The industries behind the stuff we love that came out of Japan during the ‘80s and ‘90s—the anime, the films, the manga, the garage kits—were filled with folks who managed to thread their way through familiar projects but are seemingly unknown by English speaking enthusiasts. It’s always fascinating to stumble across the work of a person like this; someone whose connections to Japanese media during the decade of excess fostered a web of creators and personalities we’re familiar with today.
Let’s talk about Hiroshi Yamaguchi. I was previously familiar with his name because of a singular piece of work. Well, really the cover to a game book1 called Scorching Pursuit. It’s a licensed Gundam book and on the cover there’s a Zaku but it’s clearly no normal Zaku. There’s a bit of Makoto Kobayashi in those shoulder pads to be sure. You may have seen this image around as it gets re-posted quite a bit.
While the book itself was credited to Yamaguchi and Studio Hard, I couldn’t find any art credit, so the illustrations may well have been by Yamaguchi himself. Another Gundam game book Yamaguchi wrote at Studio Hard, Jerid’s Order to Attack, reportedly2 had cover art by Makoto Kobayashi although I’ve had a hard time confirming that.
Scorching Pursuit popped up in the news recently because it was announced that a revised version will be published at the end of March. While diving a bit deeper into who Yamaguchi was I found a personal history that stretched from Daicon Film to modern anime with some interesting stops along the way.
While they didn’t go to the same high school, Yamaguchi grew up in the same town as Daicon Film co-founder Takami Akai and legendary artist Mahiro Maeda. It was through Akai that Yamaguchi got involved with early Daicon Film projects—specifically Aikoku Sentai Dai-Nippon [Patriotic Rangers of the Great Nation of Japan], where he assisted with the special effects. According to Yasuhiro Takeda’s The Notenki Memoirs, when Daicon alumni were working on Macross and Artland was desperate for more animators, Yamaguchi introduced them to Maeda.
It’s unclear if Yamaguchi’s relationship with Daicon Film continued past Dai-Nippon, but Yamaguchi reportedly introduced the group to another key person who you’re probably familiar with: Shinji Higuchi. Hideaki Anno’s co-director on Shin Godzilla and director of Shin Ultraman first met the soon-to-be Gainax group at a showing of Daicon Film’s shorts at the Kudan Kaikan in Chiyoda, Tokyo. This was likely the Tokyo stop of a series of screenings of Daicon Film projects that happened in Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya during late September 1984. Higuchi would go on to work on Daicon Film’s last project, Yamata no Orochi no Gyakushuu [Counterattack of the Eight-Headed Dragon]–coincidentally set in Akai and Yamaguchi’s hometown of Yonago–and eventually end up working closely with Gainax and Anno over the next few decades.
It doesn’t look like Yamaguchi worked on the original Macross TV series, but he was a key animator on Macross: Do You Remember Love? a few years later. That particular credit sticks out because by and large his huge list of work was primarily composed of writing credits. He soon joined Studio Hard, a publishing company founded in 1981 by Nobuyuki Takahashi, dedicated to otaku subjects like manga and video games. While Nobuyuki Takahashi may not be well known in English-speaking circles, he claims to have invented the word “cosplay” in 1983 because the then-prominent word for dressing up as characters in Western fandom—masquerade—didn’t translate well into Japanese.3
At Studio Hard Yamaguchi wrote a number of game books based on familiar anime series like Lupin the 3rd, Gundam, and VOTOMS. He got into anime script writing doing five episodes of Armor Hunter Merowlink in 1988 thanks to a VOTOMS game book he wrote called Planet of Vengeance Shido.4Source: Armor Hunter Merowlink Staff Interviews[/note] He also contributed more than just scripts–he apparently sketched out the rough idea for the Bountydog before Kunio Okawara took over to design it.
Later he worked again with Daicon alumni at Gainax and General Products writing the Nadia Bonus Theater shorts in 1991 and the Aim For The Top: Gunbuster NEXT GENERATION ~Excavated Battleship Alexion~ manga that ran in Cybercomix for about ten issues. A few years after that, he’d write three episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion in 1994 and three episodes of Gurren Lagann in 2007.
I won’t do you the disservice of just listing off his entire filmography when you can read it yourself, but one last thing I’ll mention is that he didn’t just write scripts, he also wrote song lyrics. Most notably for Macross Digital Mission VF-X, a thoroughly mediocre game that had some pretty good music.
The original art for Scorching Pursuit seems to have been re-done in the upcoming new version, which is a shame because the original had some delightfully rough illustrations with idiosyncratic mechanical designs. The original is known amongst Gundam fans for its unusual design work and it’s unclear if the new re-release includes any of those… Though given that the bulbous Zaku on the original cover has been replaced by a very normal looking Zaku cover the reprint, those may have been expunged. But still, it’s nice having a new version of an odd footnote in the history of Gundam publications.
Yamaguchi is still writing, too. He’s got numerous recent anime credits to his name (although nothing I’ve heard of, admittedly!) and on Twitter he recently wondered that if the revised Scorching Pursuit release sells, perhaps other re-releases would do well too.
Editor’s Note: After we published this article, Zeonic|Scanlations on Bluesky let us know that the cover art for Scorching Pursuit was Makoto Kobayashi while interior art was handled by Kazu Yukihiro and Masayuki Hidaka.
Notes
- Game books, which enjoyed a few years of popularity in Japan during the late ‘80s, are best described as the Japanese equivalent to the Choose Your Own Adventure series. As you read the story you’re faced with different choices and picking different paths will change the story. Though they also seemed to typically require a bit of stat tracking and record keeping… so perhaps they were close to the more complex Fighting Fantasy series out of the UK. During their height in popularity a lot of licensed books were released and some original stories as well.
- Admittedly, this comes from an unconfirmed blog post.
- Source: Interview with Nobuyuki Takahashi