Azone International
Azone International (アゾンインターナショナル) is a doll company closely involved with the Assault Lily franchise. They are headquartered in Fujisawa, Kanagawa Prefecture. The president of Azone International is Hayazono Tadashi (早園正).
History
[edit | edit source]Azone was founded in 1988 by Hayazono's father as Shonan Screen, a company which made stencil plates for dyeing clothes and other textiles. Hayazono became president of the company in 1989.
The Japanese economic downturn in the 1990s had a severe impact on Shonan Screen, and Hayazono decided to seek new business opportunities. He visited Vietnam, which had recently liberalized its economy, and in 1994 decided to employ Vietnamese factories to produce low-cost textiles for import into Japan[1]. After originally operating through intermediaries, Shonan Screen opened a Vietnamese office in 1996 and later established their own factory in Vietnam.
Around this time, Shonan Screen began manufacturing doll clothes for other Japanese companies that produced character dolls. Azone International was founded in 1998 as an affiliate company of Shonan Screen.
Azone produced their first original character doll, Sahra, in 2000. After Sahra's success, Shonan Screen exited the stencil-making business to focus on dolls and doll clothes and merged Azone International into themselves, later changing the company name to Azone International in 2006.
Assault Lily
[edit | edit source]Obanazawa Kenei, an amateur model dealer and former part-time employee of Azone's, approached them in 2011 with the proposal for the Assault Lily project, a series of "action dolls" with transforming weapons based on an original setting created by Obanazawa. Azone released the first Assault Lily dolls, the 1/12 scale versions of Shirai Yuyu and Hitotsuyanagi Riri, in 2013.
To promote the dolls, Azone hired author Kasama Hiroyuki to write two Assault Lily novels. The first novel, Assault Lily: Move Out, Team Hitotsuyanagi!, was released in 2015.
At some point prior to 2016, Hayazono went to see a play by the troupe Ludvico Girls High School at a theater owned by his friend. Realizing that Ludvico Private Girls' Seminary and Assault Lily would make a great combination, Hayazono invited Obanazawa to watch one of Ludvico's plays as well, after which the two approached troupe leader Sakuragi Sayaka about a collaboration. This lead to the performance of Assault Lily x Ludvico Girls High School: Schwester's Prayer, the first of the Assault Lily stage plays, in 2016.
In the fall of 2016, Azone entered into plans to develop the Assault Lily franchise as a media mix containing anime and games. This project was spearheaded by Gensho Tetsuo, a producer at Tokyo Broadcasting Systems; the companies Bushiroad, Pokelabo, and Studio SHAFT later became involved under the joint name of the "Assault Lily Project."[2] This lead to the release of Assault Lily: Bouquet in 2020 and Assault Lily: Last Bullet in 2021.