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hambrababy · 5 months

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A Journey Through an Internet Anime Rumor on Takeyuki Kanda

There is a rumor that’s spread about anime director Takeyuki Kanda’s sudden death in 1996 that has nothing to back it up. As best as I can tell, it remains unfounded and almost certainly false. The rumor is that he died in a car crash, but the only available information on Japanese sites doesn’t mention that at all. The oldest source I could find for that rumor was an uncited English Wikipedia article written by an account later banned for bad edits.

The only confirmed detail on Kanda’s death is that he suddenly passed away at the age of 52. That much, at a minimum, is confirmed by an official interview on the VOTOMS website with Ryosuke Takahashi that mentions Kanda’s passing, specifically in its third footnote.

I was (and still am) working on a separate, more fun article about a series of anime image albums, but I got sucked into this rabbit hole over the last few days. I figured I’d tell the story of how this unraveled, as well as share some thoughts on anime rumors in general.

Hey, Maybe Someone Should Check Wikipedia

I was chatting with people from Inka Subs about Vifam, and Ralem, one of the staffers, posted the credits of its 1920’s Chicago gag spinoff OVA short. The credits are in English and contain a bunch of names and inside jokes on the staff involved, and one of them was for the director “Drunkard Kanda”.

Takeyuki Kanda was a seasoned anime director who worked on many shows over his career, and he was Vifam’s series director, hence the shoutout. A tidbit I’d heard through the years and repeated myself was that Kanda died while directing the Gundam: The 08th MS Team OVA because he got into a fatal car accident. Because other staff noted his tendency to drink, that carried the implicit connotation of an alcoholic car crash, which would explain why the OVA had a director change part way through. It’s a short, somewhat dramatic story that gives a grim flourish of sudden crisis to the production of The 08th MS Team.

Except I thought for a second and realized that I wasn’t sure where that detail actually came from. I’d heard it so often, but where did it come from originally? Just to double check, I went to his English Wikipedia page to see if it was sourced there.

It was soon apparent that something was wrong. The Wikipedia page for Kanda was barebones, and it hadn’t been updated since June 13th, 2021. The article at the time had this as its bio paragraph at the start:

None of this information was cited whatsoever. There were no formatted citations, no in-text descriptions, and no links of any kind except external ones to IMDB and ANN. The page had a huge “this article needs additional citations for verification” warning slapped right at the top since 2019, but nothing had been done to fix anything.

I switched over to JP Wikipeda to see if it was listed there. I don’t know Japanese myself, but even from cautiously using both Google Translate and DeepL with the page, there’s no mention there of any sort of car crash, which was also checked by the Inka people who knew Japanese.

I looked back through the history of the page to see where that detail could have possibly come from, and it turned out that unverified detail was there from the page’s inception in 2015. That’s also where I noticed that there was an additional unverified detail about Kanda being “heavily inspired by Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spilberg [sic]” (and 20 days later even added Nicolas Roeg). The user who made that page had not only received warnings from other Wikipedia editors for adding unverified information even before the article was written, but was repeatedly blocked and later permabanned for sockpuppeting, unverified malicious edits, and personally attacking other editors.

Needless to say, the car crash detail is very suspect and unreliable. There’s no reason to believe it’s real based on the existing current evidence. Other Inka members checked through JPN sites with pages about Kanda, and none of them mentioned a car crash. Checking on my own, it’s not mentioned in the Pixiv encyclopedia, the NicoNicoDouga encyclopedia, nor even a fan-site Sunrise encyclopedia. All of those are user generated and don’t have sources themselves, so even the details that are there are unverified.

There is official interview on the VOTOMS website with Ryosuke Takahashi in 2010 where mentions Kanda. The third footnote only confirms that he suddenly passed away at the age of 52 in 1996, with no mention of the cause of death. The note does mention he shared drinks, but there are no further details beyond that.

It’s possible somewhere out there, there’s some obscure contemporaneous Japanese article or coverage where something like that maybe happened. But until any actual proof emerges, there’s no reason to believe the car crash rumor is true, or any of the other details on those JP sites for that matter. The only verifiable detail is that Takeyuki Kanda suddenly passed away at the age of 52 in 1996. If anyone has more reliable information to add to this, please share it.

Other Wrong Listings

The next “official” source I could find for that car crash rumor was ANN’s encyclopedia page on Kanda. The detail has no information on its source unless logged in, but I initially thought it could have maybe had some reputable source.

After logging in, its only listed source was that same Wikipedia article. AniDB's page also has that detail but again only lists Wikipedia as its source.

With all this looking like a mess, I decided to remove that detail from Kanda’s Wikipedia page myself. I also submitted an error report to ANN and to AniDB, both of which are pending at the time of this post.

I decided to later check the 08th MS Team Wikipedia article to correct the information there as well, and that’s where another oddity popped up. It had “citation” on Kanda dying in a car crash, but it was an anime blog that gave me a fake virus warning pop-up ad upon opening. That blog post had no source listed. There was also a link to a different anime blog saying that the episodes were delayed after of Kanda’s death (though they don’t mention the rumor, good on them!), which is at least a more plausible inference based on the release schedule, but still not confirmed. I deleted those sections as well.

I think that rumor is now at least dead on Wikipedia and hopefully soon ANN and AniDB, but by that point it had likely spread for years. I’m thankful people shared my description of this on Twitter, but that’s still a small subset of a niche of a niche on an unrepresentative website. Who knows how far that unconfirmed detail has spread?

Something Was Wrong on the Internet

Despite my attempt to tell this somewhat as a story, all of this was rather basic. Checking a Wikipedia article to see if it has a citation takes seconds. Even with blunt use of auto-translator software, which itself is very imperfect even in the most narrow and careful possible circumstances, checking JP Wikipedia and other bio sites had no mention of anything close to an auto accident. Finding reliable anime information is a thankless task, but doing the most basic fact-checking to see if a detail has a confirmed source is relatively simple. Anything unsourced on Wikipedia is always suspect, and even things with sources there need checking to see what they’re linking too.

It’s commendable that English staff databases and editable encyclopedias even exist, but those also have structural issues. On ANN, you can’t see the source listed for something unless you’re logged in, which seems like a rather serious flaw for a public encyclopedia that’s the most public-facing source of Anime staff information aside from smaller sites like AniDB and AniList. Having an editor manually approve changes is a good deterrent from false info getting posted, but it does make it harder to speedily correct things aside from using error reports to put tiny red warning circles.

As much of a weird obsession this has been for me over the last few days, and as much as it feels good to see this attempt at a correction getting shared, it is still emblematic of a larger problem.

Wrong and misleading information is a longstanding issue in English anime fandom and companies, especially when communication was more limited, but even the long-debunked ones remain nigh-unkillable even now. How many times has the “Ghost Stories flopped” rumor been spread even though it was totally wrong? Or the rumor about where Toriyama “intended” for Dragon Ball to end that’s not only inaccurate across the board but also includes outright hoaxes? Or the lacking knowledge about the anime production process as a whole?

Even from my own experiences, small details can cause these kinds of issues if they remain unchecked. A few 0079 mecha on the Gundam Wiki had to have their articles reformatted because their model numbers were lifted from made-up details posted to Japanese Wikipedia years ago from a doujin site, including the Gaw and the Dopp (thanks to editors MatokoLee and SuperFeatherYoshi for pointing these out!). The Dopp one was copied into the Wiki in 2011, but no one had bothered to verify them for so long because there was no immediate reason to suspect they were wrong. This isn’t as egregious as the prior examples since all the tech specs for mecha are fictional (and sometimes contradictory), but even the tiniest pieces of incorrect anime info can linger on for years.

I won’t give other specific rumors any more oxygen, but this still happens with tons of recent shows. One detail from an interview or one comment from an animator on twitter can get spun into something totally unfounded from the original basis of what they were trying to say, and then those misconceptions only get more repeated and exaggerated the more users and sites they pass through.

To some extent, a certain amount of this is inevitable given the language and cultural barrier for English anime fandom. But since anime has grown far wider from its initial niche, it’s almost even easier for bad information to spread quickly while corrections and actual well-researched information can’t catch up. Running actual news and press sites is challenging as online news faces many economic struggles, and there’s little incentive for individuals or influencer-type people to concern themselves with accuracy. It’s easy, and frankly more entertaining, to mythologize about so many aspects of anime production and history, to spread speculation, or to share funny or gripping details that sound true enough while never bothering to do the most basic checking on any of them.

I sometimes wonder if it is possible to make some kind of website cataloging and debunking common anime misconceptions and rumors. Kazenshuu’s rumor guide is the most comprehensive in debunking anime-related rumors, even if it’s only for Dragon Ball. Wikizilla’s misconceptions page (thanks Chungris!) is also another good example, as is TFWiki’s “urban legends” page. But there needs to be a way more centralized way to broadcast these kinds of rumor-debunkings rather than individual people happening to find them years later.

The obvious takeaway from all this is for people to be more cautious, which seems straightforward enough, but that only gets so far. My blither takeaway is that more people, myself included, should just learn Japanese. There’s a whole world of anime magazines, interviews, websites, and more that could clear up tons of longstanding rumors and even provide new details never accessible beyond Japan before, but so much remains untranslated. I have paid people to translate things I really wanted to access before (thanks Windii!), but realistically that’s an expense I can’t incur that frequently.

Life is already getting busy for me, but I think there’s merit to devoting enough time to learn some Japanese. Anime is a hobby, but it’s a hobby I love and want to learn as much as I can. Relying so much on secondhand info spread through random people, having to use flawed and unreliable auto-translate programs to skim websites, or being lucky enough to know fansubbers with actual Japanese knowledge isn’t a sustainable substitute for actually knowing things.

Learning Japanese wouldn’t fix everything. Bad information and rumors still spread among JP fans too. Even official sources from companies can intentionally mislead, while faulty memoirs and recollections from animators can get things wrong. But the English anime community needs more serious, verifiable (and far less scattered) work on sourcing anime history and news. If any of us can move that needle and stop wrong info from spreading, then that’s already more valuable than any amount of casual waffling, opinionating, and speculation that only begets more wrong information.

So be the annoying pedant who asks where someone got the detail they’re sharing. Don’t spread something that sounds too neat and simple without bothering to check. Don’t take anything for granted. Learn Japanese and look things up yourself. Demand better of others and yourself.

By the way, this shouldn’t overshadow Kanda’s extensive career in anime. I haven’t finished Vifam yet, but I highly recommend it. Watch the shows Kanda worked on and played a huge role in shaping. Let that be his legacy.

Postscript: Some Better Sources

This is by no means an exhaustive list and I don’t mean to snub anyone, but I figured I’d at least post a few people I know are more thorough with things to steer this post towards a better direction.

Regarding Gundam, I can recommend Mark Simmons’ UC-focused website, Feez’s Turn A blog, and the translations on the Zeonic Website. They have lots of old interviews and production details translated that are invaluable for understanding the behind-the-scenes of Gundam.

For anime production information more generally, I can recommend the Full Frontal team and the SakugaBlog/Booru team. They’re doing some of the best active work in covering current anime creators and detailing the current state of the industry with high quality translations and original reporting of their own.

Windii has been an immense help for me in the past, and she’s actively soliciting to translate and preserve tons of anime (and lots of Sonic) related stuff.

This is with the clarification that I don’t watch anime youtubers, but I can at least say MercuryFalcon has some very well-sourced videos, especially his Toei Fushigi Comedy one.

None of these are perfect, but they do a solid job of translating information that I’d like to see more of. Again, apologies if I forgot or don’t know about other people, but I figured I’d shout out a few of the ones I do know.

#anime and manga #gundam #08th ms team #vifam #anime rumors #misinformation

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