After the worldwide success of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006), the Madhouse production team was made an offer they could not refuse: the chance to make a new anime feature. Whereas TGWLTT had been based on an acknowledged classic of Japanese science fiction, known to every generation in Japan since its 1965 debut, this new film would be all-original. It was a tall order for screenwriter Satoko Okudera and director Hosoda, but the result is sure to become a classic of anime. That is, at least, precisely what the creators are aiming for – for all its immediacy and heartfelt sentiment, Summer Wars has also been carefully constructed as a ready-made family favourite, designed to take the place on future Japanese TV schedules that might be occupied in Britain by The Great Escape or The Wizard of Oz.

Summer Wars is Ghost in the Shell for the Facebook generation, with a self-aware artificial intelligence escaping from a sea of data and somehow attempting to influence the real world. But its inspiration is much more down-to-earth, said to commence shortly after the release of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, with the petrified director Mamoru Hosoda’s first visit to see his fiancée’s family, and the awful, overwhelming realisation that he faced a tsunami of information on family histories, feuds, and tragedies which was simultaneously nothing to do with him and yet the foundation of his life to come.

“My experience of marriage has been great,” he told the online culture magazine Cinra.net. “I’d been scared with stories of complexities and contracts, but they were wrong. But when I went to meet my fiancée’s relatives, people I had never met before suddenly became members of my ‘family’: that was something I found very mysterious and interesting. I wanted the film to convey some element of that experience.”

As in most other societies around the globe, the traditional kinfolk concept in Japan has been radically altered by modern life.  The “average” three-child family fussed over by the long-running anime character Sazae-san now seems ludicrously large by 21st century standards – what started as a 1940s slice-of-life has been turned into a quaintly odd period drama by straightforward demographics. Half a century of capitalism, reprioritising and belt-tightening has had as drastic an effect on the Japanese population as China’s draconian one-child policy. Anime shows like Bubu Chacha reflect a new norm in Japanese society – children who grow up alone, not only lacking siblings, but also lacking uncles, aunts and cousins. The nuclear families of the 20th century have reduced to the minimum possible size, often rendered even smaller by divorce. With no space even for pets, an entire Japanese generation is growing up in solitude.

This has had many ramifications for the anime business. Most noticeably, there are simply less children around, no longer present in sufficient numbers to swell anime viewing figures to quite the extent enjoyed by Astro Boy in the baby-booming 1960s. Moreover, it has encouraged some animators to offer rural imagery not as a reflection of modern children’s reality, but as an escape from it. Most famously, Hayao Miyazaki concocted My Neighbour Totoro as a virtual vacation in the lost countryside of his own childhood.

Himself an only child, Mamoru Hosoda conceived Summer Wars in a similar fashion, not merely as a film for all the family, but a film for those without such a family at all. Kenji, the protagonist, has a mother who is “busy at work” and a father working abroad. With no siblings, he is entirely alone, and swamped with the vivacious, noisy camaraderie of Natsuki’s relatives. To some viewers, the family itself is a nostalgia trip.

“You could call Summer Wars a family film, but it’s maybe better to call it a relatives film!” quips Hosoda. “There are lots of [nuclear] families in films, but not a lot of relatives. This isn’t the first time in action movie history that we’ve met the protagonist’s relations, I guess. But the thing that was constantly on my mind throughout production was the desire to make something that all the relatives would want to see.

“Once upon a time, the world of the Internet was cyber-solid, cutting edge – that was the impression that I had. But now the Internet world is much more mundane for us. So for a contemporary depiction, I played on the idea of the familiar, both in terms of the net and in terms of one’s relatives. I depicted them together.”

Hosoda allowed this dual nature to cross over into the animation styles he employed, using hand-drawn animation to give an organic quality to the real world scenes, and computer animation for the all-digital world of the web. “People argue about whether a movie should be CG, or if computers ruin something that was better done by hand. So I thought I’d compromise and do both!”

This is no mere artistic conceit. The idea of links both analogue and digital constantly recurs through Summer Wars. Great grandma Sakae may not even own a modern phone, but she sits amid a network that proves easily to be the match of World Wide Web – the endless round of gifts, kindnesses and obligations that has held East Asian culture together for centuries. When the young adults fail to achieve anything with orders and chains of command, it’s Sakae who pulls everything together, by calling in a lifetime of favours.

SAMURAI SHOWDOWN

Summer Wars deliberately recalls the look of a departed Japan, not only in its visuals, but in its cinematography. Hosoda admits that his long tracking shots across tableaux of action are in imitation of Kenji Mizoguchi, director of classic films such as Osaka Elegy (1936). But other elements of Summer Wars reach even deeper into the past.

Summer Wars is set in the hills of Nagano, close to Hosoda’s birthplace in Toyama. “At first I wanted to set it somewhere else. But once you know the history and folklore of the Ueda region, you realise it had to be there. The territory was once ruled by the Sanada clan, and I’d learned that it was a historical fact that local forces had twice defeated Tokugawa Hidetada.”

During the civil wars that ended with the rule of the Tokugawa clan, the first Shogun’s son Hidetada had marched through Ueda on his way to rendezvous with his father’s forces. In 1600, he laid siege to Ueda Castle, hoping that the occupants would soon see which way the wind was blowing, and come over to his side. Instead, the locals held out, critically delaying Hidetada, who eventually abandoned the siege. But the damage was done, and Hidetada was late for the crucial, nation-building Battle of Sekigahara.

In a typically Japanese reverence for the nobility of failure, Hidetada’s absence didn’t make that big a difference. His father still won the battle, and Hidetada still ultimately became the second Tokugawa Shogun. But in the remote mountains of Ueda, there was an enduring sense that the locals had scored a moral victory. They had done what was right, even if they lost the war.

“Me and the other Ueda people are very proud of it,” notes Hosoda. “It inspired such a great local spirit, and impressively, the locals still have it, so I decided it was well suited as a setting for the story.”

No surprises, then, that another subtext in Summer Wars is the samurai past, as Natsuki’s family relate their ancient ties to the clans that fought in the civil war. This comes to the fore in other places, such as the suit of priceless armour that watches from the hall, or the naginata pole-axe that Sakae wields – the naginata is the traditional weapon of the stay-at-home samurai wife, designed to unseat attacking horsemen.

GRANNY KNOWS BEST

Despite our entry to the film through its juvenile leads, the hapless latch-key kid Kenji and his pushy love interest Natsuki (“Summer Hope”), the core of the drama revolves around two other characters – the 90-year-old matriarch Sakae and Wabisuke, the illegitimate son of one of her other children.

Character designer Yoshiyuki Sadamoto based Wabisuke on one of Japan’s most famous bad boys: the actor Yusaku Matsuda (1949-89). The son of a Nagasaki father and an ethnic Korean mother, Matsuda shot to TV fame as the tousle-haired rookie cop in Howl at the Sun (Taiyo ni Hoero, 1972) and again as the maverick, moped-riding star of Detective Story (Tantei Monogatari, 1979). International fame beckoned after his performance in the film The Family Game (1983), and his breakout role should have been as the villainous Sato in Ridley Scott’s Black Rain (1989). However, soon after completing filming, he succumbed to cancer, turning him into on of the Japanese media’s candidates for a too-fast, too-young James Dean immortality. His memory lives on, thanks in part to his wife’s candid biography and the continued acting successes of his children, but to his role as an icon to anime designers. Most noticeably, Matsuda is the model for Cowboy Bebop’s Spike Spiegel, and now Wabisuke the prodigal son of Summer Wars, the soft-spoken, melancholy but confident boy that the family has never accepted, and who has been accused of running off with granny’s money.

As well as being Natsuki’s first crush, Uncle Wabisuke still appears to be the apple of Sakae’s eye. Despite his unwelcome origins and outsider status, he still has a scene in which he recounts his fond memories of his time with her, when she functioned in the place of his biological mother. Mamoru Hosoda, too, recalls times in his own childhood where he felt something akin to the young Wabisuke’s sense of distaff belonging.

“When I was young, I would often be left at my grandmother’s house. I guess I became a Grandma’s Boy and that experience is reflected in the work.”

THE WIZARD OF OZ

Wabisuke isn’t merely the black sheep of the family. He is a direct link to the world at large, with connections to the American military and international academia. When he arrives at Sakae’s mansion, he is the first sign that the remote Japanese countryside cannot pretend to be separate from the rest of the planet’s troubles. Soon after Wabisuke’s return, the supposedly benign virtual world begins to break through into people’s lives. Wabisuke is a local problem, an irritating family secret, who is also somehow the catalyst of a nationwide state of emergency. Similarly, his creation, the Love Machine, is a dangerous pet that has turned on its master.

The OZ virtual world allows Hosoda and his crew to examine the way in which Japan is connected to the wider world. The apparently harmless gaggle of online avatars, initially presented as little more than glorified Pokémon, are soon shown to have the ability to exert damaging effects on everyday life, disrupting traffic, shutting down vital amenities, and threatening to end the world as the characters know it. Hosoda recalls an interest in the understandably insular attitudes of the Japanese, whose geography, language and media often lead them to believe that they are somehow insulated from global issues.

“I worked in a sense of the Pax Americana,” says Hosoda. “How the minutiae of our daily life are entwined inextricably with globalism. I didn’t just want there to be a bad guy who was outside the family. Some family members cause enough trouble on their own. I wasn’t being political, just contrasting domestic and global issues, and the convergence of problems within the family. I mean, if our ‘family’ can’t deal with the problems it already has, how can it deal with the problems of the world around it?”

“In old American movies, the bad guys are easily depicted: Nazis or Communists, within a conflict-based formula… But I don’t think such diametric oppositions work in a Japanese context. Instead, I wanted to create an action movie for someone in Japan, that found the conflict born within themselves. Even now, I think, in American cinema, there is an increasing number of works like that. I think the big change came after September 11th.”

Summer Wars is a film of deliberate contrasts, juxtaposing low-tech, homespun pursuits with the high-tech digital world we live in. The centrepiece is the online world known as OZ, which Mamoru Hosoda based on his experiences of the Japanese virtual community mixi. A social networking site not unlike Facebook, mixi has a number of peculiarities – its text is Japanese-only and requires a domestic email account, effectively shutting out foreigners. Membership is by invitation only, and pages come with a Footprint function that tells a user exactly who has been looking at his or her data. Today, the service has 25 million registered users, perhaps one in every five Japanese people, although the statistic does not take into account users with multiple or lapsed addresses.

Hosoda denies any direct connection between the look of the OZ virtual world and the Superflat art-style of his former collaborator Takashi Murakami. Nor does OZ itself relate to the most obvious candidate, the Wizard of Oz.

“The name OZ comes from a big supermarket that used to be nearby back in the days I worked for Toei Animation. I lived in a boarding house, and went to work, and the third point of my daily life was this place called LIVIN Oz. That’s how it got dragged in. It’s gone now; there’s a cinema there.”

SUMMER NIGHTS

The warm nights and August vistas in Summer Wars make it harder for foreign viewers to see one of its most powerful resonances. At its heart, Summer Wars is a secular “Christmas movie” of the same stripe as Satoshi Kon’s Tokyo Godfathers, snatching all the traditions of seasonal specials and repackaging them at a time when the Japanese are most likely to be with their families. Pointedly, this is not Christmas Eve, often a day like any other for most Japanese, save for a modern fad that expects shy boys to pop the question to their girlfriends on 24th December. Instead, the Japanese equivalent of the Western “holiday season” is the height of summer, with schoolchildren at home with nothing to do, and adults more likely to be taking their limited vacation time.

Summer Wars is riddled with memories of family gatherings – the awkward division of labour between newcomers in a stranger’s kitchen and someone else’s shed, sullen modern teenagers desperate to return to the online existence that defines them, or infants pushed into traditions and pastimes on which the older generation place a baffling value. It also reflects the aspirations of the Japanese media. So much Japanese television, particularly TV movies and summer specials, seem intended for an insanely wide-ranging audience, from grandmothers to toddlers. This, it has been argued, is the only possible explanation for the corny acting in certain programmes, as if the creators almost expect them to be only half-heard amid the din of a family gathering. Thank the fates, then, that we are not subjected to the usual lazy cliché of Japanese summer entertainment, which is to simply take a bunch of characters from a pre-existing show and pack them off to a hot springs resort, where tedious high jinks inevitably ensue.

Instead, Summer Wars pushes a media mogul’s idea of how a Japanese family should spend its summer vacation: watching baseball (and saving the world). Yomiuri TV, one of the movie’s backers, is the same corporation that owns the Yomiuri Giants baseball team, themselves the subject of the long-running anime series Star of the Giants. Clearly intending Summer Wars as a staple of summer broadcast seasons to come, the Yomiuri corporation makes sure that at least one family member is baseball-crazy.

The baseball on offer, however, is not that of the Yomiuri channel. It is the Japanese High School Baseball Championships, also known as the Summer Koshien. Despite in-roads by other games, particularly soccer, it remains the largest-scale amateur sports event in Japan. The Koshien competition unifies the Japanese like no other event (or so claim the broadcasters), featuring idealistic youths from every prefecture in Japan. Regional champions fight it out in mega-matches at the Koshien stadium in Hyogo, sometimes at a rate of four games a day. Crucially, it drags in the classmates and families of the participants as eager viewers – one of the few televised events that can expect to attract a cross-generational audience.

HANAFUDA

A critical part of the drama in Summer Wars rests not on baseball but on Hanafuda, a notoriously complex card game that has its roots in Japan’s samurai past. During the Tokugawa Shogunate that dominated Japan from 1603-1868, gambling was illegal and playing cards were a forbidden foreign import. This did not stop a number of games springing to life, often played with supposedly “decorative” cards that featured Chinese art images and no numbers. The eventual result was Hanafuda (“flower bids” or “flower notes”), a complex combination of Snap and Go Fish in which players matched combinations of particular cards. Behind the scenes, professional gamblers drew up score charts for Hanafuda combinations that made it possible to bet on the outcome, and card games persisted in secret.

The cards in Hanafuda are divided into twelve seasonal suits, each containing four images. For August, for example, the images include Geese in Flight and Full Moon with Red Sky. Players must get rid of all the cards in their hand by matching them to newly overturned cards on the table. Without a match, they must pick up the cards that they have turned over. A cry of koi-koi (“play on”) represents a player’s decision to force another round, instead of banking the points that he or she already has.

In 1889, after the fall of the Tokugawa clan and the liberalisation of Japanese society, Fusajiro Yamauchi went into business making newly-legal Hanafuda cards on bespoke mulberry bark paper. The cards took off in a huge craze, were soon adopted by both professional gamblers and amateur players, and spread across Asia, particularly to Japan’s growing colonies and expatriate communities. It made Yamauchi a rich man, and his company achieved great success. With a card-player’s trust in fate, he named his company “Leave Luck to Heaven”, or in Japanese: Nintendo.

It was Yamauchi’s grandson Hiroshi who took the Nintendo corporation into new areas, particularly electronics. But to this day Nintendo continues to manufacture Hanafuda sets, not only for sale in Japan, but in Korea, where the game is called Hwatu, and Hawaii, where it is called Sakura. Better known today for the Gameboy and the Wii, the Nintendo games company is also an investor in Summer Wars, and surely had a role to play in the collision of tradition and modernity that dominates the film’s final showdown.

Jonathan Clements is author of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade and A Brief History of the Samurai.

Oshii is speaking of a common theme in science fiction all around the world, ever since the end of WW2 – the concept that today’s children have never had it so good, and yet don’t appreciate their luck. “Modern Japanese youth live in a country without hunger, without war, without revolution. They don’t have to worry about clothes or food or a home. Everything is just handed to us. But on the flipside, I can’t help but wonder if that is really a sort of misfortune…. Now I’ve got to this age, I wonder if this easy living isn’t doing them more harm than good.”

Hiroshi Mori’s Sky Crawlers was the first of several books to be published about the “Kildren”, clone-like soldiers in an unspecified future war, who fight similar artificial people in what is either the most savage reality TV show ever made, or a genuine war fought by proxy in order to avoid damage to “real” people. Although the origin of the Kildren is no real secret, they are discouraged from dwelling on the implications. Nevertheless, many react to their existence with apathy – after all, what difference does it make if they die in battle if a replacement will be rolled off the production line within days?

Hiroshi Mori’s books have sold over eight million copies in Japanese, and are clearly immensely popular with the young. But director Mamoru Oshii wished to turn Sky Crawlers into a film for his own purposes, regarding it as “a work that should be made into a movie for young people now,” not because it is a book they read, but because, in Oshii’s view, of the attitudes they hold.

Although Sky Crawlers was the first in the sequence of five novels to be published, it is actually one of the last stories in the chronological narrative. Other books, telling the stories of Kusanagi’s first meeting with the Teacher, the fate of Kannami’s predecessor, and the aftermath of the events in Sky Crawlers, were deliberately released out of order, as part of Mori’s desire to make it clear to readers that the books were more rewarding if read out of sequence, leaving the reader as much in the dark about past events as newly-arrived Kildren.

“I guess I got the offer for the film rights about three years ago,” Mori recalls, “when I was writing the second book in the series. I’d always thought that I’d written something unfilmable.” The news came in that Production IG, celebrating its 21st year of operations, wanted to turn Sky Crawlers into a film. Mori was initially reluctant.

“Then I heard that Mamoru Oshii was going to be the director. I thought to myself, ‘Ah, well if it’s going to be Mamoru Oshii, then we’ll be okay.’ I remembered in particular his work on Avalon, and I thought this is a guy I know who will bring out the beauty in my work.”

Although Japanese press releases claimed that over 60 people were auditioned for each role, the cast list is a remarkable assembly of top names from the Japanese acting world. Mamoru Oshii himself admits that there was no contest whatsoever for the role of base chief Suito, claiming that he had always wanted the Oscar-nominated Rinko Kikuchi for the role, on the basis of nothing more than “intuition”. There are also some famous names in tiny cameo roles. Kill Bill’s Chiaki Kuriyama makes a brief appearance as Midori. The barman in the local café is played for just a few lines by the ubiquitous Naoto Takenaka (Shall We Dance, Ping Pong, etc etc), star of over a hundred films, and ten times nominated for the Japanese Academy Award.

There have been several cosmetic changes from the book. Some seem designed to make the film seem less like animation and more real – for example, the book’s version of the groupie Fuuko has pink hair, whereas in the anime she is given a more realistic hue. The location was also moved – in the books, the pilots fight in Japanese airspace, whereas asides in the movie openly state that it is taking place in the European battle theatre. Company records (and DVD extras) show “location hunting” for the film took place in Ireland and in Mamoru Oshii’s beloved Poland, where he previously shot the live-action movie Avalon.

Mamoru Oshii’s film version recalls the obsession with the “little people” that characterised his earlier work. In Patlabor, the characters famously arrived at every action scene a little too late. The big over-arching movie plot in Patlabor 2 (an attempted coup), happens largely in the background while the protagonists struggle to keep up and make sense of it. Similarly, in Ghost in the Shell, the obvious high concept (a sentient virus attempts to defect) is only hinted at or obliquely referenced for the bulk of the movie, while the cast occupy themselves with the collateral damage. Sky Crawlers continues this theme, with the great scheme of the ongoing war of little consequence to the characters involved in it, and hence only referred to in occasional newspaper headlines, and in comments made by visiting tourists.

Like much of modern anime, the world of the Sky Crawlers is steeped in adolescent pursuits – the pilots smoke, drink and have sex with a curious lack of affect, and Kannami in particular perpetually claims that he is “just a kid” and hence has no reason to think in the long term. It is almost as if, like many war movie enthusiasts, he is in love with the idea of war itself, not for the thrill of battle, but for the excuse it gives him to have no thought for the long-term. The Kildren, we are told, never age, although they themselves seem confused by this – Kannami acts as if such a statement is a reference to the chances of him getting killed at any moment. Other pilots behave as if it is a literal truth, that they will forever be teenagers. There are elements here of the great nihilist anime Grey: Digital Target, in whose characters similarly strove for victory in an unwinnable war, with ever escalating enemies taking on the characteristics of a computer game. The only way to win was to refuse to take part. As in Grey, Sky Crawlers has an epilogue that hammers this point home – stay until the end of the credits!

The character of Suito Kusanagi has a different take on these things. She is a mother, albeit a reluctant and somewhat indifferent one. She also appears to have attempted to break the cycle of postings and fightings, and alludes to having loved, and indeed killed, Kannami’s predecessor – a pilot with a different name, but of whom Kannami appears to be the latest in a long line of clones.

For all these reasons, critics in both Japan and America have read into Sky Crawlers a subtle commentary on modern society, in particular the hedonistic, self-indulgent consumption that exerts such a strong pull on anime production itself. The pilots on the base remain perpetually young (in their deeds and behaviours), providing entertainment for a crowd of English-speaking strangers who laud their achievements but seem strangely insensible about the pressures that they are under. As the aficionado already knows, not every anime is a high budget, thoughtful film based on a novel like Sky Crawlers. Far too many are empty, brash recyclings of timeworn formulae, trotted out to sell model kits and decals to a dwindling fanbase. Such a suggestion casts the pilots in Sky Crawlers in a new light, not as callow, uncaring soldiers in a war they do not comprehend, but as the champions of anime itself, a cry for help from the creatives who wish for something better, deeper, and more worthy of their unquestionable talents.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade.

I shall be there introducing a bunch of other films, including Summer Wars and Professor Layton & The Eternal Diva. Someone has already asked on the Twitter feed if I will be signing copies of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis. God, yes! In fact, this is Glaswegian anime fans’ big chance to bring in a copy of SMC. I can sign it to you, to your mum, or to that anime fan you are hoping to impress with a bespoke gift this Christmas. So get over to Amazon and order your copies now!

The magazine is viewable as a webpage or downloadable onto e-Readers equipped with the EPUB format.

Coincidentally also up online today, my obituary of Kon for the British Film Institute’s Sight & Sound website.

“In the province of Yeka Mongol, there was a certain man called Chinghis. This man became a mighty hunter. He learned to steal men, and to take them for prey. He ranged into other countries taking as many captives as he could, and joining them unto himself. Also, he allured the men of his own country unto him, who followed him as their captain and ringleader to do mischief.”

– Friar John of Pian de Carpini, 13th century AD

“Not long ago, Genghis Khan evoked only unpleasant memories; he was thought of as a tyrant,” producer Vladimir Ivanov told Variety. “The film will strike a wide audience with its honesty about complex historical facts.”

Temujin (played here by three actors at different stages of his life) might have been a famous Mongol, but the extent of his empire from the edges of Europe to the Pacific coast ensured that his memory had a much larger footprint. The activities of his grandsons, who conquered Hungary, Persia and China, ensure that the name Genghis Khan is a bankable movie idea across the whole of Eurasia. By the Will of Genghis Khan is a truly international production, growing out of a novel and play first performed in the Republic of Yakutia, adapted into cinema form with co-producers in the USA, and a cast including members from China, Germany and a dozen Russian republics. But the bulk of its talent and industry is rooted not in Mongolia as one might expect, but in the vast region of Siberia – once ruled by Genghis Khan, now the Russian Far East.

Throughout the 20th century, Siberia was regarded as little more than a place of unspoken exile, of gulags and disappearing dissidents. By the Will of Genghis Khan restores this region as a crucial, vital part not only of the Russian identity, but of global geography. “Siberia”, i.e. Northern Asia, is an area occupying 13.1 million square kilometres, including not just the modern Russian state of Siberia itself, but also the Republic of Tuva, the Republic of Yakutia, the Republic of Khakassia, the Buryat Republic, the Altai Republic and oblast (district) areas including the Jewish Oblast, Kurgan, Tyumen and the Amur (also known as the Black Dragon River, which forms the border with China to the south). Siberia proper, the area from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific coast, occupies 77% of Russia, and 10% of all the land in the world. It has been inhabited by human beings since 45,000 BC, and was united, along with what is now Mongolia, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, as part of the conquests of Temujin, the “Genghis Khan”, before his death in 1227.

Secret Histories

When Temujin’s grandson Khubilai Khan conquered China a generation later, he became the founder of the century-long “Chinese” dynasty of the Yuan. Accordingly, Khubilai’s family was immortalised in a Chinese dynastic history, with grandfather Temujin accorded honorary imperial status many decades after his death. But for a more personal, more dramatic account of the life of Temujin, we need to turn to the Secret History of the Mongols, an anonymous chronicle now lost in the original Mongolian version, but which has survived through the centuries for its use as a textbook for teaching Mongolian to the Chinese. The Secret History was not translated into European languages until the 20th century, and indeed, the best and most complete version of it was not properly published until 2003.

It is the Secret History that we have largely to thank for the rich and varied folklore surrounding all subsequent stories of Temujin, including By the Will of Genghis Khan – his birth in 1162 clutching an ominous blood clot in his fist; his murder of his half-brother Bekhter in an argument over hunting; the kidnapping and eventual rescue of his first love, Borte; his capture and escape from enemies on the steppes, and the many years over which he built a confederation of tribes. Then the years of conquest, as Temujin’s forces leapt in numbers from tens, to hundreds, to thousands, to the largest unit of his operation, the ten-thousand strong divisions known as tuman.

Temujin gained a new title, as “Great Leader” (Mongol: Jinggis Qan), at around the same time that the peoples of the steppes discovered that their way of life was perfectly attuned to constant conquest. Unlike the sedentary farming civilisations at either end of their domain, the Mongols never settled in one place for long. Instead, they followed their herds in a seasonal migration, setting down their wicker-frame huts in mobile communities. Their word for this in their own language was ordo, meaning variously a camp or a herd on the move. An ordo was also the impression left in the ground by a Mongol tent – a sign that they had passed by in the recent past, and would probably return. Thanks to Temujin, the word migrated West with different connotations. In Russian, it became orda. In Polish: horda. In English, horde.

Russia at the Movies

Actors who have formerly played Temujin have included John Wayne (The Conqueror, 1956), Omar Sharif (Genghis Khan, 1965), Alex Man (Genghis Khan, TV, 1987), Ba Sen (Genghis Khan, TV, 2004), Takashi Sorimachi (Genghis Khan: To the Ends of the Earth and Sea, 2007), Tadanobu Asano (Mongol, 2007), and Tsegmedin Tumurbaatar (No Right to Die: Genghis Khan, 2008), Such a list barely scratches the surface, and does not include the great “failed” Genghis Khan epic, featuring Charlton Heston and with a revolving door of directors, that foundered due to lack of money and put Hollywood off the subject for much of the 1990s. Nor does it include many local television and theatrical productions of the story throughout the many countries who claim Genghis Khan as a historical ruler. In fact, some time during production of By the Will of Genghis Khan, someone tried to hunt down every member of the production team who had previously played Temujin in some form or other, and discovered that there were thirteen former Temujins on set, including one of the producers.

When even major Hollywood studios are struggling to finance their projects, the Russian film industry remains buoyant. The credit crunch is all about tertiary industries; the Russian economy is based on oil, gas and mining, the basic materials of everybody else’s economy. As a result, while Warner Bros postpones movies in production and scrabbles for petty cash, the Russian film business goes from strength to strength.

Russians are enthusiastic cinemagoers, and fervent supporters of local talent – 26% of Russian box office takings are for tickets to locally made films. Made for ten million dollars, costing roughly five times as much as an average Russian film, By the Will of Genghis Khan was partly funded with money from the Siberian diamond industry – the forbidding region has some of the richest mineral, oil and gas deposits in the world. It was filmed across a three-year period in locations that would have been familiar to the Mongols themselves, in several of the Russian republics that now dot Temujin’s old empire.

Locations included the sacred “Stone People” of Kisilyakh, where filming began in 2005 – a series of humanoid-form rocks legendarily held to be the petrified soldiers of Temujin. They included Yakutia, home to many of the actors, Buryatia and Tuva. A second phase of filming, incorporating the big-budget battle scenes, was undertaken over a year later in Mongolia, utilising massed hordes of horsemen and a group of international stuntmen. By the Will of Genghis Khan is a veritable travelogue of Siberian scenery, including sacred mountains once visited by Temujin, and the glittering waters of Lake Baikal, repository of almost a quarter of all the fresh water in the world.

Filming locations varied over a hundred degrees in temperature, from the “coldest place in the world”, a mountainside in Yakutia, to the seared edges of the Gobi Desert. Nor were the cast immune to danger. During filming of one shot, actress Elena Rumyantseva dragged actor Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa out of the path of a runaway horse, inadvertently saving the man who was supposed to be playing her own bodyguard.

Figures from History

The characters in the film are largely drawn directly from the historical record, including Temujin himself and his family, as well as potentates of the steppes such as Toghrul Wang Khan (Dorzhi Sultimov), who was made famous in Europe by his mention in the Travels of Marco Polo. A formidable foe, Toghrul is thought to have been the origin of garbled medieval legends of a Christian king in the East, known in Europe as “Prester John”. Seemingly out of place amid the Asiatic heritage and tradition is the figure of Father John (Gernot Grimm), a devoted European missionary determined to preach the gospel in the East. But even Father John is based on a real historical figure, Friar John of Pian de Carpini (1180-1252), an Italian monk whose book The History of the Mongols, Whom We Call Tartars, became a major source on the Mongols in Europe.

Although he was a contemporary of Temujin, the real Father John did not come to the East until after Temujin’s death, when he witnessed the coronation of Temujin’s grandson Guyuk in 1245. Friar John attempted to persuade the grandson of Genghis Khan to become a Christian, but received a curt refusal, in the form of a letter that he carried back to the Vatican, where it can still be found in the archives. But John was one of many missionaries who risked their lives to carry Christianity eastwards in the face of the hordes, many of whom did not make it back alive.

Temujin was the founder of a regime that, very briefly, would unify Asia. He lives on in his direct descendants, estimated by the American Journal of Human Genetics to number today some 16 million people from Hungary to Korea, all of whom share a recurring DNA sequence that points to a single ancestor some time in the 12th-13th century. Controversially voted as the Man of the Millennium by the Washington Post, Genghis Khan’s European reputation as a bloodthirsty savage is entirely different from the way he is remembered in many Asian regions. It is, then, unsurprising that he should have become the subject of so many books, plays and films, and that their perspectives on him should be so wildly variant. If By the Will of Genghis Khan unquestionably makes Temujin a heroic protagonist, it also makes him a willing co-star, sharing top billing with the incredible scenery of Asia itself.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of Khubilai Khan.

]]> http://schoolgirlmilkycrisis.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=1677 http://schoolgirlmilkycrisis.com/blog/?p=1675 http://schoolgirlmilkycrisis.com/blog/?p=1675#comments Mon, 30 Aug 2010 07:00:05 +0000 Jonathan http://schoolgirlmilkycrisis.com/blog/?p=1675 Higanjima is a multiple pun in Japanese. It literally means Equinox Island, or the Yonder Isle, perhaps even The Island on the Other Side. However, as noted by the characters when they first arrive on the notorious “vampire island”, it is also a reference to higanbana (Lycoris radiata), the red-flowered spider lilies whose poisonous bulbs are sometimes strewn at the edges of Japanese farmhouses to kill mice. Flowering around the time of the autumn equinox, spider lilies have become associated in Buddhist tradition with the onset of winter, and hence the threshold between life and death. They should never be presented to a living person.

In Japan, spider lilies are usually associated with graveyards. In Chinese and Japanese legend, they are said to be the flowers that grow in hell, and also the flowers that mark the path towards reincarnation. For this latter reason, they are sometimes presented as bouquets to the deceased at Japanese funerals. Another superstition suggests that if two associates will never meet again, spider lilies will be found in their path as they part. Hence the ominous tension that surrounds the characters as they come ashore at the island, to find that every path, in every direction, bears the flowering symbol of eternal separation and death.

Koji Yamamoto’s original 2003 manga Higanjima was soon snapped up as a game adaptation, turned into a text-based interactive adventure by Now Productions, released in Japan on the PSP in 2005. The action of the 15-rated game would be reflected in the later movie, with the player guiding Akira on his search for his missing brother. The manga story, however, extends far beyond the events in the movie, introducing numerous new forms of enemy, and setting up Higanjima as the perfect survivalist playground – an island that is literally off the map, infested with evil, and inviting return visits by adventurous heroes. Running at thirty volumes and still ongoing, it is also very popular in France, where many volumes have been translated as L’Ile des Vampires.

Higanjima the manga, and its game spin-off are grab-bags of horror ideas. It eagerly mixes the locked-room combat of Battle Royale with the viral horror of Resident Evil, with just a dash of the old-time religion of The Wicker Man, and presents that most tantalising of locations for the role-playing gamer – a private island of adventure, close to home and yet inhabiting a world of myth and magic. An obscure island, Higanjima has been ominously left off Japanese maps, and is the location of an ancient evil, locked inside an old, forbidden storehouse. It is also the site of wartime experiments, an unfortunate confluence that allows for fantasy and science fiction to crash together. Miyabi the vampire king springs to unlife again on the island that once was his prison, but he also has a new aim and a new legion of minions – creating vampire hybrids, reanimated zombies, and “amalgams” (vampires who have drunk the blood of other vampires). Higanjima’s monster menagerie is infested with ideas from both Japanese mythology and Hollywood horror, with experimental creatures and mutated hybrids that include bewitching beauties, mermen, and even a blood-sucking Chihuahua. (*In fact, the “Chihuahua” form is so called because of its relative size in relation to giant vampires – it’s able to give human opponents a real run for their money).

Each breed has its particular weaknesses, hence the meticulous division of labour among the adventuring youths – some creatures are best shot with arrows, others destroyed with chemical bombs or slugged with a baseball bat. In all cases, the ultimate deterrent is a beheading – suitable to finish off even the lead vampire… or so it is said. In the original story, the slow-witted Pon might have been the weakest character, but arrived on the island with one of the most useful weapons – a pistol purloined from his policeman brother.

The manga series and game also have notoriously picky fans, such that many in the film world wondered if a movie version could truly satisfy everybody, particularly a film such as this one, compressing and cutting so much of the action, and even scandalously creating a new ending. “When I heard that Higanjima would be made into a live action film, I wondered how they were going to do it,” says leading man Hideo Ishiguro (Akira). “But when I read the script, particularly the scene where Akira has to say goodbye to Pon, I got a real lump in my throat. The cast and director all agreed, it’s the crucial scene, and the one that all of us zeroed in on.”

“In the real world,” Ishiguro concedes, “Akira would be the first one to die. He helps too many people.” But it’s Akira, the younger brother, who carries the weight of the film, and who personifies the development of the characters. He not only goes in search of his long-lost brother, he has to make tough choices about whether he should help friends who have been kidnapped by vampires, tortured by zombie war criminals, or infected with a vampire virus. In the tradition of 28 Days Later, infection with vampire blood is all it takes to turn a friend into an enemy.

“Once the filming started, there was a much bigger crew than I anticipated and I was amazed every day by the sets that the staff put up. They really recreated Higanjima for real,” adds Ishiguro.

In every sense of the word, it would seem. “It was tough,” admits co-star Dai Watanabe (Atsushi). “The boys didn’t have any privacy. We were shooting on Hachijojima, and Hideo and I were stuck together in a twin room for ten days. On Hachijojima it was relatively spacious, but once we moved locations to Yugashima, it was more like a prison cell than a hotel! The room was small enough, but then Hideo and I were sharing with Tomohisa Yuge (Ken), for another couple of weeks, so we felt like fellow inmates. We developed a strong bond, and it was interesting to see various sides of them. There aren’t many secrets in such extreme cohabitation!”

Beyond the hardships of location shooting, Watanabe thinks there was something else at work in the shadows. “One of the locations, Hachijojima, used to be a place of exile,” recalls Watanabe. “So some of the crew were sure they saw something spooky. Once, when we were doing a night shoot, rain shut down all the lights. Apparently, it was a place where mysterious phenomena are often reported, and I saw piles of salt left around the edges of the set to ward off evil spirits. I wasn’t scared, but later on we found ourselves filming at an old execution ground… it was quite awe-inspiring.”

Watanabe is from a family with a serious acting pedigree – his father is Ken Watanabe, of Last Samurai fame. But Watanabe only became an actor by accident, agreeing to play his father’s character as a boy in a samurai drama. “Initially, I did it because it was a chance to skip school, but it turned out to be more interesting than expected.” Despite his father’s hopes that he would get a “real” job, and despite graduating from university, Watanabe has drifted into acting after all.

Watanabe’s education, however, came in handier than expected when working with Korean director Kim Tae-gyun. “This was the first time I’d worked with a foreign director. But before shooting began, we were able to communicate in basic English. Once we were on location, we were all learning Japanese and Korean on the go, and there was plenty of pidgin banter. When things got important, though, we always communicated through an interpreter!”

Director Kim claims that film-sets are the same the world over, but notes that as a Korean he is sure to miss elements of Japanese expression from his actors. Accordingly, he often left nuances of performance to the Japanese themselves, concentrating instead on the action and the big picture.

“The director was full of ideas,” remembers Asami Mizukawa (Rei). “After every shot, he’d cut actors’ speeches and switch camera angles. Much of his direction required real flexibility for both the actors and the crew, and everyone had to hustle to keep up. But it was all very fresh for me, and I really enjoyed it. I think it’s given the film a real pace overall. We got detailed direction in our instructions, and there was no problem understanding him, despite the language barrier.”

“When I met him I thought he had very strong aura,” remembers Hideo Ishiguro. “His eyes looking at me were very piercing, but within them there was also warmth to wrap up everything, which made me want to work with him as soon as possible. When the shooting started, because of the language barrier, I wasn’t sure at all what the director wanted from me, so at the beginning I just played a scene with my own interpretation and waited to see whether that was OK or not.

By the end of filming, Ishiguro had developed enough of a sense of Kim’s style that he no longer needed translation. “Before the interpreter said a word,” he remembers, “I could sense how the director felt. Even though I didn’t understand the language, I understood what he was feeling.”

Asami Mizukawa, who plays the meretricious Rei, is glad that she doesn’t have to fight vampires in real life, and also that she doesn’t face the awful conflicts of loyalty with which her character has to deal. “If it were me, it would be absolutely impossible to survive in such a harsh situation,” she notes. “You have to set aside the notion of whether Rei’s behaviour is Right or Wrong, and focus on the idea that her bitter past has made her a strong woman, prepared to sacrifice herself in revenge.”

Made to perform wire-work stunts with minimal rehearsals, Mizukawa threw herself into the action. “I am not afraid of heights,” she boasts, “and I loved all the stunt work, with all the actors tumbling and bumping into walls without any rehearsal.”

Thrown in at the deep end, actor Hideo Ishiguro (Akira) often found himself blocking out sword fights on the spot: “The director wanted me to develop physical strength for the shooting, so I started muscle training three months prior to the filming,” he remembers. “At the beginning of the shoot I had strength, but near to the end I was more and more exhausted and by the finish I was running out of battery power!”

“Basically, it was a tough shoot! But the cast and crew felt a real sense of camaraderie, so that when we wrapped I was almost in tears. The shoot lasted three months, but I felt really lucky to have met these people. I know it’s unlikely, but I would love to shoot with the same cast and crew again. I think if they were with me, I could overcome any hardship.”

Jonathan Clements is the author of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade.

The son of a renowned left-wing artist, Kamui’s creator Sanpei Shirato (1932- ) was one of the last of the kamishibai painters, making panels of artwork for Japanese “magic lantern” shows. A narrator, or benshi, would tell a lively story to a crowd while pushing pictures through a lit frame. Soon after Shirato’s first kamishibai work, Mister Tomochan (1951), the advent of television destroyed the medium, leading Shirato to transfer his skills into comics. His early work included adaptations of the animal stories of Ernest Seton and works for girls, but it was as the creator of Ninja Bugeicho (Chronicle of a Ninja’s Martial Achievements, 1959-1962) that he achieved true fame. Even in his early days, Shirato was notable for his insistence on an external narrator, a voice outside the story itself that would comment on the action and steer the viewers like an old fashioned benshi.

His first big success in the TV world was Shonen Ninja Kaze no Fujimaru (Fujimaru the Wind Ninja, or Ninja the Wonderboy), broadcast in 1962. His original comic was called Ninja Clan, but in a tense compromise for Shirato the committed socialist, the show was renamed to establish a link with its sponsor, Fujisawa Pharmaceuticals. Each episode of the rollicking boys’ drama would open with a Fujimaru theme song that transformed into a jingle for Fujisawa. Notably, it would close with a live-action sequence in which a breathless interviewer would quiz Masaaki Hatsumi, an accomplished martial artist who claimed to know the secrets of the ninja world, and who imparted them to an entire generation of Japanese boys.

The Legend of Kamui (Kamui-den) ran in the avant garde adult comics magazine Garo from 1964 to 1971. Simultaneously, Kamui: The Untold Story (Kamui Gaiden) ran in Shonen Sunday, a magazine for teenage boys. The latter was then resurrected in Big Comic, a magazine for adult males in 1982 to 1987, running across 116 chapters and spanning 18 story arcs. The combined sales for both Kamui serials top ten million copies in Japan. Kamui has hence passed through a number of transformations, from adult comic, to teen comic, and back to adult again. The Big Comic tales of Kamui’s untold adventures included “Wind on the Black Hill”, “House of Thieves” and “Blood Sucker”, but perhaps the best known was the 15-chapter arc known as “The Isle of Sugaru.” It was this story, running from April to October 1982, which was snapped up by the American publisher Viz Communications and translated into English, confusingly under the title Legend of Kamui. The story was one of the first manga to be translated into English, and served a valuable purpose in introducing foreign audiences to the concept of manga as more than mere kids’ comics. Subsequently, editions appeared in many other languages – mention Kamui Gaiden to a non-Japanese manga fan, and the 1980s retelling of “Isle of Sugaru” is likely to be the only one of dozens of Kamui stories that they have actually read.

Japan at the time of Kamui has locked itself away from the rest of the world in a consensual time warp, with the Shogun ruling in the name of an unseen emperor, and all foreign contacts forbidden on pain of death. The narrative is placed squarely in the 17th century, shortly after Japan was united after centuries of bitter civil war. The victorious Shoguns of the Tokugawa clan began a relentless programme of new laws, designed to kick away the ladder by which they had first ascended. Samurai who had supported the Shogun were given prime positions; samurai who had only defected in the last days, some even switching sides in the last battle, were shunted into minor provincial postings. Firearms were collected and locked away in castles. Christianity, a foreign cult with links to gun smuggling and intrigue, was ruthlessly stamped out, along with any other foreign influences. The mandolin we see Ayu playing in Gumbei’s castle is a rare foreign artefact doomed to disappear – there will be no replacement strings when those ones break. So, too are the glass wine goblets Gumbei clutches, and the glass lanterns dotted throughout his throne room.

Paramount in the social order are the samurai and farmers – the larger someone’s land holdings, the greater one’s obligation to provide arms and armour for the maintenance of the state. Merchants and fishermen like Hanbei are low down in the pecking order. But Kamui is a hinin, a “non-person”. Kamui is a ninja on the run, a clansmen who has rejected the rules and regulations of his home order, and now flees retribution on the shores of Japan’s Inland Sea. He finds brief refuge in a fishing village, only to discover that he is not the only villager living a lie…

The hinin are one of modern Japan’s most embarrassing secrets: the outcasts of bygone days, shunned by the general populace for specialising in jobs disdained by devout Buddhists – butchery, execution, leather-work and tannery. Nameless and friendless, they were “liberated” by decree in 1871, with the promulgation of a new constitution that claimed all Japanese to be equal. A mere piece of paper could not undo a thousand years of persecution, and the hinin, sometimes referred to euphemistically as buraku-min (“village people”) continued to suffer discrimination. Many left Japan for good, seeking new lives in Hawaii or Brazil, or emigrating to Japan’s new colonies in Taiwan or Manchuria. To this day, you will be hard pressed to find a Japanese citizen prepared to proclaim a hinin ancestry. Even now, marriage brokers scour a potential spouse’s family tree in search of a hinin disqualifier.

In the post-war period, Kamui’s creator Sanpei Shirato seized on the hinin as the great uncelebrated heroes of Japanese history. With the old samurai aristocracy fallen out of favour, Sanpei Shirato, and his counterpart in the world of prose fiction, Futaro Yamada, began to imagine a different world order. If the ruling class had duped the population into WW2, perhaps there had been other lies in the past. Perhaps, argued the pulp authors of the 1950s and 1960s, there was a whole forgotten underclass in Japanese history – the people who did the real work in the samurai wars, gritty, tough tricksters with gadgets and athletic abilities to match those of TV spy thrillers. Ninja are largely a creation of the 20th century – black-clad assassins dressed like the “invisible” stagehands of the kabuki theatre. With the samurai aristocracy blamed for dragging Japan into WW2, ninja formed a new, proletarian archetype – honest, impoverished, cunning peasants, literally unseen in the historical fiction that had previously concentrated on the ruling class.

The 1960s ninja fad straddled a boom-time in the Japanese economy. Colour television ownership soared in the run-up to the Tokyo Olympics of 1964, and in the years that followed, dozens of samurai-era castles were rebuilt across Japan. Many had been pulled down in the 19th century, but these edifices became the new focal points for many towns, as meeting halls, local museums and tourist attractions. They were not always historically accurate – many were constructed out of modern materials like concrete. Some even added adornments that owed more to popular fiction, including ninja hiding places as an acknowledgement of a modern fad. Ninja were now part of the literal fabric of Japanese society, and “evidence” of their existence had been retrofitted to “new” old buildings.

In the publishing world, author Masayuki Yamaguchi tried something similar. His Life of the Ninja (Ninja no Seikatsu, 1965) shoehorned ninja into every historical event he could think of, twisting every off-hand mention of commoners, spies, stealth, or sneak attacks in ancient chronicles into “proof” of the heretofore unmentioned ninja clans. Yamaguchi’s book was overly, cheekily credulous and played freely with the facts, but became the lynchpin of subsequent publications, cited and quoted as if it were a work of unassailable scholarship. Apologists for the ninja presented an infuriatingly recursive argument – there had been no direct mention of ninja previously because they were a secret society! Lack of historical evidence of ninja was hence presented as further proof that they did exist, and had covered their tracks well.

Meanwhile, the ninja boom continued unabated in the world of fiction, fuelled by the tricks and gadgetry of foreign espionage thrillers such as The Man From UNCLE (broadcast in Japan in 1965 as 0011 Napoleon Solo) and Mission: Impossible (broadcast in Japan in 1967 as Spy Great Battle). In 1967, the director Oshima Nagisa adapted Shirato’s Ninja Bugeicho into a cinema feature in the kamishibai style – an “anime” without animation, comprising still images from the manga shown under a narrator’s voice. The opening sequence of this modern Kamui film is an oblique reference to Nagisa Oshima’s 1967 experiment, utilising still images from Shirato’s manga, shooting them on a rostrum camera with zooms and pans, with a voice over provided by actors.

Sanpei Shirato continued to emphasise the struggle of the working class. The action in the Kamui manga ceases for page after page of pastoral scenes – fisherman at work, women gutting fish, hunters in the forest – all glorifying the mundane achievements of daily life. As in Yoichi Sai’s movie adaptation, the ninja action is often marginalised for a loving focus on the joys of a job well done, such as the manufacture of Hanbei’s hard-won fishing lure.

The original Kamui-den was written for college-age readers, but it is the “untold story” or Kamui Gaiden spin-off that has been revamped, re-released and re-imagined in the generations since. A primetime 1969 Kamui Gaiden animated TV series was aimed at young teens. Two episodes of this series were then cut into a 1971 animated movie, Kamui Gaiden: Shell of the Sun and Moon, and shown on a double bill with a teeny-bop movie starring the pop group The Drifters. Then as now, the narrative focussed on the “Isle of Sugaru” story arc as the most readily transferable to a new medium. animated TV series was aimed at young teens. Two episodes of this series were then cut into a 1971 animated movie,

But ninja had already moved past their mid-1960s peak. Born in children’s entertainment but co-opted by a knowing adult world in search of political subtexts, these creatures of the shadows had become ironically over-exposed. Their finest hour, arguably, was their appearance in the James Bond film You Only Live Twice (1967), which carried the idea of the ninja around the world, even as their lustre faded in Japan itself.

Arguably, ninja were killed by their own success, dragging the samurai themselves down to their level. In 1972, Japanese viewers sick of the Vietnam War and the Watergate Scandal settled down in front of their televisions to watch Monjiro, the tale of a homeless samurai reduced to vagrant status. The Monjiro series was swiftly followed by Sure Death (Hissatsu), another long series that co-opted ninja tactics into the adventures of respectable members of samurai society. In 1973, the two-year-old manga Lone Wolf and Cub was also adapted into a TV series, featuring yet another disinherited samurai forced to wander Japan righting wrongs.

The samurai had fought back, humbling themselves as scrapping, itinerant warriors, partly modelled on the roving gunslingers of American Westerns. The edifice of ninja fiction, so powerful during the 1960s, collapsed almost as fast as it had arisen, although it found new fans abroad. A last-gasp gimmick, a sci-fi cartoon starring multi-coloured ninja in avian costumes, Kagaku Ninjatai Gatchaman, was released outside Japan as Battle of the Planets. Meanwhile, in the wake of the martial arts boom fostered by Bruce Lee, Masaaki Hatsumi, the pundit and former stunt coordinator on several early ninja shows, found fame in the West as the author of Ninjutsu, a martial arts manual of ninja techniques.

The histories of many martial arts are shrouded in mystery. Few can trace their origins back more than a century, and lean instead on folklore and tradition. It is not all that surprising that Hatsumi would seek to codify and rationalise ninjutsu as a post-modern martial art, combining elements of the many forms he had already studied. With ninjutsu established in the public eye as a bona fide martial art, and ninja as a phenomenon not of pulp fiction but of history, the stage was set for Kamui Gaiden to become one of the first manga translated into English.

Futaro Yamada’s novels are only now appearing in English; Sanpei Shirato’s other manga remain tantalisingly untranslated. Despite, or perhaps because of the overwhelming lack of true evidence, ninja are now widely accepted as a historical fact, not only by foreigners but also by many Japanese, who do not realise how swiftly these legendary assassins sprang out of thin air to meet the demands of 20th-century authors in search of a new kind of hero. Shorn of their political motivations, Shirato’s action-adventure ninja stories have had many subsequent imitators in the boys’ and teens’ markets, most recently the best-selling Naruto. But thanks to his manga incarnation, Kamui remains one of the most recognisable, memorable figures of the sub-genre of ninja fiction. He has yet to celebrate his 50th birthday. Arguably, so has the ninja genre itself.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of the Samurai, and Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade.

Since this week is probably the best (and only) time to post anything I have about the Frank Chickens, another article from the vault, this time about Kazuko Hohki’s book Underfloor World (Rondon no Yukashita)

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Kazuko Hohki is the driving force behind the Frank Chickens pop phenomenon, but also the author of a Japanese-language book about life in London. Hohki has taken her title, Underfloor World, from The Borrowers, the children’s book that drove her to come to England in the first place. It also influenced her album of the same name and my favourite Frank Chickens song, “Megalomaniacs”.

Underfloor World was first published in serial form, and has a helpful table of contents that facilitates ‘dip-into’ reading. Hohki’s own method of organising her material consists of subdividing the contents lists into seven extra categories: Life, Love, Work, Women, Japan, The World and ‘The Job’ (ie. her personal career). Within these seven areas, she covers an awful lot of ground, and with headings like ‘World Peace through Karaoke’ and ‘The Siberian Grandfather of Punk’, you know you’re going to be on a magic carpet ride to weirdoville.

The happiest readers will already be big fans of the Frank Chickens. You’ll get insider gossip on the band’s many line-up changes, and backstage goings-on as they perform around the world. Those readers who are not already Chickenised may find those sections tiresome, as it often takes it for granted that you will be interested in the band’s activities, or the solo acting career of Hohki herself. After reading a Tokyo Journal article about Hohki, I was under the mistaken impression that her book was a tourist guide to London’s less-known sites, whereas it is in fact a very personal emigrée diary. The title of her original column in Kachin magazine was “Kazuko’s Diary”, which should have been a hint, I suppose.

Hohki’s notes on English life are all the more interesting because they are a window on the way Japanese people view us, and her autobiographical asides are in keeping with a long-standing tradition in Japanese literature. I think I managed to inadvertently insult the author when I told her I’d be recommending her book to students of Japanese. She claims to have modelled her writing style on that of Yukio Mishima, and she certainly reproduces his deadpan, rather British, narrative structure. However, that’s where the resemblance ends.

For a start, Mishima was never this funny. It never ceases to amaze me how the Japanese sense of humour is so close to that of the British. If Douglas Adams ever had the chance to work with such a wonderful book designer, I’m sure that he, too, would include both an Afterword and an Afterafterword, a DIY secret society membership kit, and a fold-out activity section. Also, Hohki has binned Mishima’s pretty but tiresome practice of using hentaigana, extremely difficult characters where simpler ones will do. This makes it easier-going for a start, aided still further by the fact that her subject matter is often already familiar to English-speakers. So while you’ll be reading a book written by a Japanese for the Japanese, you may find that it’s much easier to relate to the material. Can you really resist a deadpan discussion of the British penchant for Irish jokes, or a Japanese view of what it’s like to live in East London? I know that I can’t, and if you’re one of the increasing number of readers who tell us they’re learning Japanese, Underfloor World would be a rewarding place to begin looking at the Real Thing.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade. This article first appeared in Anime FX magazine, sometime in 1996, as part of a Japanese-language book round-up under the original title “The Real Thing”.

In honour of Stewart Lee’s tirade against modern evils, and the possibility that the Frank Chickens might become comedy gods…

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The Frank Chickens are a trio, or a duo. Sometimes they’re more like an octo. But anyway, they’re all Japanese. Apart from the ones who aren’t. In fact, the Frank Chickens are a nebulous entity, born from the London Musicians’ Collective. They’ve had more members over the last ten years than Spinal Tap have had drummers, but the one unifying figure is the incomparable Kazuko Hohki. This one-woman entertainment conglomerate is a journalist, singer, dancer, puppeteer (don’t ask, but it involves Godzilla and Jack Kerouac) and educational psychology graduate. She also hosted Kazuko’s Karaoke Club for Channel 4 in 1987, whose quick demise brought sighs of relief from all over TV-land.

Hohki is a practised outsider, a professional gaijin if you will, whose concentrated weirdness has also received attention in her country of origin. She even wrote and starred in a Japanese sit-com called 90 Days Tottenham Pub, about the Frank Chickens’ ill-fated attempt to marry gay English aristocrats for a visa fiddle. There’s a lot of it about in Tottenham.

Hohki’s other claim to fame in her homeland is her concerted efforts to convince the Japanese that England isn’t all red buses and Harrods. Her book Underfloor World is a tourist guide for the Japanese non-tourist in the UK, presumably citing Tottenham as a major spot of perverse historical interest.

If you have ever seen the UK depicted on Japanese television, you will see something very different from ‘real life’. The Japanese media present a very idealised picture of our faraway land, selling Nescafé on the idea that it is drunk by tweeded Oxbridge undergraduates, with tourist programmes that concentrate on the more asinine elements of our national culture. Thus it is that Kazuko Hohki’s songs can really shock her  home audience, who are faced with tales about the wide boy ‘Johnny Reggae’, and the dreary everyday life of  ‘Living in Tottenham.’

Hohki lives in the no-man’s-land between her two ‘homes’, and she is equally uncompromising in her treatment of traditional Japanese stereotypes. ‘We are ninja’ is arguably their trademark, a poppy track that says while Westerners like to think of Japanese girls as demure geisha, these girls would rather be assassins: “You’re a ninja / I’m a ninja / Amidst the blinding sand / we disappear.” They also claim to feel up alligators on the train; not the kind of girls you’d like to meet among the cherry blossoms, that’s for sure. The real joy in ‘We are ninja’ comes when you find out the nonsensical chants in the background actually mean something in Japanese; this is another typically Frank Chickens touch, and it can lend a whole new level of appreciation to their music, not unlike discovering ‘Showaddywaddy’ means something obscene in Swahili. (It doesn’t, by the way).

There is similar in-yer-face bricolage in ‘Do the karaoke’, which begins like one more depressing Japanese ballad, but soon perks up when we hear “…I dumped my love in the Sumida river.” Some of the Frank Chickens’ best work is in a similar vein, not only because they can have a lot of fun mincing up the lyrics of traditional songs, but also because they can show off their musical ability. Some songs sound suspiciously like those 80s ‘electronic’ hits, where some muppet had just discovered what the green button did on his Casio, but there are also some marvellous tracks which incorporate traditional supporting instrumentals from the obscenely talented Clive Bell.

The Frank Chickens remain very much a live group, rather than studio performers. Occasionally the songs on their albums seem to be missing a certain something, and you can only find out exactly what when you see them live. Hohki makes no secret of her wish to be a permanent amateur, kicking her heels around the edges of  the Tokyo/London pop scene and doing her best never to become ‘too English’ or ‘too Japanese’. She told the Tokyo Journal that London is the best place for her to ‘be herself’, and her real vocation seems to be standing up in front of bemused foreigners and trying to get them to be as zany and free as she is. This is what you’ll see at a Frank Chickens concert, where you’re treated to their silly costumes, their insane dancing, and their nasty habit of dragging members of the audience up on stage to humiliate themselves. This is not a particularly ‘Japanese’ habit, unless you count karaoke bars as institutions of ritualised humiliation, but this is yet another thing that makes Hohki and friends so exciting. They are not exclusively Japanese or exclusively British, but they live in a strange world between both cultures, and that gives them an insight and appeal that calls out to the weird in us all.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade. This article first appeared in Anime UK magazine in 1995.

From A Brief History of Khubilai Khan by Jonathan Clements, available now in the UK and in the US.

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The attempted invasion of Japan was, with hindsight, the moment when the Mongols’ legendary invincibility was called into question for the first time – a sign that the tide of barbarian invasion had finally begun to ebb. The Mongols had experienced setbacks in the past, but had always, eventually, returned home with, at very least, the nominal submission of their enemies.

Logistically, the Japanese invasion project was no smaller than the Mongol enterprises to take the empires of the Tangut, Jurchen or the Southern Song. However, historically, it became literally world famous. It is in Marco Polo’s awestruck account of the plan to invade Japan that the island kingdom first enters European consciousness. When, 200 years later, Christopher Columbus waded ashore on a remote Caribbean island in search of ‘Cipangu’, he was merely the latest inheritor of Khubilai’s propaganda, convinced that Japan was an island of untold wealth, there for the taking.

Many Japanese accounts leap straight to the arrival of the first great Mongol fleet off the coast, and the heroic efforts by the samurai to hold them back. However, Chinese and Korean annals present a very different story, and show the size of the Mongol threat steadily growing throughout the 1260s. The first approaches to Japan were little more than honeyed words and oblique threats, escalating in severity as years passed without a direct Japanese submission to Khubilai.

The first signs of the Mongol invasion are rumours and tall tales from mainland visitors, the mere ghosts of direct contact, as careful Korean obfuscations kept the Mongols and the Japanese from making actual contact. Although history largely remembers the two great, apocalyptic battles in Hakata Bay and their almost supernatural ending, lesser accounts record a number of skirmishes long before the infamous days of reckoning. There were kidnappings and secret deals in the Korea Strait years before the Mongol armada officially set sail, and there was even a pre-emptive Japanese strike on the Korean coast, which saw part of the intended invasion fleet burned where it stood in the shipyards. Small parties of emissaries travelling aboard the ships of others, gradually transformed through the 1260s into an ambassador with his own honour guard and his own military escort: two ships, then a dozen, then hundreds.

If we piece together the scattered references to ‘Dwarf Pirates’ or the ‘Land of the Rising Sun’ in mainland chronicles, we become witness to the inexorable gathering of a terrible storm. The question that remains for the modern historian to ponder is whether the Japanese or Mongols ever appreciated the terrible odds they both faced.