Biography|Hikaru Kondo — The Nakano Cafe That Put the Studio on the Street

People treat Japanese animation studios as closed floors behind a lobby card reader.

Hikaru Kondo built a public door onto Waseda-dori instead.

In June 2006 he opened ufotable Cafe at 1-38-11 Nogata, Nakano, in the Nagata Building.

The shop was a gallery cafe, not a staff canteen with a locked back stair.

Kondo was born in Tokushima Prefecture on 2 December 1969.

In his early twenties he wrote for game magazines, then joined Tokyo Movie Shinsha and its sister studio Telecom Animation Film as a production manager.

Credits from that period include work on Spider-Man and on the 1995 Lupin III feature Farewell to Nostradamus.

After a producing job at Step Eizo he went independent in 1999.

In October 2000 he registered ufotable as a yugen-gaisha and took the presidency.

The company name comes from a piece of furniture, the UFO table, not from a spacecraft brief.

The first workroom was two desks squeezed into a four-and-a-half-tatami corner of a friend's old apartment in Kita-Ikebukuro.

That flat is still a private home, so this pin is the public room that followed, not the private one.

Kondo had wanted, from the start, a place where the people who drew frames could stand next to the people who bought tickets.

He also wanted the staff to eat better than a convenience-store dinner at a desk.

The cafe put original drawings on the wall and collaboration menus on the table.

Nakano was then the studio's home as well as its shopfront. Later headquarters moved to Shinjuku Front Tower. The Nogata door stayed.

From this address the firm added dining rooms, more cafes, a cinema in Tokushima, and the street festival Machi Asobi.

A visitor today still finds the same lot on Waseda-dori. The reservation system changed. The idea did not.

Photo: takeya manai, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons