When we were doing the first movie, Tamagawa was put in charge of the short Pikachu's Summer Vacation (1998). In those days, you see, Tamagawa and I would tackle the majority of the key animation for the Studio Cockpit episodes ourselves. One day I was asked if I would be willing to do the key animation for some of the TV episodes by myself while Mr. Tamagawa was off working on the movie and I said "sure." And so I ended up doing two episodes9 as both the animation supervisor and the key animation director. After the movie was finished I thought things would go back to the way they were but it seems like OLM asked if Studio Cockpit would be willing to make two separate teams for Pokemon, a Team Tamagawa and a Team Iwane. I took this to mean that those two episodes I did must not have been too bad after all. I agreed, and ever since then I've been doing the key animation all by myself.

But there's no way I could do everything all the time, y'know. During the Pocket Monsters Advanced Generation period (2002), Tatsuya Annoura, Takeshi Moride, Mitsuzumi Yoshino, and Masahiro Yamanaka were all added to the key animation staff. When they got promoted from in-betweeners to key animators it was thought that suddenly having them taking on less outside work and more in-house stuff for Studio Cockpit would help them grow. That then transitioned into them finding their way into the episodes I was working on. I'd let them work on some of the key animation and, once they got good enough they would leave the nest and would get work on other projects.