[Credits Roll into the Sea] has a lovely high concept, of a woman who believes that she has no story, but really wants to make one happen before she dies. The title of John Tarachine’s manga has a pun concealed within it. The “Umi” could mean ocean, but here it is also the name of our heroine, Umiko, a 65-year-old widow who is seized, after a lifetime of movie-watching, with the inspiration that she wants to make a film before she dies. Tarachine’s manga is a lovely evocation of the creative arts and the creative mind, starting with a woman who has never done anything before, immediately thrown off by the need to actually have an idea. Not even knowing what kind of film she wants to make, she heads off to the cinema to watch The Old Man and the Sea, where she runs into the androgynous and occasionally cross-dressing film student Kai Hamauchi.
The encounter with Kai introduces Umiko to a whole world of people just waiting for success in the arts, and to the fact that nobody is going to hand her a producer’s title on a plate. A producer needs to find the money, have the idea, sort out the script, find the actors, scout the locations… suddenly Umiko’s twilight years are vibrantly busy, and the whole thing is a touching memorial to her late husband, whom she first met on a date to the movies.
Repeatedly, Tarachine pokes around the fine line in media mogulship between getting stuff done and just goofing off. Is Umiko a dabbling dilettante or a producer in waiting? Is she having a cheesecake in a café with her mate, or is she investigating the possibility of a funding proposition? Is she off on a pointless daytrip with Kai, or is she scouting a location? One day, this might all turn into a movie… or nothing. It’s a lovely investigation of the literal glamour of movie magic.
Extracted from my Manga Snapshot article on Mystery Bonita magazine, from NEO #224, 2022. Credits Roll into the Sea will be released as an animated feature in 2027.
“His first novel, Paradise, is a ‘genetic’ romance, in which two star-crossed prehistoric lovers are separated by the Bering Strait, only for their distant descendants in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to be reunited by some strange attraction and hereditary memory. However, it was with Ring, a supernatural detective drama, that Suzuki first found true success. Combining an eerie sense of the time abyss of the Japanese countryside, in which modern comforts are written only lightly over centuries of tradition and secrets, with one of fiction’s most perfect basilisks, it posits a ‘haunted’ scrap of film that will strike its viewer dead unless it is shown to another, hence passing on the ‘curse’.”
Fittingly on David Attenborough’s 100th birthday, I stumble across a podcast that latches onto the “history as a calendar year” analogy that I stole from Life on Earth.
It even comes with a bunch of nifty, and I am guessing, A.I.-generated infographics to summarise the book. But who are these anonymous podcasters? Could this be the first review of my work delivered by robots?
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
The Official Schoolgirl Milky Crisis Blog 