The Emperor Meiji tried to draw a line under the seditious leanings of some of those in his service. Pointedly, in 1879, he changed the name of the “Tokyo Shrine to Summon the Spirits” to the “Shrine to Quiet the State” (Yasukuni Jinja). Like many of the other classical Chinese allusions in 19th-century Japanese politics, this reference tends to be cited out of context, without much consideration of the text being quoted. In the original Chinese, the term is found in an official’s defence of his decision to put a soldier into a government position:
“I have done it to secure the quiet of the State. When you have men who have rendered great service, and you do not give them the noblest offices, are they likely to remain quiet? There are few who can do so.”
Amid the songs of the 1930s, one stands out not for its musical or lyrical achievement, but for its tone. “Mother at the Nine Steps” (Kudan no Haha, 1939) was written for the spring ceremony at the Yasukuni Shrine, where the newest war dead would be ceremonially accepted into its halls. The song tells the story of a lady from the provinces, coming to the Nine-stepped Hill (Kudanzaka) that leads to the venue:
From Ueno Station to the Nine Steps
Frustrated by unfamiliar places
Taking a whole day and relying on my walking stick
I’ve come to see you, Son.
A large gate that can reach the sky
What an honor to be enshrined
In such a magnificent place as a god.
Your mother is shedding tears of joy.
I put my hands together kneeling
I find myself chanting a prayer to the Buddha.
I am taken aback and flustered.
Sorry, Son, I’m such a yokel.
Just like a kite giving birth to a hawk
I appreciate how fortunate I am.
Just to show you your Order of the Golden Kite
I’ve come all the way to Kudanzaka.
It seems oddly ungracious to ridicule a bereaved mother for being a “yokel”, like she hasn’t suffered enough. But for music historian Osada Gyoji, that is part of the song’s subversive appeal. We have gone, in the space of two years, from the unlikely sight of mothers waving off their sons “without tears,” to this broken old woman in the big city shedding tears that are plainly not “of joy” at all, but continuing to put a brave face on her personal desolation.
“The verb for beheading, in this context, retains a visceral sense of the battlefield – it is not the stark, slashing kiru of a ritual execution, but the unpleasant, gritty kubinejikiru, literally, ‘head twisting off and cutting’, wrenching the head from the neck with the aid of a dagger or butcher’s knife.”
Sorry if it’s a bit quiet on the blog at the moment, but I am literally all at sea, onboard the MS Westerdam on a two-week circumnavigation of Japan. I’m this voyage’s designated expert with Road Scholar, a company that “enriches” travellers’ experiences by forcing them to spend time with me, something that readers of this blog get for free. I’ve been lecturing about the samurai and the history of Japanese food, and squiring people around castles and tea farms, sake breweries and museums. This week alone, I’ve soaked in the hot springs at Arima, shouted myself hoarse at a sumo wrestling match, and joined in the celebrations in Kochi when the locals discovered they’d struck the tourist jackpot by becoming the subject of the just-announced 2028 NHK taiga drama.
“Nobly deciding to film in the location where the original novel was set, Zhang Yimou was disappointed to discover that the locals had stopped growing sorghum altogether, instead preferring more lucrative cash crops like peanuts. In order to match the novel’s descriptions of tall, waving gaoliang grass, he would have to pay the locals to actually plant some, and so as the script was being written, farmers in Shandong were being paid to sow sorghum seeds on sixteen acres of waste ground.
“Shooting was delayed by almost a month, when Zhang and his crew returned to the area to find that the farmers had neglected to water the fields – sorghum can be a fast-growing crop, but it is thirsty, and the crew had to spend several weeks tending to it, while the production money bled on a daily basis.
“Mo Yan’s original novel ends in the present day of its composition – the 1980s – with the narrator visiting his family graves, and fuming at the sight of a new, modern form of sorghum. He angrily berates the locals for bringing in ugly, squat hybrid sorghum from Hainan far to the south.
“Hybrid sorghum is a high-yield crop, but tastes awful, causes constipation and, most importantly isn’t red. To Zhang Yimou’s great horror, his tame farmers had sown eight acres with the wrong kind of grass…”
From my video essay in the new Blu-ray of Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum, coming in July from Whole Grain Pictures (US).
In 1939, Helsinki port authorities refuse to allow 29 Jewish refugees to disembark on the grounds they do not have jobs or places to stay. Prominent Helsinki businessman Abraham Stiller (Ville Virtanen) says that if that is the only problem, he will vouch for them all. His rash promise ruffles feathers among the understandably jumpy congregation at the Helsinki synagogue, but he remains true to his word.
Stiller is a confident, proud Finnish Jew, berating the uppity official Arno Anthoni (a chilling Kari Hietalahti) who objects to Jews outside the store, unaware that his suit has just been tailored for him by Janka, one of Stiller’s refugees. But as the Soviet Union orchestrates a reopening of hostilities on the frontier, and Finland contemplates a “co-belligerency pact” with the Nazis, Stiller finds his power begin to erode.
At first it is little things – objections to English-language newspapers; schoolboys shouting “Heil Hitler” – but as the years pass, the accommodation of the Nazis leads to a hardening of attitudes towards the Jews. In a cunning ruse, the film’s feel-good title does not derive from some TV-movie-level message of hope, but from the slogan on a propaganda poster celebrating Finland’s military team-up with the Third Reich.
Like Oskar Schindler, with whom he would inevitably be compared, Abraham Stiller is a complicated figure, a holy fool unjustifiably confident in his ability to fix things. His promise on the dockside secures the safety of 29 people, but his similarly brash assurance that his charges shouldn’t flee for Sweden as the noose tightens ultimately costs several of them their lives.
A snarling Nazi officer demands to know what he is doing in Lapland, and he cheekily answers: “I’m on Finnish territory. I could ask you the same thing.” Despite a Luger only recently pointed at his head, he insists on wading back across the marsh to his friends in a work gang, in order to finish their celebration of the Sabbath.
Stiller’s over-confidence comes back to bite him, when it is revealed that the Nazis’ wish-list of Jews derives from the congregational lists that he himself gave to the authorities in order to guarantee the sanctuary of the original group of refugees. As Anthoni gloats over the news, he quotes Casablanca (1942). This is something that Stiller will regret: “…maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon.” It’s Anthoni who comes up with a work-around to placate the Nazis without annoying the Finnish authorities – instead of deporting Finnish citizens, they will start with refugees with foreign passports.
The opening titles of Klaus Härö’s Ei koskaan yksin are a procession of production partners of almost comedic length, revealing a large-scale Europudding – a Finnish story, bolstered with German and Scandinavian financing, backed by the Austrians, and partly shot in Estonia. The crew makes the most of what was plainly a very restricted shoot on Helsinki’s Bulevardi, a street that has frankly remained unchanged for the last century, and which can easily be repurposed for the 1940s – if I remember rightly, it was also the location of Aatami Korppi’s bank in the closing scene of Sisu (2022). Unfortunately, this means that the passage of four or five years of historical time is lensed on what appears to be the same drab October day, but Härö makes the best of this look, shooting his film as if it takes place in a world where it is forever autumn.
A black and white framing device, reversing the use of colour in Schindler’s List, reminds us that 1972, when the dying Stiller is interviewed about his life, is actually further away from our own time than it was from the time of the Holocaust. It also hides the aged Stiller from the harsher glare of full lighting, allowing actor Virtanen to get away with his old-man make-up.
The film is a glorious mash-up of contending languages, not only Finnish and German, but haunted throughout by sudden outbreaks of Yiddish, whenever the Jews are in their own company. I have always been charmed and unsettled by the sound of Yiddish, ever since I first heard it in a cold open for The West Wing – like German from another universe. It is a topic most brilliantly pursued in one of my favourite books, Aaron Lansky’s Outwitting History, about how this language could go from being one of the most widely spoken in the world, to a forgotten orphan, over-written not only by the Holocaust, but also by the migration of so many of its surviving speakers to the United States, where their children grew up speaking English, or Israel, where their children grew up speaking Hebrew.
Drawing on the work of the real-life author Elina Sana, the film grapples with the fact that free Finland, which was, unlike Norway and Denmark, not actually occupied with the Nazis, nevertheless was prepared to send seven people to their deaths in Auschwitz, one of them a Helsinki-born child.
Its closing reel, and the catch-up titles that end the film, struggle with this scandal, seemingly unable to reconcile the matter of the film itself with the facts of history. These seven, we are told, were the only Jews that Finland gave up, and it was thanks to Stiller and the Helsinki synagogue that no more were sent to their deaths. But we see nothing of this later struggle, nor of the fate of the dastardly Anthoni, who fled for Sweden at the end of the war, but was repatriated to face trial, released with little more than a slap on the wrist, and died conveniently before Elina Sana’s late twentieth-century investigations began poking at the true story behind it all. The book Finland’s Holocaust is the best account of it all in English, and has much on Anthoni’s lick-spittling trip to Berlin to appease the Nazis, played for dark humour in the film, in which his enthusiastic “Heil Hitler!” to Heinrich Müller is greeted with an icy stare, as the Nazi officer insists on finishing the piano sonata he is playing before answering.
Instead the film ends with a trip to Israel, where the sole survivor is cajoled into making a token gesture of forgiveness to Stiller. It is an unfortunate mis-step, attempting to tie everything up with a bow, and seemingly contradicted by the film’s closing title card, which reveals that after seeing his wife and son die in Auschwitz, Georg Kollman “never spoke of Finland.”
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Short History of Finland. He is watching all the Finnish films so you don’t have to. Never Alone is currently one of the in-flight movie options on Finnair.
Hiroki Yamaguchi “…was working within the constraints of shoestring funding, a largely amateur or volunteer cast and crew, and shooting on a Panasonic DVC-Pro – a video camera with a price-point and capabilities that can be matched today by a second-hand iPhone. Nobody on the production was paid; the props and set were literally scavenged from a junk yard. Even the advertising was low-tech, with the cast hefting a poster-board through the streets of Tokyo, exhorting passers-by to give Love, Actually a miss and try the little indie film playing in a smaller screen at the same cinema.”
From my sleeve notes to the bonkers Hellevator, coming in May from Treasured Films.
“A lovingly curated and researched deep-dive into some of the most important Japanese animated feature films ever made.” — Jerome Mazandarani, Answerman, Anime News Network
“It’s a solid introduction to the genre with enough depth to teach even devoted fans a thing or two.” — Publishers Weekly
“You can’t go wrong with this fascinating and fun new book about anime. It is, after all, by Jonathan Clements, an icon among anime experts, who has watched more anime than most doctors would advise, and written (with wit and expertise) about it for decades.” — Frederik L. Schodt, translator of Astro Boy and author of Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics
“Jonathan Clements’ knack for storytelling takes readers on an adventure every bit as exciting as the productions he profiles.” — Matt Alt, author of Pure Invention: How Japan Made the Modern World
“…makes an erudite case for each film’s inclusion with insight built on decades of writing about anime and Japanese culture.” — Zack Davisson, translator of Space Battleship Yamato and author of The Ultimate Guide to Japanese Yokai
“Do you want to go through the Mists of Time?” he asked.
No, I said. I’m in a bit of hurry, and there’s somewhere else to be. How long is the big filmy thing?
“Twenty-eight minutes,” he said.
I’d better skip it, I said, darting into the next hall, which turned out to be a series of remarkably wide-ranging exhibits linking the Viking Age to the Silk Road, including a fragment of Tang-dynasty textile, found in a Swedish grave, and a cowrie shell, found in Denmark, that might have come from as far away as the Maldives. It ended in the café, and I realised that I had inadvertently refused to go through the main event at the Vikings The Immersive Experience.
Sheepishly, I sidled back to the guardian of the Mists of Time. It was half past nine on a Tuesday morning, and I was the only person there.
Okay, I said. I am ready.
It’s been thirty years since Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck, but we still struggle to find the words to describe hybrid media events. Vikings: The Immersive Experience is not a museum exhibition, but several inter-linked multi-media happenings, separated by a holding area packed with replicas related to the world of the Vikings, some of them also interactive. It is not the sort of place for a hurried historian to dash through, snapping signage with his phone. It is intended to be the length of a movie, and so it should be.
The story derives from the Tale of Ragnar Lothbrok (most famously used as the inspiration for the History Channel’s Vikings series), and cleverly runs with the doubtful claim therein that Ragnar’s wife, Kraka, was really Anlaug, the last of the Volsungs, daughter of Sigurd and Brynhildr. This allows the Immersive Experience to begin with a VR event retelling ancient myths beneath a rune-hung World Tree. This first presentation ends with Anlaug/Kraka boarding Ragnar’s longship to sail off for her wedding.
Beyond, there is a scattering of displays and interactive booths, while “the Professor” on my audio guide made repeated offers to go deeper into any subject I liked the sound of. The Immersive Experience does everything it can to showcase the high points of the Viking age, and then waits for the visitor to ask to know more.
It’s Anlaug/Kraka’s wedding that begins the second and larger multi-media experience – a 360-degree movie which the audience is invited to watch from their very own longship. It offers dizzying bird’s-eye views of a Norse community, and then plunges the viewer into a prolonged sequence in which Kraka develops the power of prophecy, thereby allowing her to foretell the next 200 years of Viking history, her sons’ wide-ranging travels and conquests, and (in the only linguistic mis-step) landfall on a distant coast that she anachronistically refers to as “the Americas.”
The narrative is unrepentantly, exultantly the story the Vikings tell about themselves, without any of the coughs, cavils or asides of modern scholarship – apart from an opening speech recounting the destruction of Lindisfarne, the story is one of a bunch of sea-kings taking whatever they want, and reacting with fierce anger whenever anyone stands up to them. I actually found this lack of hand-wringing rather refreshing, and ideally suited to the implied viewer: a teenager ready to be thrilled by tales of derring-do by entitled thugs. As a popular historian, I concede that it is necessary to meet one’s audience halfway. Coming out of the Immersive Experience into the inevitable gift shop, one is invited to pillage fridge magnets and baseball caps, as well as a selection of introductions to the Vikings aimed largely at a young-adult readership. More detailed accounts of the Viking age can wait, but the Immersive Experience is sure to hook them in.
It finishes with another cunning link, suggesting that Anlaug/Kraka, might be the unidentified Viking queen buried in the Oseberg ship grave. This allows the experience to close with the sight of the archaeologist Gabriel Gustafson and his little dog, poking around an unassuming hillock in Norway, connecting a tall tale that begins in ancient myth with the first Victorian-era finds that would define our modern sense of the Viking age.
The guardian of the Mists of Time was waiting for me on the other side.
“Would you like to have your picture taken on the Viking throne?” he asked.
Over at Animeigo’s Youtube channel, they make their bonus footage available from their oral history of the anime business, which means you get to hear me talking about the logistics (and the finances) of festival guests and interviews, gossip about Leiji Matsumoto, Naoko Yamada, Mamoru Hosoda and others, the creation of Smith Toren and foreigners in the anime business.
Over at the Subject to Change podcast, I return to talk about my book on the First Emperor of China and the man who was sent to kill him: facts and fictions in Zhang Yimou’s movie Hero (2002), the evil mirror-universe version of Confucianism, an impossibly well-endowed “eunuch”, the construction of the Terracotta Army, the politics of archaeology, and how to spend a slave labour dividend.
The Official Schoolgirl Milky Crisis Blog 