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 draw what are called 'single-panel cartoons,' which you don't see very often anymore. In the Japanese manga world today, the vast majority of people draw gekiga, comics, or animation; I believe there are only about 20 or 30 people making a living from single-panel cartoons. In other words, you are all 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.' But by the time I was growing up in the immediate post-war period, manga for children finally began to emerge in abundance. Before we knew it, it grew along with its readers and created the comic culture we have today.

During that time, there was a period when 'manga for adults' flourished and grew. When you think of the central single-panel cartoons of that era, the first thing that comes to mind might be the political cartoons found in newspapers. These used to be called 'jiji-manga' (current events cartoons)—satirical drawings of politicians' faces and topical issues in newspapers. There were also some slightly risqué cartoons. 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 would often tell me, 'I ran through the flames holding you. It was truly terrifying when we fled under a railway bridge where burning sleepers were falling. You were wrapped in a blanket, and you survived because various people threw fire-prevention water on you.' She also often told me how she worried because my eyes wouldn't open for about three days after the air 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 mobilization 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 today. My mother would flee taking me with her. My father would flee on his own. They would agree to meet at a certain place if they both survived. 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 America, so to speak, but 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 CRITICAL.' 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 almost killed by America once during the air raid, I was saved by America that time, so I've reached the present day with the slate more or less clean (laughs).

My generation grew up from a place of truly nothing. When I reached the age of reason, the surroundings were full of ruins. We would dissolve saccharin released by the occupation forces in hot water and drink it, saying, 'Oh, this is delicious.' That's 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 were the meager manga found in magazines for children. I would watch those greedily, and if there was a picture I liked, I would spend my time trying hard to copy it.

I have been part of the Keio Juku since the Keio Futsubu School. When I entered the Futsubu School, the library was full of books, and it was a matter of course that I could read any of them. I was so happy that I spent all my time in the library. There, I learned things like the fact that 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 also enter my head.

My serious encounter with manga was 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, there was a poster that said, 'Manga Club Recruiting Members: Anyone interested, come to the coffee shop "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 a prospective new member had come for the first time in a long while.

There was something like a scrapbook of works there, and they were so-called single-panel cartoons. There was political satire, humor, and risqué content; they had collected single-panel cartoons in the adult style of the time 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 Research 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 for a Waseda-Keio 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 a Waseda-Keio 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 right at the beginning of the 1950s and 60s, 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 writing the letters 'K' and 'W' on large panels and using them to create a manga. Takehiko Maeda and Rokusuke Ei were the leaders of the two teams. Surprisingly, we ended up winning (laughs). That's when we decided that Keio should also continue its activities.

First, I wondered what to do, and what I thought of was holding a Waseda-Keio Manga Battle in the corridors of the Hiyoshi campus. The Waseda Manga Research Society rented an apartment near their university as a club room, and their closets were full of manga pasted on panels for exhibitions held on campus. So, we borrowed about 20 manga panels from Waseda, and the five of us from Keio drew manga on panels in the same way, lined them up in the Hiyoshi corridors, and recruited members while holding the Waseda-Keio Manga Battle. As a result, by the time we graduated, the number of members had grown to about 20 or 30. It's a happy story that it has continued to this day.

We also participated in the Mita Festival for the first time, taking a corner of a classroom or corridor to do caricatures and exhibit manga on panels. At that time, since the club had started its activities, we wanted an advisor, so we 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, 'You guys, do you know how much I get paid for a 30-minute lecture? What do you think of a person'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 cultural criticism'—still remain within me. Manga is not just about mocking or ridiculing people with gags; it must be drawn with an understanding of the pathos behind the humor and various other things—that is, an understanding of human beings. In a social sense, it must lead to cultural criticism. 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 Keio's Institute of Oriental Classics (Shido Bunko), was writing manga criticism, and I was invited by him to have various conversations. We did something like a roundtable discussion about manga in Suntory's PR magazine 'Yosho Tengoku' (Western Liquor Paradise), and we continued our association after that, with him introducing me to various foreign manga. What I realized then was that even though we call it all 'manga,' 'Japanese things and foreign things are different.'

In Japan, the manga that were commercially viable as so-called single-panel cartoons were either political cartoons appearing in newspapers or small, slightly risqué illustrations. Otherwise, they were humorous manga with a few panels or things like illustrations. There were many interesting works by my predecessors, but they were interesting in a momentary, fleeting way. Especially with the current events cartoons in newspapers, after six months or a year, even the artist themselves sometimes wouldn't know what they were satirizing. Once the topic of the moment is lost, 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 cartoons, for example, people like Kon Shimizu or Hidezō Kondō were so good at caricatures that the manga was interesting enough just with the politicians' faces, 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. 'This guy is a sly one, this guy is a coward, this guy might be a bit slow'—all of that was expressed through drawings. 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 cartoons certainly don't fit the current era (laughs).

On the other hand, looking at foreign manga, I thought that it might be okay to freely express a manga artist's individual 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 a lifetime. I wanted to draw that kind of manga.

However, in Japanese society, there weren't many 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? The company wanted as much old brass material as it could get. 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 anti-Vietnam War movements were being actively carried out, war could be used as a means of making money in this way. This reveals a completely different side of the Vietnam War than what you see in newspapers or on TV. I thought, 'The front lines are amazing.' 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 party to it. Then, it's no longer enough for it to be just objectively interesting, and you have to do various things yourself. It's a matter of course, but this is a bit painful. So, I used the salary I had saved to hold an exhibition of single-panel cartoons and produced a manga book through self-publishing.

At that time, Bungeishunju published a magazine called 'Manga Dokuhon' every month. This was an entertainment magazine mainly featuring manga for adults, containing things like light story manga and single-panel cartoons, and it often introduced foreign manga. They had something called 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 novice, but I received such an offer about 10 months after starting my job. Since there were at least some places that found single-panel cartoons 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 my activities as a manga artist. Bungeishunju's 'Manga Dokuhon' found my manga interesting and began giving me pages from time to time. Just showing a single-panel cartoon is one thing, but when told I could use 16 or 8 pages freely, I could depict a single theme. 'Manga Dokuhon' let me do that occasionally, and at the time, this 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. As my work began to catch people's eyes, I started receiving various offers like '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 work from travel magazines. The publishing division of the Japan Travel Bureau at the time, now JTB, published a monthly magazine called 'Tabi' (Travel), and I received a request to go somewhere on a trip and write text and draw pictures. It was to be a series, 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 are naturally beautiful around the time the book comes out, so even if you take photos, this year's photos can 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 to watch the engineer operate 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, when we entered Tokyo just before Shiodome Station at dawn, facing the morning sun head-on, 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 amazing. 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 much of a given, but I suddenly wondered what this was. Going on a trip opens various 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 ended up going to Borneo. I wandered through the jungle after being told out of the blue, 'Let's go find the Rafflesia, the world's largest flower.' It was muggy and there were 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 are beautiful rivers. When there's a river, we get happy and everyone strips naked and jumps in. It's fine to jump in with great joy, but since we haven't bathed for days, we don't want to be showered with the water used to wash other people's dirty bodies, so we try to go even slightly further upstream than others (laughs). So I proposed lining up in a single horizontal row, and we scrubbed our backsides and washed our heads.

At night, we stayed at local accommodations in the jungle. A place like a water house served as the lodging, and when you go up the stairs and enter the room, there is 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 'washlet' where you wash yourself when finished.

The area under the water house is a fish farm where they raise fish. It's a system where what comes out after you do your business becomes fish food. Just as I was thinking there are such ways to be frugal, that fish appeared for breakfast (laughs). There is the term 'food chain,' but I would like to keep a bit more distance from it.

Also, there were longhouses, the stilt houses of ethnic minorities. When you go up, they were raising pigs in the enclosure below. Again, the pigs' food was human waste, and in that sense, there is no waste. Today's Japan wastes many things. It's often called food loss, but the reason rats and crows target the garbage humans throw away is because it's 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 suddenly 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's said they might be aliens, but what I realized by going to the site is that those are all Moai that were abandoned in the middle of being made.

Easter Island is a small volcanic island, but they quarry tuff from near the crater and transport it for kilometers to the coast. Several Moai statues stand there as well. Did they perform 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's a truly mysterious society. Easter Island is isolated by thousands of kilometers from other societies, and it seems Polynesian people migrated there around Japan's Heian period. After that, in the isolated island in the middle of the ocean, without any chance to exchange with other civilizations or verify what they were doing, they continued making Moai for hundreds of years.

What's interesting is that the Moai statues gradually get larger over time. Is this human nature—a manifestation of the desire to run a bit faster than that guy or be a bit superior to that guy, whether in studies or sports? And as they got 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 didn't understand at all why they were going through such hardship to make Moai statues. It felt like a strange, distorted civilization that would collapse if someone just said, 'Other people are having more fun; why are you doing this?'

One reason it became such 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 island's people died there, 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 legends carved into wooden boards with something like characters, but Christian missionaries gathered them all and burned them. For these two reasons, the island's legends were completely lost. Most of the people living on the island now are those who came from Polynesia after colonization. In that way, many civilizations have been lost. I was struck by the horror of what humans 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 top of 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 really want to travel abroad, I think it's a waste.

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

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, think about things from various angles, and 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 single-panel cartoon 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 have small talk afterward. At that time, I mentioned that the current state of dinosaurs in Japan was terrible.

Since dinosaurs hadn't been found in Japan yet, there were no dinosaur experts. But I had been interested since long ago, so I was researching dinosaurs. 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 without any decent books about dinosaurs. There were only collections of information from books published in America and the like, or books where they were just listed alongside various other prehistoric creatures. 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 honor for those animals, nor any concept of an ecosystem. There was only uncertain information, like Tyrannosaurus is a carnivore and scary, or Stegosaurus has spikes on its back but is actually weak. It's a big mistake for children to think that Earth's history and prehistoric life are like that. When I told that 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 trying to think for ourselves 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 only been coming in from America and elsewhere until then, an American publisher thought this was interesting and translated it, and it was published in America as well. I even received fan letters in English from American children. Later, I wrote 'Dinosaur Museum' for a general audience 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 and the like. But those professors might be researching ammonites, for example, and were only supervisors because they were experts in prehistoric life. 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 to say, '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 begun 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 line of cars 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 boots. And there is nothing to eat but mutton. Every day was just eating mutton boiled in slightly salty well water.

It's a complete wilderness with no people at all. In such a place, I went with an Inner Mongolian dinosaur expert to a place where fossils had been found before and dug. Then, we encountered a beautiful complete fossil of a Late Cretaceous Protoceratops. 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 gather before you know it in a place you thought was an uninhabited wasteland. 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 they were the village head said, 'The dinosaur bones here are village property; what do you mean by taking them away without permission?' When we said, 'We are researchers, and we are taking this to a museum to research and exhibit it,' they 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 and the like often occur at American excavation sites 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 several hundred million 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 pulling each other down that you could never tell children about.

But when children hear the news that a new dinosaur has been discovered in Hokkaido and its whole body has been assembled, they will think they want to discover a dinosaur someday. A site is a difficult place where complex interests between humans are intertwined, but it is also a place that gives dreams.

When we were excavating in the Gobi Desert, we stayed in ger, but we couldn't last on just mutton, and midway 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 there is no concept of a toilet at all. The surroundings are almost uninhabited, and we have no choice but to do as the locals do, but since the desert has good visibility, you can't possibly go during the day. However, at night it's pitch black and there are wolves, so you can't possibly go outside. Therefore, you go just before dawn. As dawn approaches, everyone scatters in all directions from the tents with 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's dawn in the desert, it's still chilly, but then a moment comes when you suddenly feel heat on your body. When I jumped up in surprise, the morning sun that had just peeked over the horizon was hitting my backside. It felt almost like being burned. Afterward, I carefully buried what I had produced and returned. I heard later that the sand in that desert blows up in season 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, it was conveyed to me through my physical senses that nature without human involvement has continued in this way for hundreds, thousands, and tens of thousands of years. What I thought after going to Africa 25 times is 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 who 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. We call it the law of the jungle, but the ecosystem revolves in that way. Whenever you go, the zebra herds are energetic, and the lions are always loitering around them. You can feel deeply through your physical senses that the scenery of the beautiful green savanna, which looks peaceful at first glance, is created while repeating such ruthlessness of the ecosystem as a matter of course.

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 if their food gets away. Carnivores have that experience every day. This is a major undertaking.

The ecosystem is created within 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. Plants, the herbivores that eat them, and further the carnivores—the ecosystem is created within that balance. As the environment changes within that, plants and animals change little by little, and I believe evolution exists in that form.

What makes that clear is actually 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 emerged and flourished for nearly 200 million years while going extinct. Then, 65 million years ago, all types went through a mass extinction. What's mysterious is that it's said a meteorite hit and changed the environment, or volcanic eruptions changed the global environment, but there are no strata from 65 million years ago where dinosaurs are found dead in piles. It's just that dinosaur fossils stop appearing after the 65-million-year mark.

For a while after that, there are no very large animals. And after that, the mammals that survived the dinosaur era diversified in the new era 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, just 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. It's the same 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 was a stack of coincidences that produced various species, but when looking at the birth of humanity, I start to feel that it might not be quite so.

There are various theories, but single-celled organisms emerged 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 functions as living things to try to advance into every possible environment on Earth. In the era of dinosaurs, animals with the single system of dinosaurs 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 one after another to produce various species and 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 called 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. We created railways and automobiles to move quickly on land. Mammals other than humans have produced energy within their own bodies to think and move, but humans learned to use external energy. Using fire, we obtain heat from that energy to make food easier to eat, create pottery, melt metal to process various things, and eventually generate 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 a capsule of an environment convenient for ourselves, 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 the 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 amazing? 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 that kind of perspective when looking at dinosaurs and animals.

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

So, here is the conclusion. First, I want young people to go abroad, look at things from various angles, and look at things over the long span of Earth's history and the history of life. For that, I definitely want them to visit the African savanna. Welcoming the sunrise and sunset within the savanna 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 backside 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 our ancestors also lived in such a place long ago.

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