It all started when @QuestForTori showed me this post:
That sure is a PC-98 game that says "furries ga suki". I had to know what this was all about. Why does a PC-98 eroge have the word "furries", in English? Why did it devote a whole room to the idea of loving furries? I needed answers!
Like it says in the post, it's from the (in)famous Alicesoft eroge Rance 4.1, but searching for it didn't give me much in the way of results. The text in the screenshot is first-person, out of character text so it read like some kind of a dev room, but even searching for that didn't bring up much - until I found the script itself. And there it is, Naritaya's heroic pro-furry screed:
Nice to meet you. I'm Naritaya.
I'm a newbie CG artist who was in charge of
the title CG and a few other things this time.
This will be my debut work.
Anyway, my goal from now on is to steadily
increase the number of furry lovers like me
and create a game that could be called
definitive for that genre (hah).
Everyone who loves dog- and catgirls, or things
like elves and devil girls (though the nuance is
a little different), basically "non-human girls,"
stand up now! Alice has its tradition of gal
monsters, so this shouldn't be just a dream!はぢめまして。成田屋と申します。
今回タイトルＣＧ＋αを担当しました新人
のＣＧ描きです。これがデビューの仕事とな
ります。以後，よろしくお見知りおきを。
とりあえず今後の目標としては，私と同じ
Ｆｕｒｒｉｅｓ愛好家を地道に増やしてその
手の決定版ともいえるソフトの発売までこぎ
着けたい，と思ってます（笑）。
犬猫その他のどーぶつ娘，（ちょっとニュ
アンスが違うけど）エルフや悪魔っ娘等のい
わゆる「人間以外の女の子キャラ」の愛好家
の方，今こそ立ち上がりましょう！アリスに
は女の子モンスターの伝統もありますから，
決して夢ではない筈です！
So not only is our friend Naritaya a furry fan, he specifically uses the English word "furries" in romaji more than once while expressing his love for furries. This is a Japanese artist who knows and loves the English furry scene. (Keep in mind, this is 1995!) This is where @moomarts found copies of some of Naritaya's personal art, with the URL still in the watermark, which is what brought us to:
NARITAYA'S FURRIES LAND
That's right, Naritaya had his own website in the 90s where he posted the anime furries of his dreams, filled with exactly all the kinds of anime art you might remember from the years 1995-2003.
His art style is distinctively 90s/early 00s anime, but there's that heavy use of "furries" in English again. I could only imagine the kinds of connections he must have had with the English-speaking scene, and then I found it tucked among his outgoing links page:
Yes, that's a link to the "Anime Transformation Archive". I lack the subject matter expertise to fully detangle the connections here but it's pretty clear that, yes, there was some western anime-furry fandom connection happening here. Didn't always see much of that back before social media brought us together across languages.
I'm not sure what he's up to now, but wherever you are Naritaya - hope you're still living the anime furries dream.
