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The pain of having your dreams come true appears vividly when you realize that even if your dreams really come true, they never really come true.

From birth to death it’s just like this.

SO I GRADUALLY SETTLED into doing my dream job the way I’d done every other job I’d had in my life: with care and energy but also a certain amount of detachment and boredom.

In the meantime, I played at being a real writer for Tsuburaya, not just a guy who makes up character names and promo leaflets. I submitted several stories for consideration to the Ultraman Tiga TV series in 1996. One of my scripts, in which the GUTS team time-travels to Japan’s feudal era, was deemed interesting but too expensive to make, another in which the GUTS team become Buddhist monks and battle a monster that’s not even really there was deemed just too weird. The head of the planning division liked it, but he couldn’t convince the rest of the team to take on something quite that bizarre.

In 1998 when the TV series Ultraman Gaia was being produced, I decided to have one more go at writing an episode. The standard plot of nearly every episode is this: “Monster shows up, people try to defeat it, fail. Ultraman shows up, beats up monster, flies off into sunset.” I thought it might be neat to set an episode in a parallel universe in which Ultraman is a giant bad guy who constantly attacks Earth’s cities. In order to protect themselves, the earthlings create giant monsters to battle him. In this universe, the “evil” Ultraman always defeats the “good” monsters, but must fly home to recuperate before he can attack again. I wrote the story down, painstakingly translated it into Japanese with my wife’s patient help, and submitted it.

I was flabbergasted when they decided to use it.

It turns out quite a lot of care goes into crafting the scripts for the Ultraman shows. You can do a surprising amount within the rigid format they’ve used for the past thirty-six years. Kinda like blues music. There are never any more than three chords in a true hardcore blues song, yet each song is unique, and after nearly a century of song-writers using those three chords, the possibilities have yet to be exhausted.

At my first meeting, Hirochiku Muraishi, the director slated for my show, asked me what my theme was. I did have a theme in mind, but I’d never expected anyone would ask me about it. I expected to be asked how many monster battles would be in the show or about how to move the action along more quickly and build to a cliffhanger before the commercial—anything but what I was trying to do with the script. My theme, I told him, was Power. It came from something Nishijima had once told me. He spotted me reading a book about Ultraman and said, “Those TV shows teach children to believe in Power.”

I was pretty taken aback. I’d never thought about it but superhero shows, popular with kids all over the world, do teach children to believe in power: we are in trouble and we can’t help ourselves, so someone more powerful—a superhero—has to fly in and fix our problems. And in the world of kids’ TV shows he always does so out of the goodness of his heart, never asking for anything in return. Real power in the human world is not so altruistic. The only place other than in the world of superhero shows for kids where you can find powerful beings who help powerless people out and ask for nothing in return is in the sphere of religion. This is yet another way in which Buddhism is not a religion.

There’s a “bodhisattva” in Buddhism called Kannon. Bodhisattvas aren’t gods, supernatural beings who exist somewhere and mercifully intervene in the realm of human affairs. Nonetheless, you can ask Kannon for help. But since Buddhists do not believe in literal supernatural beings, it’s understood that Kannon’s help really comes from ourselves. Still, Kannon is always available to help you and will always aid you when asked.

My show was about how power can be abused. In the universe