Toshio Suzuki has spent the last 20 years carefully steering late-era Studio Ghibli, a company that arguably cannot really function without the input of its three greats – Hayao Miyazaki, the late Isao Takahata, and Suzuki himself. In 2008, Suzuki appointed Disney Japan’s Koji Hoshino to take over as company president – a smart move, finding a man with world-class knowledge of running a cartoon company’s legacy.

But now Hoshino has resigned, claiming that the completion of Miyazaki’s How Do You Live?, is a good time to go, particularly since Hoshino’s going to be 67 in May. An alternative version of the story in the Japanese tabloids has Hoshino leaving under a cloud because his predecessor needed to “properly separate his public and private life.” Suzuki might have stepped down as president in 2008, but never quite went away, functioning instead as a general manager, whatever that means.

Suzuki, whose memoir of working at Ghibli carried the winning title Mixing Work with Pleasure, has been dishing out jobs to his Thai girlfriend Kanyada “May” Phatan. The two have allegedly been an item since she sold him some roadside chicken wings in 2013, after which Suzuki invested in her spa and restaurant. When those businesses went under, Suzuki steered Ghibli itself into authorising a Totoro café in Bangkok in 2018, May’s Garden House Restaurant, which shut down the following year just ahead of COVID.

Not to be deterred, Kanyada resurfaced as the mononymic photographer for The Ghibli Museum Story (2020), and for a book the same year of Toshio Suzuki quotations. She also writes a monthly poem for the Ghibli in-house magazine Neppu, and last month was feted at an Iwate exhibition of her photography, to tie in with a new, rather thin, compilation book.

In the era of Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, this barely moves the needle on the scandalometer. Some Ghibli staffers might bristle at the whiff of privilege, but it’s not like Suzuki hasn’t got form. He literally put a landscape gardener in charge of Tales from Earthsea because the guy was Hayao Miyazaki’s son. And nor is it all that unusual for people to get hired on the basis of personal connections, like that guy Roy Disney at Hoshino’s old company. Le Monde, of all places, fumed that Suzuki took the chance at the Iwate exhibition to “enjoy the hot springs with his girlfriend” which hardly seems like a crime.

If there’s any impropriety at work, it’ll be up to Hoshino’s replacement to clear it all up. That would be Toshio Suzuki, back as president after a 15-year absence.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article first appered in NEO #230, 2023.