- I can't do manga where the characters readily make friends that they risk their lives for. I started out by drawing short human drama pieces, but even then - partially because I wasn't doing long-term series, but they weren't generally stories about friends.
- For me, there's a reason for winning at gambling, and that reason is what's interesting about it, so I try to structure my manga so that I can explain things through reason.
- I consider one of the characteristics of my manga to be that the bad guys say these really cruel things, and yet you feel like maybe what they're saying is true. You could say that I use the bad guys in my manga as a sort of wall that stands in for society or something like that, which Kaiji then bumps up against and wins or loses against.
- My line of work is actually a bit like gambling. I see having a manga series as like putting on a show, in that it comes down to how long you can keep it running, how many customers you can get into your tent. You don't even know if you're going to have an audience if you put on your show, so it's a blind investment and, in that sense, a sort of gamble. Manga is a gamble in the same way - you start a series without knowing whether it'll last or not.
- Take pledge-drive concerts, for example. Basically, I think those things are bogus. I don't know how many hundreds of millions of yen those things raise, but I suspect that they'd be donating more money if they would just take the money they put toward the concert's production fees and donate that to charity instead. Now, obviously they're aware that they could do that and are choosing not to anyway - they want to appeal to people's consciences, I get that, but still... as Kaiji says when he's on the steel beam, "People don't save people because they don't feel bad about it." I realize this is pretty harsh stuff. Sorry.
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