as follows:
In the summer of 2001, we hosted the 40th annual Japan Sci-Fi Convention (SF2001) at the Makuhari Messe center in Chiba, Japan. It had been a full 20 years since Daicon III, the very first sci-fi con we’d hosted, and it’s going on 24 years since we first became active (as they say) in the biz.
In the beginning, I was a kid who didn’t think much about anything, who preferred the pleasures of the moment to any long-term uncertainties about the future. I was just a regular kid. What changed me was a series of encounters, an unbroken procession of chance meetings that thrust me from my young and vigorous but ultimately clueless boyhood, and transformed me into the man I am now.
More than anything, it was Daicon III that played the greatest role in many of these encounters, and now here we were again, hosting SF2001. I guess you could say the convention marked an era in my own career, so I decided to treat the occasion as an opportunity to synthesize the past two decades into the form of a record of my youth. Naturally, most of the things I remember happened to me personally, so those are the things I mainly write about. And there’s a distinct possibility that this account of mine may not even be accurate, in the sense of being based on hard, objective facts.
At the very least I’m trying not to write any outright lies, so please forgive me of any faults in my memory, or if others happen to remember things differently. That’s just the nature of the beast. I hope this book will serve as an aid to readers who want to learn the truth behind the rumors of how we got from Daicon to Gainax, as well as information on things they might want to know about us. Of course, if you do fall into that category you must be even more of a geek than I am…
The entire text of The Notenki Memoirs can be read online here. Jump to the Daicon III chapter here.
Another access point to this early history is much more vivid, an 11-episode live-action Japanese TV series set in 1981 titled Blue Blazes (TV Tokyo, 2014). The main character is a wannabe manga artist at the Osaka University of Arts. His classmates are the “Daicon gang,” and the story includes a fictionalized account of the Daicon III opening animation, from production through unveiling.
The digital version of Notenki Memoirs linked above includes subtitled clips from Blue Blazes. It hasn’t been officially imported to the US, but you can find fansubs of the entire series here (both Bittorrent and direct download).
Photos posted on Twitter by Marimo aquarius and khara Inc2
More recently, Hideaki Anno became the subject of a traveling art exhibition in 2023. It displayed hundreds of artifacts, including original art from Daicon III and his other early films. The catalog sold with the exhibition offered the following explanation:
Impact of the Daicon III Opening Animation
The films Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Star Wars (both released in 1977, and in Japan in 1978), sparked a global science-fiction craze. Around the same time, the popularity among fans of the theatrical film version of Space Battleship Yamato (1977) touched off a sci-fi anime boom in Japan, and Mobile Suit Gundam (1979) subsequently became a hit as well.
In this context, university students also formed increasingly active manga, anime, and sci-fi circles. Having enrolled at Osaka University of Arts, Anno made a transformative splash in 1981 at an event that was part of the 20th Japan Science Fiction Convention (known as Daicon III, “con” being short for “convention”).
Young staff managing the convention planned a short film, known as its “opening animation.” One of its organizers, a friend of Anno’s since high school, approached him and urged him to participate. Anno took part as a key animator and demonstrated extraordinary skill in rendering mechanics and effects such as explosions.
On the day the convention opened, attendees were bowled over by the superb quality of the film. It was screened many times during the event, and Shoji Kawamori of Studio Nue, who saw the film at the venue, invited Anno that same day to work as an animator on Super Dimension Fortress Macross (1982).
Later, when Anno was in Tokyo, Kawamori introduced him to animator Ichiro Itano. Impressed by Itano’s outstanding key animation, Anno accepted the invitation and readily agreed to participate. He visited chief director Noboru Ishiguro in Tokyo during summer vacation of 1982 and worked with him to improve the mechanical effects in the second episode. This marked Anno’s professional debut.
In early 1983, he moved to Tokyo with a single bag. For about three months, he stayed in the studio or at Itano’s apartment, continuing to work part-time as a key animator with Itano, learning much from his stance toward creation and drawing skills.
4. Products
When the “Daicon gang” founded their own store in Osaka named General Products, they were in a perfect position to create merchandise based on the Daicon III opening animation. Here’s a sampling of what they had to offer.
VHS tape; also included bonus material
1/12 “Daicon III no Onnanoko” (Daicon III girl) metal figure
Plastic figure
Commemorative remake, 2023
Settei (production art) collection (Click here to see all the pages)
Images from here to the end are probably postcards
5. Production gallery
Many thanks to my fellow scavengers who compiled all of this material. I salute you!
