Kojima bought the 2005 DVD release of Bohachi Bushido but could not…

Upon learning that Yuriko Hishimi would attend the premiere of a Mamoru Oshii film, Kojima wrote to Kenji Kamiyama pleading that he introduce him to her. Onstage at the premiere, Oshii confessed through a megaphone his own youthful love for Anne, and Kojima felt relieved, as if Oshii were speaking for him; although Kojima did not get to speak with Hishimi backstage, after forty years he saw his first love as a real woman, and at age forty-four he wrote the essay as the love letter he should have mailed forty years earlier.

Kojima placed his first love at age four in Anne Yuri, the only female member of the Ultra Guard in Ultraseven. A promotional photograph—which was not an actual scene from the episode—showed her brushing her hair unaware of an alien standing behind her; Kojima wanted to warn her, but also blushed and felt heat without understanding why. In the series finale he cried more at the thought of never seeing Anne again than at the hero’s departure or the end of the show.

After returning to Japan following the freight-elevator incident, Kojima bought the DVD of Elevator to the Gallows and watched it for the first time in about forty years. The film proved different from his childhood impressions: he felt sympathy for Jeanne Moreau and realized it was not film noir to him but a hymn to love. He concluded that he had been trapped inside that movie for decades and that the real elevator accident had set in motion again the elevator that had long stood still in his heart.

Kojima said he loved the work of Teru Miyamoto and had read his novels exhaustively during his adolescence. While seeking escape in fanciful translated books, those novels helped him come to terms with his real, true-to-life self; he placed Kinshu as his favorite, followed by Haru no Yume and Ao ga Chiru.

Kojima expressed nostalgia for the atmosphere of the Showa era and said he could not resist purchasing Volume 2 of the “Taiyo ni Hoero!” DVD collection. He evoked its streets, signs, fashion, hairstyles, cars, police cruisers, black rotary phones, red pay phones, phone booths, tobacco, hi-lite cigarettes, electric fans, cafes, amusement parks, and the warmth of the people. He clarified that he would not go so far as to say those days were better, but that everything felt nostalgic. That night he would watch episode 5, featuring Keiko Sekine—now Keiko Takahashi—of whom he had been a huge fan at the time; Shohei Hino also makes a guest appearance.