Voice Actors of the TV Anime Jaadugar: A Witch in Mongolia Discuss the Importance of Thinking for Yourself in Modern Society

— Including that side of it, meeting all kinds of people and learning from experience is what matters, then. In terms of work, those chances naturally increase as you build up your career.

Shimono: True, stories of failure also become experience points.

Sekine: Ever since I was little, my mother told me, if you cannot bring yourself to face a wall head-on when you hit one, it is fine to go around it. Beyond the wall you went around there might be stairs or a ladder, and finding them is one way of doing things too.

When you manage to get over a wall through trial and error, the next time you hit a wall you may be able to set up a ladder yourself, drawing on the experience of the previous one. So she taught me to work out how to get over each wall one at a time, but to run away when it truly is hopeless.

Shimono: What a lesson that is! That is wonderful.

Sekine: So Sitara, too, has been through both joyful things and painful things, and it is precisely because she got through them that she can share Töregene's feelings and stand up to what she faces using the knowledge she has gained. But when you look at the people she is up against, experience matters as much as knowledge. I felt that you have to value both learning knowledge and gaining experience.

— Episode 1 also presented the idea of putting knowledge into action in a memorable way, with Muhammad dropping the bucket.

Shimono: Saito, do you have a lesson like that, or something you have been thinking about?

Saito: Listening to everyone, I felt that my own view is still narrow. Only recently have I been able to turn my sensors toward what I myself am feeling, and I do sometimes wonder what a particular emotion is, but even so it ends with nothing more than frustration or not understanding, and my own answers still feel far away.

Shimono: What sort of feelings did you have right after you started this job?

Saito: Well, I do not want to dismiss the person I have been until now, but I think I really did it all without thinking. I simply gave things a try and took on challenges, and there were times when what I wanted to do was enough to get by.

But as I was given the chance to work on more and more productions, that stopped being enough, and I started to ask myself what acting is and what it means to make a work. I still do not understand it at all.

Shimono: In that sense, maybe you are hitting a wall right now.

Koshimizu: It is all still ahead of you. I think that is rather nice! Struggling over it is fun too!

— Thinking really is difficult and demanding, since answers rarely turn up right away. At a time when it is possible to use AI and get by without thinking, I find myself feeling anew how important it is to think for yourself.

Koshimizu: When you spend time with the story of Jaadugar: A Witch in Mongolia, it makes you realize how fortunate it is to be able to take thinking for yourself for granted.

Shimono: But even without anything that difficult, people are basically always thinking about something, are they not? I do not think you can stop thinking as such, so if that is the case, thinking about all kinds of things and drawing out your own various answers makes your life richer.

These days you may rely on AI, but if you do, there is a chance you will end up only memorizing the words it produced.

Looking into whatever interests you in your own way, and actually seeing and engaging with it when you have the chance, is what turns into real experience. In that sense, I think digging deeper under your own power may be quite important.

Koshimizu: I like thinking, so I think a lot and often move forward on a working assumption. But when no answer comes, I put it on hold, and I also think that the point at which you stop, where you decide not to think about it any further, is crucial.

Lately I have been making good use of AI in my own way. My method is not to ask AI for answers, but to have it keep a record of summaries. I ask it to summarize only the key points of what I have thought through and assumed, and tell it that I do not need opinions or impressions, so that when I return to it after some time I can start again from where I left off.

Shimono: That is knowledge, or experience, in its own way. It is a way of arriving at an answer: AI can do this, so I will use it like this.

Koshimizu: If you do not put your thinking on hold for a while, you keep going round and round even though no answer is going to come right away, and as a result you can end up harming your mental health, right?

Saito: (nods deeply)

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