The girls pulled out a portable music player with “Hare Hare Yukai” ready to go and performed the song just as the characters do in the anime.
I understand now that just about all Haruhi cosplayers are able to dance along to “Hare Hare Yukai,” but at the time I had only just begun my role as a promoter or Japanese anime, so it came as somewhat of a shock to me back then.

Upon returning to Japan I showed the video I took of the girls to a member of the Foreign Services who is quite versed in the Spanish language.
“Is this really Spain?” He asked, quite surprised. “Spanish people generally have a tendency not to gather in a group and perform in unison like this. Just think about Flamenco. But I guess if that’s the case then anime is having some sort of effect on the Spanish mentality, right?”

When I travel overseas I’m often asked to give interviews for various media.
“I’m sure you’re aware that Japanese anime and manga is having a great influence on the young people in my country on how they view life and relationships. But are other Japanese people aware of this?”
This is something that I’m asked quite often.
Japanese anime began being broadcast all over the world in the 70s. Regular readers of this column will already be well aware that regular Japanese people are quite oblivious to the global impact of Japanese anime and its overwhelming power.

“It’s like Haruhi is me.”
The number of times I’ve heard girls say this is almost too many to count.
My profession is somewhat unique I suppose, but it often occurs to me that I’m probably the only Japanese to have witnessed so many different girls performing “Hare Hare Yukai” in so many different locations all over the world.

A number of years before I started touring the globe, Hironobu Kageyama, a member of Lantis’s pin-up group, JAM Project, was already a pioneer amongst Japanese artists, out there paving a way through the unknown (visiting foreign countries) and asserting his will to “perform wherever his fans call him.” You could say that what I’m doing now is following in the foot steps of Kageyama-san.

“The quality and various genres of ani-songs have become much more diversified also.”

Not just personally, but also as a bearer of cultural diplomacy, I’m looking forward to seeing what kind of song Lantis brings us next. I asked CEO Inoue to select three ani-songs that really represent the Lantis name.

Lantis continues to churn out ani-song hits one after the other and has become a revolutionary in the industry, but CEO Shunji Inoue still had a dream of his own. He wanted to one day create a song for the “Gundam” series and that dream became a reality when their song “Kimi no naka no Eiyu” (sung by Minami Kuribayashi) was chosen as the ending theme song to the latest edition in the Gundam series, “Mobile Suit Gundam AGE.”

They may have fulfilled another of their goals but don’t think they’ll simply stop at that. I think it’s safe to say we can expect great things from Lantis in the years to come.

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