At Kyoto Animation, women were central
He can’t get the TOKYO — women out of his mind.
A day after an apparent arson killed 33 people at an animation studio in the Japanese city of Kyoto, a neighbor, the 81-year-old Ken Okumura, remembered seeing several women jump from the building’s second floor. They were so badly burned that blood was coming from their noses, and all of their
clothes but their underwear were gone.
“Just horrible,” Okumura said on Friday, as the smell of burning still hung in the humid air.
Much was still unknown about the Thursday fire, which appeared to be Japan’s worst mass killing in decades. The police identified Shinji Aoba, 41, as a suspect in the case, based on statements they said he made when he was apprehended. They said Aoba was being treated for severe burns and had not been arrested. Japanese news reports, cit
ing unnamed police sources, said the suspect had told police that he started the fire because he believed the stu- dio, Kyoto Animation, “stole a novel” from him.
NHK, the public broadcaster, reported that Aoba had served time in prison for robbery and that he was being treated for an
unspecified mental illness. The report, which cited an unidentified source, said he lived in the city of Saitama, near Tokyo.
As of Friday, none of the names of the 33 people killed in the fire had been released. What was known was that almost two-thirds of them — 20 — were women.
That appears to reflect a trend in Japan’s animation industry, as well as the hir-
ing practices at Kyoto Anima- tion. There are about twice as many women as men among working animators in their 20s, according to Daisuke Okeda, a lawyer and adviser to the Japan Animation Cre
ators Association. Male animators still lead the industry, and they outnumber women among animators over 35, Okeda said. But Kyoto Animation — known as KyoAni to its fans — is known for employing more women, particularly younger women.
More than half of the work- ers in the burned building were women, based on figures released by the Kyoto fire officials about the dead as well as the dozens of injured.
On Friday, a man distraught about his 21-year-old granddaughter, who worked at Kyoto Animation, told
NHK that he could not find her name on lists of people taken to local hospitals.
“She was my pride,” the man, Kazuo Okada, 69, said of his granddaughter, Megumu Ohno. “Her name started appearing on the screens of anime movies. I was so happy to see that. I was proud of her. I want to see her face soon.”
Kyoto Ani m ation was co-founded by Yoko Hatta and her husband, Hideaki Hatta, in 1981, and went on to produce high-quality, meticulously detailed works. They
included “The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya,” a science fiction series based at a high school, and “Lucky Star,” whose intelligent female protagonist is distracted from her studies by anime and video games.