Gedo Senki (Tales from Earthsea)

27th January 2006

Number 27 - Transformed into a DoCoMo Mushroom

Continuing from yesterday, I'm going to go on with the cycling stories.

In the animation industry, for some reason, there's a lot of people who like bicycles. So much so that every year a 160 km road race is held from Inagi City in Tokyo to Suwa County[1] in Nagano.
I also take part in this race.

Mr. Inamura, the animation director of "Tales from Earthsea", is one of the bicycle fanatics. He is the owner of some serious legs.

Mr. Inamura wears an Italian made Briko helmet. It looks so cool that I once tried it on, only to find an evil looking DoCoMo mushroom[2] standing in front of the mirror. Oops, my head was too big for the helmet.

After that I tried several helmets that I had seen when I watched a race on television and thought were cool, but they were basically from European makers, so even if I could get my head in them, I still looked like a refugee from the planet of the mushrooms.

Somehow or other, it seems like European made helmets only fit people with small heads and small faces. It can't be helped I guess, so I wear a comparatively deep helmet from the American maker Bell.

I get told that my face doesn't look very much like my father, but the size of my head at least, is something that without a doubt I have inherited from him.

Speaking of which, 20 years ago, when the film "Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind" was in production, my father suddenly said "You're riding a bike!" We went out to buy one straight away, which was good, but we couldn't find any helmets at all that would fit my head. When we finally screwed my head into an out-size helmet, I remember clearly the way my head seemed to spill out from under it.

Translator's Notes

[1]: A county or gun (郡) is an a regional grouping of local government units smaller than a city, i.e. villages and towns. It has no administrative power.

[2]: DoCoMoDake are DoCoMo mobile phone company campaign mascots. They look like colorful mushrooms with faces.