The World Seen Through the Eyes of a Manga Artist

2019/11/13

I am Kunihiko Hisa, and I have just been introduced. Usually, my title is manga artist, but I do so many different things that even I find it confusing (laughs). I suppose I should start by explaining that.

Nowadays, when people hear the word "manga," most probably think of comics, gekiga, or animation. However, what I primarily do is create what is called "one-panel manga," which people rarely have the chance to see these days. Currently, the vast majority of people in the Japanese manga world draw gekiga, comics, or animation; I believe there are only about 20 or 30 people making a living from one-panel manga. In other words, you are looking at something very rare right now (laughs). Please listen as if something rarer than a panda were speaking to you.

Manga is experienced by each generation in its own era and through its own perspective. Generations older than mine grew up with pre-war manga like "Norakuro" or "Boken Dankichi." By the time I was growing up in the immediate post-war period, manga for children was finally starting to pour out. These works grew along with their readers and eventually created the comic culture we have today.

During that time, there was a period when "manga for adults" flourished and grew. When people think of the central form of one-panel manga, the first thing that comes to mind is likely the political cartoons found in newspapers. These used to be called "jiji manga" (current events manga)—cartoons in newspapers that satirized current events, often featuring caricatures of politicians. There were also some slightly risqué manga. Thus, even though we use the single word "manga," what people imagine changes slightly depending on the era. Therefore, I would first like to clearly indicate the era in which I have lived.

I was born in February 1944. I was a year and a half old at the end of the war, but our house in Okubo, Tokyo, was destroyed in the Great Yamanote Air Raid in May 1945. Naturally, I have no memory of it, but later my mother often told me, "I ran through the flames holding you. It was truly terrifying when we ran under a railway bridge where burning sleepers were falling. You were wrapped in a blanket, and you survived because various people splashed water from fire cisterns on you." She also often told me how she worried because my eyes wouldn't open for about three days after the raid. It was an experience where I was one step away from death.

My father was also at home during the air raid. He had been in the army, but the ships of the unit he belonged to were being sunk one after another, making it impossible to reach his destination in the Philippines, so his call-up had been cancelled. During that air raid, my father fled separately from my mother. The values of the pre-war era were completely different from those of today. My mother fled taking me with her. My father fled on his own. They told each other that if they were both safe, they would meet at a certain place. That way, even if I died in the fire with my mother, the Hisa family would continue as long as my father survived. Conversely, even if my father died, the Hisa family would continue as long as I survived. It was an era of such values.

At that time, I was nearly killed by the Americans, so to speak. After the war, when I was three years old and living in Hayama, I nearly died of dysentery. My mother sent a telegram to my father saying, "Kunihiko in critical condition." However, at that time, a local veterinarian happened to have penicillin released by the US military, and using it cured me instantly. So, while I was nearly killed by America once during the air raid, I was saved by America that time, so I have reached the present day with the score more or less settled (laughs).

My generation grew up from a place where there was truly nothing. When I became aware of my surroundings, everything was covered in ruins. We would dissolve saccharin released by the occupation forces in hot water and drink it, saying, "Oh, this is delicious." That was how I was raised. I was a child of an era where the only pleasure was secretly listening to rakugo on the radio. Because there was no television, the only visuals available were the meager manga found in magazines for children. I would gaze at them hungrily, and if there was a picture I liked, I would spend my time trying hard to copy it.

I have been part of the Juku since entering the Keio Futsubu School. When I entered the Futsubu School, the library was full of books, and naturally, I was allowed to read any of them. I was so happy that I spent all my time in the library. It was there that I learned things like how H.G. Wells, whom I thought was just a sci-fi writer, actually wrote history books. In any case, I believe I was raised by books.

From around that time, for some reason, I liked drawing things like manga or illustrations. During class, I would copy what the teacher wrote on the blackboard into my notebook, but at the same time, I would draw something like an illustration of that lecture. By doing so, I would somehow remember the scene visually, so the teacher's talk would enter my head.

My full-scale encounter with manga happened when I moved from high school to university. While I was eating with a friend at Umezushi—which is no longer there—at the Hiyoshi Campus, I saw a poster that said, "Manga Club recruiting members. Those interested should come to the cafe 'Sao Paulo' in Shibuya." It sounded interesting, so I went with my friend. There were two or three seniors there, and they were delighted that prospective new members had come for the first time in a long while.

There was something like a scrapbook of works there, and they were so-called one-panel manga. There was political satire, humor, and some risqué content; they had collected one-panel manga aimed at adults of that time and made them into a scrapbook. However, after that one meeting, the seniors all said they were busy with their graduation theses and didn't show up. Almost a year passed without doing anything, and the seniors all graduated. My friend and I were saying, "We're becoming sophomores, but we haven't done any activities, and it's just going to end like this."

At that time, there was a group called the Waseda Manga Society. This was a large club with about 40 members that had already produced manga artists active in society, such as Shunji Sonoyama, Hosuke Fukuchi, and Sadao Shoji. Their representative visited Keio and said, "NHK has a project called the 'Sokei Manga Battle,' so would you please do it?" However, while Waseda had about 40 people, we only had two (laughs). But the Waseda people said the program wouldn't work unless Keio accepted. That makes sense, as it was the Sokei Manga Battle.

They said five selected players from each side would do a manga battle in the studio, so I managed to gather three friends from the Futsubu School who looked like they could draw and decided to participate. It was just the beginning of the 1960s, and at that time, NHK was in Uchisaiwaicho. Since it was a "Children's Day" project, they wanted to make it look like a variety show for kids, so they gave us simple tasks like drawing the letters "K" and "W" on large panels and using them to create manga. Takehiko Maeda and Rokuro Ei were the leaders of the two teams. Surprisingly, we won (laughs). That's when we decided to continue Keio's activities.

First, I wondered what to do, and what I thought of was holding a Sokei Manga Battle in the hallways of the Hiyoshi Campus. The Waseda Manga Society rented an apartment near their university for their club room, and inside the closet were piles of manga pasted on panels for exhibitions held on campus. So, I borrowed about 20 manga panels from Waseda, and the five of us from Keio drew manga on panels in the same way. We lined them up in the Hiyoshi hallways and recruited members while holding the Sokei Manga Battle. By the time we graduated, the number of members had grown to about 20 or 30. It is a happy story that this has continued to this day.

We also participated in the Mita Festival for the first time, getting a corner of a classroom or hallway to do caricatures and exhibit manga on panels. At that time, since the club had started its activities, we wanted an advisor, so I went to Professor Shintaro Okuno and asked, "Professor, please," and he graciously accepted. I was so happy that I kept talking to him, and he said, "Listen, do you know how much I get paid for a 30-minute lecture? What do you think of other people's time?"

However, the words he gave us for our bulletin at that time—"The foundation of humor is pathos, and that must eventually lead to high criticism of civilization"—still remain within me. Manga is not just about teasing or mocking people with gags; it must be drawn with an understanding of the pathos behind the humor and various other things—in other words, an understanding of human beings. In a social sense, it must lead to a criticism of civilization. I felt that deeply then, and I still feel that way now.

When it came time to graduate from university, I wanted to continue with manga, but I felt there was no place for my kind of manga in the entertainment-centered manga world of that time.

At that time, Shinichi Kusamori, who was at the Institute of Oriental Classics (Shido Bunko) at Keio, was writing manga criticism. I was invited by Mr. Kusamori and had several opportunities to talk with him. We did something like a roundtable discussion about manga in Suntory's PR magazine "Yoshu Tengoku," and we continued our association after that, with him introducing me to various foreign manga. At that time, I realized that even though we use the same word, "Japanese manga and foreign manga are different."

In Japan, the manga that were commercially viable as so-called one-panel manga were either political cartoons in newspapers or things like small, slightly risqué illustrations. Otherwise, they were humor-oriented manga with a few panels or things like illustrations. There were many interesting works by my predecessors, but they were interesting in a fleeting, momentary way. Especially with the current events manga in newspapers, after six months or a year, even the artist themselves sometimes wouldn't know what they had been satirizing. Once the topic of the time is no longer understood, it becomes unclear how to evaluate the manga itself.

Therefore, although there were many interesting manga artists at the time, unfortunately, their works have not remained. In terms of political manga, for example, people like Kon Shimizu or Hidezō Kondō were so good at caricatures that the manga worked just with the politician's likeness, but such manga were consumed without almost any chance of being compiled and seen as books.

However, in an era without television, it was caricature manga that showed the true nature of politicians in their expressions. They expressed everything through drawings: "This guy is a sly one, this guy is a coward, this guy might be a bit slow." Nowadays, when I watch TV, there are so many interesting members of parliament that even a manga couldn't capture, and I find myself thinking that political manga certainly doesn't fit the current era (laughs).

On the other hand, looking at foreign manga, I thought that it might be okay for a manga artist to freely express their own philosophy or way of thinking through the medium of manga. You could call it a picture with a message. If I could express my own themes through manga, I felt I could continue it for the rest of my life. I wanted to draw that kind of manga.

However, in Japanese society, there were few places where such things could be published. In the so-called commercial newspapers and magazines, such a thing was unthinkable.

So, I reluctantly took a job at a trading company. That said, it wasn't that I particularly wanted to work properly; I just joined because it seemed like they would give me a salary, which was quite a nuisance for them. As a result, I was only there for 10 months, but it was very interesting. Everyone taught me the work, and there were all sorts of people. It was 180 degrees different from my student days, and I saw how the real world actually moves.

Since it was a trading company, we were buying and selling things. 1966 was the height of the Vietnam War. It was when Japan's high economic growth began, and materials like bullion, copper, and brass were in demand everywhere on the ground, so there was a department that collected and sold them. A Taiwanese dealer came there through a Japanese person to pitch the sale of empty artillery shell casings. The casings were made of brass, and for 105mm or 150mm guns, a single casing is quite large. The pitch was that they could supply any amount of those spent brass casings, so wouldn't we buy them? For the company, old brass material was always in demand. We would sell it to wire companies like Furukawa Electric.

The Taiwanese dealer said that because it was the middle of the Vietnam War, Vietnamese generals could supply as much as we wanted. If we said we needed so many tons, they would fire the cannons that many times (laughs). It was a good deal because they could deliver a fixed amount reliably. In an era when the anti-Vietnam War movement was in full swing, war could be used as a means of making money in this way. This revealed a completely different side of the Vietnam War than what was seen in newspapers or on TV. I thought, "The front lines are incredible." In the end, this deal was turned down because there were unexploded shells mixed in, and it would be bad if an accident occurred.

The front lines were certainly interesting, but if you stay too long, you become a participant. Then, it's no longer enough for things to be objectively interesting; you have to do various things yourself. It's natural, but it's a bit tough. So, I used the salary I had saved to hold an exhibition of one-panel manga and created a manga book through self-publishing.

At that time, Bungeishunju published a monthly magazine called "Manga Dokuhon." This was an entertainment magazine mainly featuring manga for adults, containing things like light story manga and one-panel manga, and it often introduced foreign manga. They held the "Bunshun Manga Award" and put quite a bit of effort into discovering new talent.

I thought they might find my work interesting, so I applied several times. One of the judges at the time was the author Morio Kita. Then, I received an offer from Morio Kita, saying he was going to write a fairy tale series called "The Lonely King" for "Shosetsu Shincho," and asking if I would draw the illustrations for it. At the time, I was a nameless beginner, but I received such an offer about 10 months after starting my job. Since there were at least a few places that found one-panel manga interesting, I gradually began to do more manga work.

The starting salary at the company back then was about 20,000 yen, but the money I made from drawing manga as a side job reached about that much per month. So, I resigned from the company and decided to start working as a manga artist. Bungeishunju's "Manga Dokuhon" liked my manga and started giving me pages occasionally. Showing just one single one-panel manga is one thing, but being told I could use 16 or 8 pages freely allowed me to depict a single theme. "Manga Dokuhon" let me do that occasionally, and at the time, that made me the happiest.

The editor-in-chief of "Manga Dokuhon" at that time was Kazutoshi Hando. Now, he writes many books as a storyteller of the Showa era. In that way, I was allowed to draw manga in the gaps of the world. Eventually, as my work came to people's attention, I started receiving various offers, such as "Please draw pictures for children's picture books," and before I knew it, I had somehow become a manga artist.

One of the interesting jobs I had after becoming a manga artist was for a travel magazine. The publishing department of the Japan Travel Bureau (JTB) at the time published a monthly magazine called "Tabi" (Travel), and they asked me to go somewhere on a trip and write and draw for them. It became a serialized project, and I thought it sounded interesting to be able to go to various places across the country. I wanted to see various front lines.

Since it was a monthly magazine, for example, when putting together a special issue on "The autumn leaves are beautiful now," the leaves would naturally be beautiful around the time the book came out. So even if you took photos, this year's photos could only be used next year. Therefore, I would go there not at the best time for that location, but a little before then, and draw manga while receiving explanations that "it will look like this at the best time" (laughs). The cherry blossoms aren't blooming, but I draw while imagining they must be beautiful when they do. I was sent to various places always at times that were not the best. That was interesting in its own way, though.

The most grueling was the coverage of a freight train. I had loved trains since I was a child, so I went to Hiroshima by Shinkansen with great joy and boarded the locomotive of a freight train. It was coverage of an express freight train from Hiroshima to Shiodome. Riding a freight train was a dream of mine since childhood. I went into the engine room and was shown the engineer operating it. However, the engineers changed every two hours and boarded one after another in high spirits, but I had to do the coverage alone. Running through the Sanyo Main Line and Tokaido Main Line in the middle of the night, by the time we entered Tokyo facing the morning sun just before Shiodome Station at dawn, my eyes were stuck shut and I was exhausted.

At that time, I realized that just like this freight train, people are working and moving in the middle of the night and early in the morning. I thought society is incredible. But conversely, I also thought it was too much. Humans aren't working; rather, humans are being made to work to maintain the system called society. Working has become so natural, but I wondered what this was all about. Going on a trip opens many doors of sensitivity. I was allowed to have various experiences while thinking about such things.

Speaking of various experiences, there was a one-hour program on TBS called "Shinsekai Kiko" (New World Travelogue), and at one point, I went to Borneo. I wandered through the jungle after being told, out of the blue, to go look for the Rafflesia, the world's largest flower. It was hot and humid with many leeches. To prevent leeches from attaching, I walked through the jungle wearing gloves and socks to seal any gaps on my body.

In any case, I walked through the jungle for a long time, covered in sweat. Occasionally, there would be a beautiful river. When there was a river, we would get excited, strip naked, and jump in. Jumping in with great joy was fine, but since we hadn't bathed for days, no one wanted to be splashed with the water used to wash someone else's dirty body, so everyone tried to go even slightly further upstream than the others (laughs). So I suggested we line up horizontally and scrubbed our backs and heads.

At night, we stayed at local accommodations in the jungle. A place like a water house served as the lodging, and when you went up the stairs and entered the room, there was a toilet in the corner. This was just a concrete floor with a hole in the middle. There was a rubber hose and a faucet next to it—a manual washlet to wash yourself when finished.

The area under the water house was a fish farm where they raised fish. The system was that what came out after you did your business became food for the fish. Just as I was thinking what a frugal method this was, that fish appeared for breakfast (laughs). There is the term "food chain," but I would prefer to keep a bit more distance from it.

Also, there were longhouses, the stilt houses of ethnic minorities. When you went up, they were raising pigs in the enclosure below. Again, the pigs' food was human waste, so in that sense, there was no waste. Today's Japan wastes many things. It is often called food loss, but the reason rats and crows target the food waste humans throw away is that it is still edible. We are burning usable food instead of letting other creatures use it. From an ecosystem perspective, this is also a huge food loss. I thought about such things in the jungles of Borneo.

Easter Island was interesting. It's the place with the mysterious Moai statues, and when you go for a TV shoot, the locals show you everything. The famous Moai statues stand on the slopes. It is said they might be aliens, but going to the site, I realized they are all Moai that were abandoned in the middle of being made.

Easter Island is a small volcanic island, but they quarried tuff near the crater and transported it for kilometers to the coast. Several Moai statues stand there as well. I wonder if they performed some kind of ritual. The tuff Moai statues have large eyeballs made of white coral stone and are looking toward the interior of the island.

Despite having the civil engineering technology to create and transport such things, there are no stone bridges, houses, or other architectural structures. The only things they made were Moai. It is a truly mysterious society. Easter Island is isolated by thousands of kilometers from other societies, and it seems Polynesian people moved there around Japan's Heian period. After that, within the isolated island in the middle of the ocean, without any exchange with other civilizations and with no chance to verify what they were doing, they continued to make Moai for hundreds of years.

What's interesting is that the Moai statues gradually became larger over time. Is this human nature—a manifestation of the desire to run a little faster than that guy or to gain a slight advantage over that guy, whether in studies or sports? And as they became larger, they became difficult to transport, so they were abandoned midway and remain on the slopes in that form.

What I found most mysterious on-site was that I couldn't understand at all why they were going through such hardship to make Moai statues. It felt like a strange, distorted civilization that might collapse if someone just said, "Other people are enjoying themselves more; why are you doing this?"

One reason this became a mystery is colonization by Westerners. The Westerners who "discovered" Easter Island arbitrarily decided it was French territory, and the French took the island as their own and sold the island's inhabitants as slaves to work in the Chilean mines in South America. Most of the people on the island died, and only about 100 survivors finally returned to the island, so the transmission of the island's culture was completely severed. This made it even more of a mystery as to "why they were making Moai."

There were records of the island's history and traditions carved into wooden boards with something like characters, but Christian missionaries collected and burned them all. For these two reasons, the island's traditions were completely lost. Most of the people living on the island now are those who came from Polynesia after colonization. In this way, many civilizations have been lost. I was struck by the horror of what humans can do.

The things done during the Age of Discovery are all things unthinkable by today's values. Kidnapping people in Africa and making them work as slaves in South and North America. That is related to current racial and border issues. Today's world exists on a history where such things were done normally until just a few hundred years ago. Therefore, I want young people to see and feel various front lines of the world, but when I hear that young people today don't want to travel abroad much, I think it's a waste.

I often write books about dinosaurs, so I will talk a little about why I started writing them.

What is necessary in drawing manga is not to take what you see as it is, but to look at it slightly from the side, from the back, to think about things from various angles, and to trace the viewpoints of people in various positions. Without that twist, it's not interesting at all as a manga.

In my 30s, I had a weekly one-panel manga series in a children's newspaper called "Asahi Shogakusei Shimbun." At that time, the editor would come to my house to pick up the manuscript. I always felt bad for making them wait, so we would chat afterward. At that time, I mentioned that the current state of dinosaurs in Japan was terrible.

Since no dinosaurs had been found in Japan yet, there were no dinosaur experts. However, I had been interested in dinosaurs for a long time, so I had been researching them. At that time, several dinosaur books for children were out, but when you opened them, they said, "Dinosaurs really existed long ago; kaiju have people inside them; let's distinguish between dinosaurs and kaiju." It was an era when there were no proper books about dinosaurs. There were only collections of information from books published in America and elsewhere, or books where they were just listed alongside various other prehistoric creatures besides dinosaurs. I thought this was terrible treatment for our predecessors on Earth.

Dinosaurs were ordinary animals that lived a long time ago, and moreover, they flourished for a long period of nearly 200 million years. There was no respect or admiration for those animals, nor any concept of an ecosystem. There was only uncertain information, like Tyrannosaurus being carnivorous and scary, or Stegosaurus having spikes on its back but actually being weak. It is a big mistake for children to think that Earth's history and prehistoric life were like that. When I mentioned this to the "Asahi Shogakusei Shimbun" reporter as small talk, they said, "If you're going to complain that much, write it yourself," and I wrote a series about dinosaurs for the children's newspaper. The content was about thinking for yourself what kind of animals dinosaurs were based on discovered fossils.

An editor from Akane Shobo saw that and requested me to create a dinosaur book for children. At the time, there were no books explaining things like "this and this fossil have been found, and reconstructing from the found fossils results in this," so it was seen as a rarity and became a rare bestseller among my books.

Furthermore, while dinosaur books had previously only come into Japan from America and elsewhere, an American publisher thought it was interesting and translated it, and it was published in America as well. I even received a fan letter in English from an American child. Later, I wrote "Dinosaur Museum" for general readers for Shincho Bunko, and this also sold quite well. Through this process, I created several dinosaur books.

At that time, dinosaur books published in Japan were supervised by professors from the National Museum of Nature and Science. However, that professor might be researching ammonites, for example, but was the supervisor because they specialized in paleontology. This is like asking someone researching clams or shijimi, "Why is a giraffe's neck long?" In other words, the genre of seriously researching dinosaurs itself did not exist.

Therefore, I created that genre myself. Seeing that, many people were inspired and said, "Then I will too," and since then, many young people have become dinosaur researchers. I take pride in having cast a stone into that pond.

Recently, dinosaur fossils have gradually started to be found in Japan as well. Fukui Prefecture has now become a dinosaur kingdom and has a magnificent museum. But when fossils first started being found, the people who found them didn't know how to handle them, so I was called in because "that person is a manga artist but also writes dinosaur books, so let's have him talk a bit," and I went to many dinosaur excavation sites. I was also allowed to go to foreign excavation sites for TV programs.

You might think of overseas dinosaur excavation sites as a world full of dreams and romance, but it's quite difficult. I once went to the Gobi Desert in Inner Mongolia for about three weeks for an excavation. We drove in a convoy from the provincial capital into the middle of the desert, set up camp, and stayed in ger (Mongolian tents). The morning starts with shaking scorpions out of your shoes. And there is nothing to eat but mutton. Every day was just eating mutton boiled in slightly salty well water.

It was complete wilderness with no people at all. In such a place, I went with a dinosaur expert from Inner Mongolia to a place where fossils had previously been found and dug. Then, we encountered a beautiful, complete fossil of a Protoceratops from the Late Cretaceous. It was a fossil in such good condition that it looked as fresh as the camel bones rolling around nearby.

While digging for fossils, people somehow gather in a place you thought was uninhabited wilderness. When we were finally about to dig it out, load it onto a truck, and carry it away, the truck was suddenly surrounded by a large crowd of people. When I wondered what was happening, a person who said he was the village head said, "The dinosaur bones here are the property of the village; what do you mean by taking them without permission?" When we said, "We are researchers, and we are taking this to a museum to research and exhibit it," he insisted, "No, this is village property; the village will also build its own dinosaur museum someday, so don't take it." In the end, the matter was settled by paying some money.

Troubles over landowners' rights often occur at excavation sites in America as well. A Tyrannosaurus fossil was found on an Indian reservation, and when a local research institute excavated and took it, they were told, "Things on Indian reservations belong to the Indians; you haven't obtained the landowner's permission." Since Indian reservations are under the jurisdiction of the FBI, they came to the institute with guns, seized the Tyrannosaurus, and took it back. Later, that fossil was put up for auction and sold for hundreds of millions of yen, and it is now displayed in a museum in Chicago. Also, a replica is displayed at Disney World, which provided the money for the auction. Because dinosaur fossils can be worth money, human greed can sometimes get involved. Even at Japanese excavation sites, there is a world of researchers sabotaging each other that you could never tell children about.

However, when children hear news that a new dinosaur has been discovered in Hokkaido and its whole body has been assembled, they probably think they want to discover a dinosaur someday. The front lines are difficult places where the complex interests of humans intertwine, but they are also places that provide dreams.

When excavating in the Gobi Desert, we stayed in ger, but we couldn't last on just mutton, and halfway through, people who came from the mainland to support the shoot brought Cup Noodles. These were delicious. They tasted like civilization.

This is an arid region, and the concept of a toilet does not exist at all. The surroundings are almost uninhabited, and we had no choice but to do as the locals do, but because the desert has good visibility, you can't go during the day. However, at night it's pitch black and there are wolves, so you can't go outside. Therefore, you go just before dawn. Just before dawn, everyone scatters in all directions from the tents, carrying shovels. You dig a hole just for your own use, squat down, and while thinking, "Why am I doing this in a place like this?" you do your business while gazing at the sky just before dawn.

What surprised me then was that since it was dawn in the desert, it was still chilly, but suddenly a moment came when I felt heat on my body. When I jumped up in surprise, the morning sun that had just peeked over the horizon was hitting my buttocks. It felt almost like it was burning. Afterward, I carefully buried what I had produced and returned. I heard later that the sand in that desert rises during certain seasons and reaches Japan as yellow dust. I wondered if that's why it's called yellow dust (laughs); I might have caused trouble for a few people.

It can be said that there are almost no current ecosystems that do not involve humans. However, when I went to Africa and saw animals within a 360-degree horizon, I felt through my skin that nature without human intervention has continued in this way for hundreds, thousands, and tens of thousands of years. What I thought after going to Africa 25 times was that "herds of zebras are always energetic." Why are there only such energetic zebras? Zebras also get sick, get injured, and grow old. However, while in human society we help each other and try to create a good society for everyone, in the case of zebras, they left all the problems of the elderly and the disabled to the lions. Those that grow old, get injured, have bad luck, or fall behind the herd quickly become prey for the lions.

Conversely, lions are always eating only those kinds of zebras, and they can't easily eat the energetic ones. It's called the survival of the fittest, but the ecosystem turns in that way. Whenever you go, the zebra herds are energetic, and the lions are always prowling around them. While repeating such ruthlessness of the ecosystem as if it were natural, the scenery of the beautiful green savanna, which looks peaceful at first glance, is created—I can feel that deeply through my skin.

When you watch, the success rate of hunting by carnivores is very low. This is natural. The ones being eaten don't want to die, so they flee desperately. But the ones eating also have to chase desperately even though they are hungry, because if their food escapes, they stay hungry. Carnivores have such experiences every day. This is a major undertaking.

The ecosystem is built on the balance between carnivores and herbivores. If herbivores increase too much and eat too many plants, the environment changes significantly. Then the herbivores cannot live either. It is the carnivores that adjust this. But if carnivores increase too much, the number of herbivores decreases. Within the balance of plants, the herbivores that eat them, and the carnivores, the ecosystem is formed. Within that, as the environment changes, plants and animals change little by little, and I believe evolution exists in that form.

This is actually well understood from dinosaur fossils. When one species is born and another goes extinct, a different species emerges as if to replace it. During the dinosaur era, various dinosaurs appeared and went extinct while flourishing for nearly 200 million years. Then, 65 million years ago, all types went through a mass extinction. What's mysterious is that although it's said that a meteorite hit and changed the environment, or a volcanic eruption changed the global environment, there are no strata from 65 million years ago where dinosaurs are found dead in piles. Dinosaur fossils simply stop appearing after the 65-million-year mark.

For a while after that, there are no very large animals. Then, in the new era, the mammals that survived the dinosaur era diversified and underwent great evolution to become elephants, camels, hippos, and so on, as if tracing the ecosystem previously occupied by dinosaurs.

Both dinosaurs and mammals, like the Moai statues mentioned earlier, gradually began to produce larger species. Previously, some people said dinosaurs went extinct because they became too large, but it's the opposite. Because they were flourishing, they were able to become large within that environment. The same is true for mammals. There were many large mammals, but when the cooling of the Ice Age arrived, the large species disappeared. At the same time, humanity emerged.

It is said that evolution did not proceed with a purpose but through an accumulation of coincidences that led to various species, but looking at the birth of humanity, I feel that might not be entirely the case.

There are various theories, but single-celled organisms appeared about 3.5 or 3.6 billion years ago, and the organisms born on Earth gradually began to produce various types. All animals have developed their biological functions to try to advance into every possible environment on Earth. In the era of dinosaurs, animals with the single system of "dinosaur" tried to advance into forests, high mountains, deserts, grasslands, and the sea. Even after they went extinct due to major environmental changes, mammals then changed their body designs and produced various species to try to advance into every possible environment on Earth. Life born on Earth is always trying to expand its living space. But no matter how much it tries to expand, it can never leave the vessel that is Earth.

However, humanity was able to advance into every possible environment on Earth for the first time without changing its body design. To fly in the sky, we use airplanes. We even enter the water in submarines. To move quickly on land, we created railroads and automobiles. Mammals other than humans have produced energy within their own bodies to think and move, but humans learned to use external energy. By using fire, we obtained heat from that energy, made food easier to eat, created pottery, melted metal to process various things, and eventually generated electricity to use external energy to create a complex society. Nowadays, we even share information among all humanity using the internet.

For humans, being able to advance into any environment without changing our bodies means that if we make an environment convenient for ourselves into a capsule, we can survive whether in the sea or in outer space. If we attach a rocket to that and launch it from Earth, life born on Earth can leave the surface of Earth for the first time.

The fact that humanity can go outside Earth means we can also take other Earth creatures with us. Life was born on Earth and spread to every possible environment on Earth through trial and error, but it could never go outside Earth. With the birth of humanity, for the first time, it became possible to spread life born on Earth beyond it. Isn't this incredible? Perhaps biological evolution had a direction from the beginning of wanting to go beyond Earth, and for that, it had to give birth to humanity. This is a manga artist's delusion, but I feel this kind of perspective when looking at dinosaurs and animals.

Various things are being said now about animal protection and environmental issues, but environmental issues simply mean wanting to protect an environment that is convenient for humanity. Looking at Earth's history, it seems not much has changed over the last 100 years or so, but it has changed significantly when viewed in units of 1,000 years. Ten thousand years ago was the Ice Age, and there were elephants like the Naumann elephant in Japan. There were also mammoths in Hokkaido. I believe environmental issues must be viewed over a slightly longer span. With the narrow scientific power of taking the last 100 years or so as a standard and considering its protection as the environmental issue, we may not be able to fully respond.

So, here is my conclusion. First, I want young people to go abroad, see things from various angles, and look at things over the long span of Earth's history and the history of life. For that purpose, I definitely want them to visit the African savanna. Welcoming the sunrise and sunset within the savanna's horizon is the best. When you go out to the plains in a jeep just before dawn, the sun rises from the horizon. Your face gets warm even if you don't have your buttocks out (laughs). Birds take flight all at once. Hyenas or lions returning from a night out walk by with bones in their mouths. You can truly feel that this was nature, and this is the kind of environment our ancestors once lived in.

It is said that Homo sapiens, born in Africa about 150,000 to 200,000 years ago, spread throughout the world, and I feel the home of that soul there. In many senses, the starting point is there. Within that, you can think about various things: what humans have obtained and what we must aim for from now on. I want you to place yourself in such a front line and feel things by looking at them from multiple perspectives.

Thank you for your kind attention today.

(This article is based on a lecture given at the 708th Mita Public Speaking Event held on July 1, 2019, with some additions and corrections.)