This was my very first Kyoban Festival. Returning to Kyoto for the first time in 20 years, I found it to be a beautiful city. There are plenty of tourists, but everyone seems to treat the city with a certain reverence, and that atmosphere feels really good. With my expectations sky-high about what kind of festival it would be, the eve-of-festival event easily blew past everything I'd imagined: stunning performances married perfectly with anime footage. I was completely captivated by live film score music. The pre-festival event alone is more than worth the trip from Sapporo.

My First Taste of "Sheer Fortune"

Tomorrow marks the opening of "Kyomaf" (Kyoto International Manga Anime Fair), one of western Japan's largest anime festivals and one closely tied to Kyoban Festival. Figuring Kyoto would be buzzing tomorrow as well, I was about to leave the venue at Kyoto Station when I got word that Yuki Hayashi himself, the organizer of Kyoban Festival, was about to host a banquet by booking out the banquet hall of Hotel Granvia Kyoto, directly connected to Kyoto Station. To my gratitude, even a mere outside writer like me was told I was welcome to attend.

So this is the kind of moment where you bust out that line Kaiji always uses: "Sheer fortune...!" While I was lost in such thoughts, I found myself escorted all the way to the hotel's banquet hall.

Just moments earlier I'd been thinking, "The most cost-effective dinner would be the standing-room udon stand near the platform." In this Reiwa era of ever-rising prices, with earnings roughly equal to a salaried worker's monthly income back in the mid-1960s, this was a luxurious hotel banquet hall the likes of which I'd never seen. Glancing at the names of the other banquet halls, I spotted things like "Symposium on Molecular Science"... There really are so many things you still don't understand even as a grown-up, aren't there.

I was shown to my seat. But here's the thing: in a place where, if a game of fruit basket suddenly broke out and someone called for "the people who aren't important," I would clearly be the first to leap to my feet, I was somehow seated way up at the head of the table, which only confused me more. Hayashi must be the kind of person who treats everyone equally.

The food, too, was nothing but exquisite dishes plated as elegantly as something a refined young lady would eat in an anime. A server poured the drinks. Nervous and parched, I kept gulping down beer. The moment my glass dipped a little, the server topped it right back up. By around the seventh glass, my mind was racing: "Uh oh! At this rate I'm going to get drunk (already drunk). No, more importantly, they'll think I'm a shameless freeloader for drinking this much! Come to think of it, I've heard that in Kyoto words can mean the opposite of what they say. Which means... was even being invited to the banquet a way of telling me to go home...?" Just as I was spiraling, the guest of honor, Hayashi, took the stage.

Hayashi's Talk

Hayashi's encounter with music apparently traces back to the "men's rhythmic gymnastics" he did in high school. In this sport, you get to choose the music that accompanies your routine, and through it Hayashi awakened to the joy of music and went on to study it self-taught. Film scoring, where music is set to footage, and rhythmic gymnastics, where you dance in real time to music you've chosen yourself, take opposite approaches, yet they certainly seem to share a lot in common. Perhaps that's where the secret lies behind Hayashi's uncanny knack for scores that sync so perfectly with a character's movements.

Afterward, when Hayashi declared he would "prove that I really did rhythmic gymnastics," he performed a gorgeous handstand right there on stage. And as he lowered his legs, he caught his foot on the light of a music stand that had been set up on the stage.

After that, Kenki Kobayashi and Yui Arima, music producers for the anime "My Hero Academia," took the stage and traded all sorts of behind-the-scenes stories with Hayashi.

What stood out most was the story about how Hayashi often "picks fights" with music producers (meaning he's the type to push his opinions assertively, I'd guess). Of course, it wasn't anything menacing; it was an incredibly sophisticated discussion. For instance, anime runs at "24 frames per second," and being off by even a single frame completely changes how the score lands and how the anime footage pops. Those are the kinds of things Hayashi speaks up about. One day, after he voiced an opinion, Arima fell silent, and just as Hayashi thought "Is she mad?", Arima wordlessly pulled out the chair next to her. Hayashi felt he'd been acknowledged, as if she were saying "You're right, that's better. Let me hear more of your opinions," and it made him so happy. He told the story with a childlike smile.

It's precisely because they place such weight on these incredibly fine details, and because they have a heartfelt desire to make anime better, that Japan has become an anime superpower. All I could do was groan in admiration at this truly precious story.

Even After It Ended...

Good times pass quickly, and before I knew it the party was wrapping up. I'd been stepping out of the banquet hall now and then to visit the smoking room, and there was a man who'd been glancing at the hall with admiring eyes for a while now. As I came out, he asked me, "This is... the banquet for that composer Hayashi, isn't it?!" When I said yes, his eyes sparkled and he told me, "I've been a huge fan for ages." From the outside I had a "Kyoban Festival Staff" armband on my arm, but I'm about as low on the totem pole as it gets. As I gave him a sheepish smile, thinking "You've got the wrong person to ask...", a staff member from "Futokoro-gatana," the agency Hayashi belongs to, went and fetched him, and the man got to give Hayashi the greeting he'd been longing for. I'm so glad a capable staff member happened to be nearby. And watching Hayashi, who was genuinely humble and handled it so wonderfully, I was reminded once again that this really is a man who treats everyone with the same kindness.

To think such a lovely thing could happen after the pre-festival event. I'm getting more and more excited for the main Kyoban Festival!

Elegantly plated banquet cuisine