Son of 1985 JAL crash victim releases anime to pass on memory
Yamamoto Masayoshi lost his father Kenji in the accident that claimed the lives of 520 people in August of 1985. The father was 49 years old.
Yamamoto released the roughly one-minute video on Friday as part of his long-term efforts to pass on the memory of the accident and the lessons learned from it.
He made the animated video with the help of generative artificial intelligence. Based on the story he created, it shows a woman, who lost a parent in the accident, telling her two children about the incident.
It explains that the plane crashed on a mountain, that it took a long time before rescuers reached the site, and that families continue to climb the mountain to console the souls of the victims.
But the bereaved families are getting old and a growing number of young people are not aware of the accident. Yamamoto said he hopes his video will help the younger generation and foreigners know what happened and think about what they can do to prevent a similar tragic accident.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
NHK
3 hours ago
- NHK
Sony Group posts record net profit, sales for Apr.-Jun. quarter
Sony Group has posted record net profit and sales for the April-to-June quarter due to brisk sales of video game titles and solid demand in the semiconductor business. The Japanese technology and entertainment giant says net income stood at 259 billion yen or 1.76 billion dollars, a jump of 23.3 percent from a year earlier. Sales were 2.62 trillion yen, up 2.2 percent. Sony has adjusted its full fiscal year figures to reflect the 15-percent tariff agreed between Japan and the US. It now expects the levy will result in a cut of operating income by 475 million dollars. The company revised upward its annual net profit forecast to 6.58 billion dollars, while maintaining its sales projection.
Japan Times
13 hours ago
- Japan Times
Futuristic mermaid tale ‘ChaO' makes a splash
Unlikely romances between humans and mermaids have been the basis for several anime films, like Hayao Miyazaki's 'Ponyo' and Masaaki Yuasa's 'Lu Over the Wall.' Now, Hans Christian Andersen's 'Little Mermaid' tale gets its latest animated spin in 'ChaO,' a new film from Studio 4°C that opens in Japan Aug. 15 after premiering in June at the Annecy International Film Festival in France, where it won the Jury Award. The romantic comedy takes place in a near-future Shanghai where humans live in relative peace alongside the merpeople who populate the city's canals and surrounding seas. Its protagonist is Stephan (voiced by Ouji Suzuka), a mild-mannered engineer who works at the city's top manufacturer of maritime vessels. One day, Stephan meets a mermaid princess named Chao (Anna Yamada), who is instantly smitten with Stephan, claiming they've met before, though he has no idea what she's talking about. Sensing a public relations coup for his company (a shipbuilder married to the daughter of a mer-king!), Stephan's boss (Ryota Yamasato) pushes his young employee to marry Chao. Even though he grumbles about the need to wed 'a talking fish,' the meek Stephan nonetheless goes through with the nuptials. The unlikely pair then begin a crosscultural coupling that brings challenges as Chao navigates life above the sea and Stephan slowly unlocks the repressed memories of when he first met his bride. 'ChaO' was directed by Yasuhiro Aoki, 56, a veteran animator and director of episodes of properties like 'Batman: Gotham Knight' and 'Tweeny Witches' in his feature film debut. For 'ChaO,' which took nine years from conception to release, Aoki was tasked by Studio 4°C producer Eiko Tanaka ('Tekkon Kinkreet,' 'Children of the Sea') to create a 'totally new' original anime film. Aoki tells The Japan Times that part of achieving that remit came in imbuing the film with a high level of visual density. Each frame is packed from corner to corner with intricate backgrounds, characters and objects with multiple blink-and-you'll-miss-it sight gags made to reward repeat viewings. Zooming out to allow for that kind of extra visual information was one of Aoki's primary goals. 'In a live-action film, you can have actors here and there across the frame doing all kinds of things, whereas anime tends to focus the camera only on what's essential to move the plot forward, on the character who's speaking, for example,' Aoki says. 'I wanted to avoid that tendency.' Proof of the film's visual spectacle is the number of frames drawn by its animators. The average anime film is said to be made up of about 30,000 to 40,000 hand-drawn frames, but 'ChaO' has over 100,000. 'That was many more frames than we anticipated,' says Aoki with a laugh. 'The truth is, with all the detail I was trying to pack in, the animators and I got excited about what we were trying to do, and we somehow ended up with over 100,000.' As the credits roll, the film gives the audience a peek behind the scenes and pays tribute to the hard work of those animators by showing how some key shots looked before they were colored and composited. 'We're entering an era where things like CG and AI are on their way in and hand-drawn animation is on its way out,' says Aoki. 'Since we're on the precipice of that change in eras, the ending sequence functions as proof that our film is drawn by hand. Ultimately, I think what humans like best is art made by other humans. AI may be gaining attention, but I think we want to watch things made by people.' Veteran animator and director Yasuhiro Aoki (center) premiered his film 'ChaO' in June at the Annecy International Film Festival in France, where it won the Jury Award. | Studio 4°C Speaking of people, another element that brings the vibrant look of 'ChaO' to life are its various characters. Created by the director and refined by character designer Hirokazu Kojima, each of the film's characters look totally different from each other but all share a sketchy, cartoony fluidity as they careen across the screen. 'I started my career in anime about 30 years ago, when the industry was starting to concentrate on anime with a lot of realism to appeal to adults,' says Aoki. 'I've done a lot of realist animation and enjoy drawing it, but for 'ChaO,' I wanted to try something you couldn't do in live-action filmmaking, something that might give live-action filmmakers a pang of jealousy. That's why the film has characters of all shapes and sizes: round, thin, tiny, large. Animation offers total freedom, after all.' Not only do the film's distinctive characters give it visual appeal, they also help fill out its expansive, zoomed-out worldview. Aoki and his team spent a lot of time making sure that even minor characters, from Stephan's inventor roommate Roberta (Yuichiro Umehara) to Chao's guide to the human world Maibei (Kavka Shishido), would be memorable even with limited screen time. 'Stephan and Chao are the main characters, so naturally we spend the most time with them,' explains Aoki. 'At the same time, Stephan is the most straightlaced, normal one among them. In contrast, we gave the minor characters enough zest to make the audience think they could be main characters in their own right. In that way, they end up leaving a lasting impression. We created all the characters to be loved even if they only appear briefly. I wanted audiences to wonder about what those characters were doing even when they weren't on screen.' Studio 4°C tasked Aoki with creating a 'totally new' original anime film, which meant imbuing 'ChaO' with a high level of visual density. | © 2025 'ChaO' Committee Another of the film's unique elements is its setting, Shanghai, a place not often seen in Japanese animation. The choice was partially inspired by China's explosive economic growth at the time the project was first conceived. 'When we visited, it felt very futuristic, but there was a lot of 'old China' left too,' says the director. 'That contrast was interesting, as was the speed of modernization. It had an atmosphere I had never felt in Japan, even though they're both Asian countries, so that made it a very interesting place for the setting of our film.' In recent years, anime has dominated the Japanese box office, and 2025 is no exception. But while franchise-based properties like 'Demon Slayer' and 'Detective Conan' are surefire hits, anime films based on original screenplays like 'ChaO' aren't guaranteed to make the same splash. Still, Aoki tried not to worry too much about box-office considerations while making his film. 'Filmmaking is a business, and everyone wants a hit, but I think every creator wants to try their hand at an original at least once,' Aoki says. 'I also think that viewers want to find something they can call their own. I have a feeling that more than big franchise hits, originals are the films that really live on in people's hearts.' 'ChaO' opens in cinemas nationwide from Aug. 15. For more information, visit (Japanese only).
Japan Today
14 hours ago
- Japan Today
How true to life is Brendon Fraser's movie about Japanese rental families?
By Casey Baseel, SoraNews24 In the decade-plus that SoraNews24 has been around, we've never once mentioned Brendan Fraser. This isn't because of any long-standing beef between us, but simply a result of the Academy Award-winning actor not having any major connections to Japan-related happenings during that interval. So to all our loyal readers who also happen to be fans of Mr Fraser, we apologize for the wait, which is now over thanks to the release of the trailer for "Rental Family." An upcoming release from Los Angeles-based Searchlight Pictures, "Rental Family" stars Fraser as a foreigner living in Japan, eking out a living acting in commercials. When that line of income starts to dry up, he finds a job with a 'rental family' agency, where customers pay to have someone play the role of a family member or friend. This isn't such a far-fetched premise. There's an entire ecosystem within the Japanese show business industry of foreign resident actors who specialize in bit roles in commercials, movies, TV dramas, and historical reenactment programs that need non-Japanese on-screen cast members (the live-action adaptation of manga "Thermae Romae," for example. has a scene set in an ancient Roman bathhouse with dozens of non-Japanese extras). The size of these parts, though, means that the actors aren't making A-lister money, so Fraser's character needing to take on an unorthodox job to make ends meet is pretty plausible. Likewise, Japan, really does have rental family agencies. They first started attracting significant attention in the early 2010s, and we've even tried their services out for ourselves, such as when our reporters rented a middle-aged man or sister (two sisters, actually). That said, judging from the trailer, it's debatable whether "Rental Family," directed by professionally mononymous Hikari, who was born in Japan and moved to the U.S. after high school, is attempting to accurately depict the status of rental family agencies in contemporary Japanese society, or whether its main goal is to tell a dramatic and emotional story with Fraser's character's job as its framing device. For example. a major plotline seems to involve a Japanese woman hiring Fraser's character to pretend to be the father of her daughter, who appears to be of mixed Japanese/Caucasian ancestry. 'This girl needs a father,' Fraser's boss tells him, and when he introduces himself to the child as such, in a public place, she shouts 'I hate you!' and storms off. 'She hates me,' Fraser laments to his boss, who replies 'That's what being a parent is.' Now, it's definitely true that most countries don't have rental family services, and the obvious reason is that the concept would be seen as just too weird. But while the idea isn't too weird for Japanese society as a whole, renting a family member is still considered unusual by most Japanese people. There's no real pushback against it, since it's seen as quirky but harmless fun for those who're intrigued by the proposition, and you could argue Japan is already somewhat softened regarding paid quasi-social relationships, what with hostess/host bars having been a thing for so long. However, hiring a stranger to pretend to be your child's father, especially as an attempt to address clearly severe psychological issues stemming from the parent's absence, is something that most Japanese people would say is a cruel disservice to the child, and not the sort of benefit that rental family agencies promote themselves as providing. Yes, you can rent a 'dad' in Japan, as Conan O'Brien famously did during his time in the country, but again, the service is targeted at adults wanting a fatherly figure for role play, not as a way to address the emotional trauma of a minor. Similarly, Japan's 'rental grandma' service is more about the sage wisdom, traditional skills, and calming presence that a woman of advanced age can provide, not necessarily acting as a substitute for an actual familial connection. So what about the two scenes where Fraser appears to have been hired to play the role of a groom at a wedding, one a Western-style ceremony and one a traditional Japanese one? Surely that's got to be crossing some sort of marriage-fraud line, right? Except, no, those are actually possible scenarios, though maybe not the most plausible. That's because in Japan, wedding ceremonies, whether performed at a church or temple, aren't legally binding. The only way to make your marriage official in the eyes of the law is to submit your marriage registration paperwork to your local city hall or ward office. So as long as the chapel or temple is OK with it, you could, in theory, hold a wedding ceremony, and a reception too, as a purely for-fun thing, perhaps if circumstances mean you're unlikely to ever get legally married to an actual life partner. Sure, it'd involve considerable expense, and there's no guarantee that all of your friends and family members would be onboard and happy to attend, but there's no legal barrier to doing it if you want to have the wedding experience without actually getting married. Oh, and you also have to give "Rental Family" credit for making sure to pick a suitably niche console to be the system of choice of the lonely man who hires Fraser to pretend to be his buddy. ▼ Your true friends are the ones who'll still hang out and play Dreamcast games with you in 2025 (but they'd be even better friends if they helped keep any snacks off of the disc drive cover). The trailer also includes a few shots of the Shibuya Scramble intersection, but I'm pretty sure the U.N. recently passed a resolution mandating the landmark be shown at least once in any foreign-produced movie with scenes set in Tokyo. The more aggravating thing is when the preview has someone saying, ostensibly to Fraser, 'You could live in this country for a hundred years, and there will still be things you won't understand.' Yeah, Japanese culture has its initially confusing quirks, just like any country's culture does, but playing up the inscrutability of the Japanese psyche is a pretty tired cliche, especially considering how many of Japan's real-world foreign residents effectively adapt to the local social norms way before they hit the century mark of living here, and even more especially when the line is paired with visuals showing people waiting at a train crossing, which doesn't exactly make one say 'Ah, Japan…so mysterious!' ▼ Granted, the barriers do tend to go down earlier in Japan than in some other countries, but 'Wait here so you don't get hit by a train' isn't so hard for non-Japanese people to wrap their heads around. So you could say that it's kind of a mixed bag in terms of how much of a window into modern Japanese life "Rental Family" is going to be, but that might not really be its intention anyway. Fraser's character himself even says 'You know, sometimes it's OK to pretend' as the trailer wraps up, so 100-percent real-world accuracy probably isn't the goal, and if nothing else it looks like it's going to be a story that's both introspective and encouraging of empathy, neither of which are bad emotional spaces for a movie to take its audience. "Rental Family" opens in theaters in North America on November 21. Source, images: YouTube/SearchlightPictures Read more stories from SoraNews24. -- We tried Tokyo's 'rent a middle-aged Japanese man' service, and it was awesome! -- Conan O'Brien in Japan episode features Toto toilets, Harajuku, a rented family and Conan Town -- Rental grandma service growing in Japan, can help cook or break up with boyfriends External Link © SoraNews24
