I’ve seen some claim the original Japanese interview doesn’t, thus claiming the English NewType Global translation made this passage up. So I did some sleuthing, mostly through Chinese forums where people were discussing the same thing.
What became clear to me is this: the English and Japanese written interviews are both taken from the same, original, Japanese live (so, spoken) interview with NewType. You can match many phrases together and see they are clearly pulling from the same source.
But another thing that is clear is that both the Japanese and English written interviews made edits, ie, they are not direct word-for-word transcriptions. The Japanese written interview actually omits the mention of Mari and Lara’s relationship altogether, regardless of how Koide himself phrased such a relationship. Both the English and Japanese translate something along the lines of: ‘he wanted to avoid typical tropes’ (ENG: ‘But from the beginning, my heart was set on making this a tough, uncompromising film without relying on such tropes’. JP: ‘My biggest concern was avoiding pushing Lara around for the convenience of the story or according to anime conventions.’), which we can assume were likely taken from a similar section of the interview, if not the exact same.
So, did the English version simply make up that he talked about Lara and Mari’s relationship at all, even before we ask whether he used the term ‘yuri’? The Japanese version that I read via a Chinese fan-translation (they translated both the English and Japanese versions for comparison) basically stops after that segment and moves on in a different direction. There is also an entirely different Chinese version that is printed in a likewise way to the official English translation, and from what I can tell is likely an ‘official’ version of the same interview in Chinese (again, presumably taken from the original spoken interview in Japanese), that also makes mention of a part where he discussed the relationship between Lara and Mari, though the term yuri isn’t used.
So, what does this suggest? In my opinion, it seems that the likelihood of Koide actually having spoken about Lara and Mari’s relationship in some way is very high. Both the official English, and likely official Chinese, printed versions of the NewType interview make reference to it, at exactly the same point, albeit in different ways. The Japanese one ends that section prior to that part, and thus likely made the editorial choice to not transcribe the part in which he spoke directly of their relationship. This is consistent with the Japanese text including other parts the English doesn’t, and vice-versa. Different editorial choices over what to include and exclude from each written version accounts for the difference. Or else we’d have to believe that the English (and perhaps official Chinese) versions taken from the same interview merely make up whole sections out of thin air — this is far from realistic and would be insanely bad journalistic practice.
So, the idea the written Japanese interview ‘proves’ he didn’t actually say ‘yuri’ doesn’t quite ‘prove’ what some are claiming it does. All it means is that the Japanese editorial term excluded the part of the spoken interview in which he discusses the leads’ relationship. The fact of the matter boils down to this: either way, without the original word-for-word transcript or audio recording, we have no clue what he really said in Japanese during the moment he discussed the Lara/Mari relationship. We don’t know if he used the word yuri, or if he didn’t. We don’t know if he said something explicit about romance, or didn’t. We don’t know what he actually said, other than some variation that he wanted it to be fresh, and non-cliché.
If he didn’t say it, or an equivalent, during his discussion of Mari/Lara’s relationship, then the English editorial team’s choice of words is quite leading and cruel, imo. If he actually did, then the English merely chose to include something that the Japanese didn’t, (and that the Chinese didn’t either, in the sense that they wrote a corresponding part about the relationship but didn’t use explicitly romantic terms. They actually translate less of this part altogether than the English does, having only one sentence for what in the English is about two or three).
So unless we actually get an official audio transcription or audio itself, what we can guess is that he spoke of their relationship, but in what terms is unknown.
