Talk to Me: The stories you run into during an interview

Interviews. How hard can it be? 

The average reader might assume it’s just a matter of asking a question and objectively getting an answer. After all, that’s the rules. But interviews are more than an interrogation. Some are more off the cuff than others, but it’s a collaboration between the interviewer and interviewee to put on a show at the end of day.

From the reader or viewer’s perspective, the exchange seems seamless and natural, because how hard can it be to just talk to someone? 

Today, I’m here to tell you, it’s actually pretty hard.

That’s right, it’s ya’ gal Chiaki and instead of talking about cats or brain worms, I’m actually talking about something professional for once. As AniFem’s resident working journalist with a (salaried) staff writer position at [REDACTED] with around two decades of experience in talking to strangers about deeply personal matters. I’m here to tell you what goes into an interview, and what can possibly go wrong.

That said, I’m not here to reinvent the wheel. To this day, when people ask me “how do I interview X,” I’ll first remind people that Lauren Orsini’s “How to interview celebrities at a fandom convention” exists. It’s the short and sweet, and professional, way of preparing for an interview with someone famous that you may look up to.

I, on the other hand, am here to be wholly unprofessional and instead talk to you about all the ways things can go sideways while trying to do an interview. (But for a mercy, I’ll redact the names of people who are still alive to spare them the embarrassment for both of our sakes.)

Lesson 1: Read the book before you ask about it

So let’s start with the basics first. Unless you’re a prolific blogger or youtuber with a measure of success, you’re likely not getting that interview with your famous manga author, or even be granted a press pass to a convention. Honestly, if you have that kind of clout, what are you doing reading this article, you can probably just walk into the VIP guest section of AX and steal a San Pellegrino from the table and no one would bat an eye.

No, dear reader, you’re probably in a situation where you’re not in a position to be able to pick and choose your jobs. So welcome to the first joy of being a interviewer in the enthusiast press: having no idea who the fuck you’re about to talk to aside from some vague understanding “they’re kind of a big deal according to their manager.”

Whether it’s the assistant colorist for a show no one is watching this season or the star musical guest of the convention, your enthusiasm may take a hit when you’re assigned someone and your first question to your editors is “who?” 

And I mean it, you could be talking to the most interesting person in the world, but if you’re out of your element you’re about to have the most lackluster interview ever done.

Story time: 

Back in high school, I was elected managing editor for my school newspaper. While editing the paper, I was reading baseball statistics for our school’s team and it went horribly because I don’t understand sports statistics. It was so bad, I was barred from touching the sports pages (luckily the literal second cousin once removed or something of Joe DiMaggio was the sports editor for the paper so I let him and the editor-in-chief’s girlfriend—she played soccer—deal with it). 

That’s not the story. 

The story is: fast-forward about a decade and I’m working my job as a bilingual reporter and we learn this Japanese baseball legend is coming to America for a visit and there’s a special dinner to honor him. I’m invited to do an interview since, well, I can speak Japanese.

Yeah, no, I still don’t have any idea how baseball works aside from something about Ichiro blowing up the world with a laser beam?

My interview questions were like:

• “What’s it like to visit America for you?” (He actually visits pretty-frequently)
• “What do you think of all these Japanese folks in the majors today?” (He’s glad to see it. Like what was I even expecting from this question here?)
• “So what does a retired baseball player even do?” (He’s now a sports commentator on TV, a pretty common job if you know and watch sports shows at all.)

Fair to say, it was very awkward for the both of us.

So how did that happen? Well, the big issue is, if you’re thrown into an interview where you don’t know what you’re asking about or who the person you’re talking to even is, you’re about to be in for a bad time.

Like the time I had dinner with an attorney who argued a pretty famous supreme court case and I had the gall to ask “so who even are you anyway?” over a plate of $50 fettuccine ( which he even paid for at the end of the night).

Look, in my defense, I wasn’t there to interview him. I was there to interview the inventor of Sudoku.

But if you’re about to do an interview, you gotta do the research. The one time things went really well was when I interviewed a famous race car driver.

I have no idea how race cars work aside from the fact: “the fastest person who doesn’t crash wins.”

Being totally out of my element, but at least having a basic understanding that “this guy is a huge deal,” I asked around for advice and was able to work out some solid questions thanks to Lauren Orsini, who randomly knew about this guy. And I even got a free steak lunch in a VIP dining room while doing the interview!

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is something Lawrence Grobel basically said in “The Art of the Interview: Lessons from a Master of the Craft.” You have to read the interviewee’s book before you engage with them, because winging the interview with superficial knowledge is going to bite you in the ass. It’s probably the most important piece of advice I’ve ever gotten from that book. That and that I should always have a backup for when my voice recorder breaks or runs out of batteries.

Lesson 2: Trust no one, especially yourself

So, when your Olympus voice recorder does run out of batteries and you’re stuck there without a proper way to record your interview, don’t think to yourself “It’s fine, I’ll remember this.”

No you will not. 

Hand written notes? Yeah, no, those can screw you over too.

“I’ll use my phone to record it.” Is it charged? How’s the audio quality? Yeah, prepare to realize you’re in for a bad time.

Just carry some extra batteries on you.

Story time:

Back in college, I took a few creative writing classes, and being at a fairly well-established college, I had the opportunity to listen to some hot-shot writers in the twilight years of magazine journalism, back when freelance writers actually made enough money to support themselves and even get full time gigs.

On this one particular occasion, a writer for the Atlantic, whom I’ve honestly forgotten what his name is, visited to talk about how he got into writing. He sent in some essays about flying small planes over Alaska and the Atlantic didn’t give a damn about his airplanes, but they liked the cut of his jive and hired him on to write other essays instead. 

On one such assignment, he was sent to a South American prison to interview a drug lord rotting away in a cell. He recalled how the man, once at the zenith of luxurious living, now simply dreamed of one day finding the bars on his small cell window gone and for him to sprout wings to fly out and into the sky above.

That’s what he wrote anyway. When his editors at the Atlantic asked where the recording was of when he said this, dude said “he didn’t say it.” The whole sequence was written based on vibes.

The Atlantic, of course, got mad at him for doing this because, you probably shouldn’t just make up quotes, but the writer pressed his editors to just call the guy up at the prison and read him what he wrote. The former drug lord, upon being read the dream sequence, wordlessly broke down in tears and agreed to let the Atlantic run the sequence as is.

I thought this was complete bullshit 14 years ago, and I still think it’s complete bullshit now.

That’s not the story.

So I once attended a dinner celebrating and remembering an activist organization from a few decades back. While there, a fairly prominent lawyer spoke about the contributions this group made through a remembrance. He told the story of an old lady who was a client of his that the organization helped, but we told the story off the cuff and had a few key omissions that made it difficult to tell if the story he told was all a single continuous tale or not.

Writing his remembrances up, I relied on his words to reconstruct the story.

Within a day after the story went to print, the lawyer sent a lengthy e-mail to me, demanding I write a correction because I had left out key details on his story—details he simply did not provide during the dinner-time speech.

I, politely, clipped him the audio file of him speaking, along with the full transcript of everything he said to simply say: “you didn’t say that.”

He quickly acquiesced and asked me to publish a clarification in the paper instead.

All of this and sometimes your interviewee might misremembering things or you, yourself, could swear you heard something one way, when it never really happened.

In 1969, two Stanford University professors published a study that essentially argued stories enabled better fact-retention than rote memorization. A person staring at 12 words trying to memorize them will have better luck when using the 12 words in a story. This fact was cited to me at an event about sharing stories, and was almost immediately misremembered later in the event to mean: “people don’t remember facts, they just remember vibes.”

Ironically, it’s probably true, because that would explain how so many people have misremembered to me Martin Niemöller’s famous quote “Then they came for me” over the years. You might get the vibes right, but it’s the little details that will be the difference between you publishing a compelling story and setting yourself up for a libel suit.

Add to that the complications of a whirlwind interview where you’re getting your answers once removed through a translator and the pressure you’re facing to get this thing out ASAP due to deadlines, and sometimes you’re going to misremember things or not account for every little detail, and that can be blasphemy when your reader thinks they know your interview subject better than you or the interviewee themselves.

Lesson 3: And remember, we’re all human

And this lesson goes out as much to the readers as the interviewers, but you sometimes gotta check your ego at the door. As much as memory can be fallible, so too can your preconceived notions color your understanding of an interview. What’s obvious to you might be completely alien to others, and that gap in knowledge and experience can become a gulf of difference especially when working internationally or from the perspective of a fan versus a professional.

And to this, I do offer some humility: unlike most of you plebians who cannot pick and choose which interviews they do, being an editor of the fourth most popular website according to Anime News Network readers, I have the luxury of submitting interview requests for whomever I want. And on one occasion, I was granted the opportunity to do an interview with my most favorite ever person in the anime industry ever. 

My passion alone was not enough, however. And despite thinking I had a good read on him after reading various essays and works on him for years and years, when it came time to ask him about his work and his motivations the question I asked was kind of a dud.

In these moments, the professional thing to do is not to let that personal disappointment show and keep going with the interview. Let your interviewee speak their truth and accept it, unless they tell you the moon is made of cheese or something so absolutely wrong, you have to challenge it.

And while some things might get lost in translation or culturally be evaluated differently, never assume you are somehow more correct when partaking in someone else’s answers, because in that moment, they’re being frank with you. (And all the more so, this humbleness is vital for the reader as well.)

Story time:

So my girlfriend is a niche Internet micro celebrity, she has like 12,000 followers on the cursed bird site.

What I’ve learned is: you don’t want 10,000 followers on any social media platform. Celebrity and parasociality disintegrates the private and suddenly your life becomes a platform rather than a lived truth.

Somewhere around hitting 10,000 followers on something, people stop perceiving you as a person and more of a concept. Me posting my emotional support Mexican pizza on social media is cute and funny. Her posting of a Baja Freeze at the Pacifica Taco Bell is an icon of trans culture.

While I don’t have 10,000 followers on any kind of social media (but you can help me make it happen 🥺👉👈), I’m somewhat notorious in my own circles. 

Many people introduce me to others like: “This is Chiaki, the reporter for [REDACTED], she’s one of the best writers out there today.”

To which the person, whether they’re the poet laureate of the city or whatever, goes: “Wow, a writer huh, you must be pretty eloquent.”

People seem to have this perception that, just because I have this ability to write compelling and inquisitive works for the benefit of readers everywhere, I’m some kind of superhuman entity that should be worshiped, and they’re technically right because I’m a vtuber. But that doesn’t mean that I’m also all that smart or deep. I’m just an asshole who can string together words to sound kinda funny on the Internet.

Turns out everyone’s just people, sometimes.

That’s not the story.

So I interviewed the head of a classical Japanese dance school once while he was in the U.S. The man, a 50-something balding man, relatively small in stature, was stoic and refined. He gave his instructions to his students, telling them to hold a pose so that he could go up and adjust their stances and then slowly going over their movements to critique them as they danced.

The students were, of course, beholden to the master-disciple dynamic tinged with a mix of fear and reverence. They yielded to his instructions and put him on a pedestal. Understandably so, since he’s likely seen and instructed thousands of dancers by now, since he had been dancing since he was four years old.

I, meanwhile, am not beholden to that relationship. 

Me: “What’s on your mind when you’re teaching?”

Teacher: “I… I guess I’m just hoping they’ll actually learn. I mean you just need to repeat what I’m doing.”

Student: “Well, that’s the hard part.”

Some chuckling.

The teacher, grinning: “You wanna give it a try, we can do a simple folk dance.”

Me: “Oh, god no. I have two left feet.”

Teacher: “Heh heh, is that so?”

Later, one of the students pulls me aside as I’m leaving:

“Chiaki, what the hell?! Sensei was laughing. He’s never laughed like that before!”

I shrugged, he seemed like a normal guy to me. Outside the context of being the most important man in the microcosm of an international dance school considered to be a treasure of Japanese culture, dude seemed like a guy who could just knock back a few beers at the end of the day.

Lesson 4: Prepare for things to get weird

Making a living national treasure break composure aside, interviews don’t always go how you expect them, and sometimes the best advice I can impart is to simply roll with the punches.

Whatever happens, at the end of the day, you tried to have that conversation and that’s the most important fact. But combined with the fact that people are sometimes just weird, you need to just realize that you just need to chill sometimes. Consider it a funny story you can one day write into an article one day.

Prepare for the worst and hope for the best. I’ve done enough interviews to know nothing can really go to plan, and sometimes your work becomes an adventure.

Story time:

Going back to the time I ended up eating a $50 fettuccine dinner with the inventor of Sudoku at Scala’s Bistro in the Sir Francis Drake Hotel, it was hard enough trying to record a meandering conversation summing up nearly half a century of lived experience by a smoking and drinking magazine editor who loved horse races as much as he did going around working with kids in his retirement years (and yes, some asshole will probably go into the comments of this article and say the dude didn’t even invent Sudoku, because he actually just stole it from an American puzzle magazine and changed up the rules a bit. Ketchup, Catsup, I don’t fucking care).

But try keeping on topic about puzzle games and race horses when you’re eating the best truffle oil ravioli (he had the ravioli, I had the fettuccine) you’ve ever had and taking in the din of holiday diners the week after Thanksgiving in a busy restaurant. And try to be polite about it, because some guy and his wife is also just sitting there at the table with you listening in. And then try to keep your interview focused on the Sudoku guy when you find out the random dude who invited you to dinner that night was essentially the Asian Johnnie Cochran.

That’s not the story.

As I said, your work can sometimes become “an adventure,” and sometimes, that adventure goes well beyond that single interview. Yes, you exist in a sort of microcosm while engaged 1-to-1 with your subject, but an interview can also inspire more, like the time I interviewed Hiroo Isono.

Isono was my idol as an artist. While more people probably would recognize folks like Yoshitaka Amano or Akira Toriyama for 1990s JRPG artists, Square had also hired the mild-mannered painter from Aichi Prefecture to do the cover art for the Mana game series.

I secured the Isono interview on my own, in typical Chiaki fashion.

I was visiting Japan over the summer to attend a study abroad class in Aichi Prefecture. While I was there on a student visa, I flew in to Tokyo first to take a tour of the Ghibli Museum and just missed witnessing the Akihabara massacre in person by about a week. I had e-mailed Isono, since I saw he was holding a gallery in downtown Nagoya, and I took one of my free days during my classes to do an interview.

Isono was a gruff looking man, but kind. He told me about his childhood growing up in the countryside where he would go catch bugs in the mountains behind his home. I adored his art as a fan and wondered what kind of inspiration he drew while drawing the mana tree for the games, and he simply responded to me: “oh that? Well, I’m a commercial painter. I’m hired to paint things as a job,” or something along those lines. I’ve regrettably lost my recordings and notes to this interview since then.

I sat in his gallery, looking over his works and talking to him about his life growing up in post-war Japan. Although he was a commercial painter because it paid the bills, his personal passion lay in painting nature: from his painting of fresh saury he bought from the local market to a grand expressive painting of Angel Falls in Venezuela, he was happy to talk more about his personal work.

All the works I knew and liked, however, were works he did by commission. The Mana game art notwithstanding, I discovered he had drawn my social studies textbook cover from my Japanese middle school, among other commissions for the Ministry of Education at the turn of the century. To him, these were also just a job.

Instead, Isono really lit up when he talked about traveling around to find what inspired him. He had gone to the African Savannah on numerous occasions to paint lions and gazelles, and his passion for preserving the Amazon rain forest culminated in illustrating “熱帯雨林 生命の森” (The Rain Forest: The Forest of Life) with botanist Takakazu Yumoto.

Knowing I had come all the way from America, he was particularly open to telling me about his time driving across the U.S. in an old jeep. He hired a tour guide out of the Los Angeles area and asked him to drive with him across the country for three weeks. They would first drive through the South West and South, making their way up into the Appalachian mountains, before wrapping back around to the west coast by driving a northern route through the Mid West and out to the Pacific Northwest, or at least that was the plan until Isono got sick about two weeks in and had to call off the trip half way through.

And from that whole story, I wound up going on to do yet another interview to learn about another interesting man: a Japanese tour guide who led Japanese tourists around America and is the donor for the cherry blossom trees planted at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library & Museum, but that is a different adventure.

As we wrapped up the interview, Isono handed me all four of his art books he had published up till that moment.

“I want you to take these books,” he said. “Take them back to America and find me a publisher.”

I did what any 20 year old college student trying to act like an adult would do: I told him it was a terrible idea. I wouldn’t know how to even begin working on something like that.

“Well, you’re young, you’re a writer. You publish things right? I’m sure you can work this out. I want you to be my agent. Take these books as reference materials for your article and to help shop them out to publishers.”

He wouldn’t take no for an answer, so I accepted the books. And goddamn it, I did try. This guy was my hero, after all. And of course, it didn’t work out at all. I was 20 and living through the worst recession since the Great Depression (at the time). I closed out this chapter of my life in 2011 or so, when I last called him at his home and apologized that I couldn’t secure any publishers.

He sounded disappointed, but told me, “ah, well, that happens,” and that was the last I heard from him, as he died of cancer a little while later.

That’s not the story either.

Sometimes, no matter what you do, things won’t go well, and you just gotta grit your teeth through it.

I once got rolled into doing some interviews for an outlet at an anime convention. Still in college and hanging out with an editorial team that’s more or less the cast of Genshiken, we got some great interviews.

In any case, we got a guy who was there as industry, but we knew him better as a hentai artist, and we scored the interview under his pen name. 

Problem was, this was the wild west era of anime conventions when yaoi bingo featured an honest to god strip show and cosplayers in cardboard Initial D cars were still allowed to do full sprints down the convention concourse while blasting eurobeat from a boombox. Guest relations were still kind of a loosey goosey affair and the agreement to do the interview was “after the dude’s panel” at like 10 p.m. or so. And with autographs and all the other things, the interview got pushed back later and later.

I’m of course tired, but consider the fact that the artist dude is also probably pretty tired. Man’s just given a panel to a packed room and signed a bunch of autographs, and now he has to talk to some college students at midnight?

We get hustled into a quiet side room after his fan-engagements and we finally have time to talk. We talk about his work, his comic, a bit about his personal life, and we have a pretty good conversation going. That is, until I broach the question of piracy.

Now in this era of the mid-naughts, when streaming had yet to gain legitimacy, moreover I’m sitting there talking to a man whose porno manga is only really known in Japan, he was already coming into this meeting wondering how in the hell these fucking college students even knew about his side-gig.

Me: “You’ve got a lot of fans in the English speaking world, what do you think of that?”

Artist: “Glad to have them, but I have no idea how they’ve found my work. Can they even buy my comics? What about the language barrier? I’ve been curious about that.”

Me: “Yeah, most people are pirating it.”

Artist: “Oh, well that’s certainly a problem, but I don’t know how to feel about it since people overseas are getting to know me…”

Following the interview, it’s like 1 a.m. We’re all exhausted and the artist pulls me aside.

“You got a lot of nerve asking me something like that. I’m out here staying out late past midnight to put up with you bozos and you’re asking me how I feel about people stealing my work? Man, fuck off.” or something along those lines. I don’t remember exactly what he said because it was after we finished up, and you know, hard to remember facts over vibes.

People are complicated. No amount of preparation can guarantee a good interview sometimes, and we can’t all be expected to be perfect all the time either. What’s important at the end of the day is hoping to have turned over at least one rock after we do an interview.

We’re all human and despite hoping to do our best, we sometimes screw up. And at the end of the day, you gotta move on. What’s important is learning from it for yourself, because we can always continue the conversation in the next interview.