As Matteo Watzky notes in his welcome review of my book, Anime: A History, it’s weird how little it has been discussed in academia. He probably hasn’t helped by repeatedly claiming on social media that I am neither an academic nor a scholar, but it is gratifying to see his assessment that “…for those versed into anime studies and history, Anime: A History is and should remain an essential read.”

His wording might at first seem strange, but it is carefully chosen, and reflects his deep engagement not only with what the book means to him, but with what it could, and should, and might mean to others. It is this self-awareness that leads him to say that some of his comments might seem to be hair-splitting or historiographical nit-picking. They are the sort of arguments that professionals might have about their profession, in the interest of improving it for all, rather than W0RST ANIME BOOK evarrr comments more suitable for TikTok.

As he mentions, in the time that he has taken to publish this review, I have actually written an entire other book about the subject, which has also been largely ignored. Partly, this is a case of a very real boycott on account of a cover that everybody hates, including me. But Japan’s Anime Revolution surreptitiously functions as an expansion of Anime: A History, discussing twenty specific films, and incorporating research so up-to-date that it had to be folded in after I had started writing it. It also has whole chapters on Hakujaden, Gundam and Space Battleship Yamato, which he wishes I’d said more about in Anime: A History. I hope Watzky doesn’t take two more years to get around to reviewing that one, but as he points out, there is remarkably little critical engagement with all publications about anime. I have written a lot of it myself, but I can hardly write a review of my own book.

He refers to a “lack of substantial updates” between my first and second edition, which is a weird thing to say when the latter is twice as large. He calls instead for “a history of taste and critical categories: evolving along with forms and exerting an influence on them, these come from people who may or may not act upon their tastes and encourage, or not, certain works over others.” Can anyone think of someone who could write that book? Any takers? I look forward to it. After publishing the first edition of Anime: A History in 2013, I actually wanted to come back with a collection called Anime: Alternate Histories. The idea was for people to write all the chapters that they wished there would have been: something on audiences, something on voice-acting, on erotica, on marketing, and so on. But no publisher was interested, and so I gave up.

Watzky thinks I should devote more to audience studies, and I don’t think he’s wrong. At the risk of designing a 1:1 scale map of the world, which turns out to be as big as the world itself, it would be nice to incorporate more. If I seem to be shying away from audience studies it’s less about my industry focus, and more about my exasperation with so many other papers on anime which claim to be about audiences, but then turn out to be “what some people I know think about some anime they’ve seen.” As I am sure Watzky would agree, that’s not quite the same thing. Nor do I agree that leaning on the work of Eiji Otsuka would make life simpler: it’s something that not even Eiji Otsuka advises doing.

Hefting a giant sack of stones into a glass house of his own making, Watzky comments that I should have said more about the decline of Mushi Production, because there has been lots published about it in the last decade. He cites three examples, one of which is a great book that I reviewed nine years ago, although not so useful on Mushi, and another of which formed a major part of my chapter on Space Battleship Yamato in Japan’s Anime Revolution. His third example is a book I also wrote a detailed review of six years ago, in which I point out that its non-existent citations make it hard to use academically.

We’ll have to disagree, again, on how readily available accounts might turn out to be, not the least because the true story comes accompanied by eye-popping shenanigans, such as the case of the staffer who literally backed a truck up to steal anything that wasn’t nailed down before the bailiffs arrived, and the possibility that he did so with Tezuka’s full knowledge and collusion. You can’t libel the dead, so this kind of scuttlebutt is fairer comment when there are fewer people left alive to sue you, but nevertheless, the record is still very cagey on all this stuff, and I venture to say that, even now, people are still notably tight-lipped about what actually happened, which makes it difficult for a historian to cite chapters and verses.

Still, if it’s that obvious, it shouldn’t be a big deal for Watzky to actually finish his interesting online history of Mushi Production, which he abandoned just as he got to what is apparently the easy part.

Watzky notes several interesting metatextual issues, starting with my book’s implied readership. He calls it a work “for experts, by an expert,” an assessment of which I heartily approve, not the least because the anime world is absolutely jammed with self-styled experts, and I would love it if more of them actually bothered to read it. So, you heard it here first: if you think you are an expert on anime, then you would love Anime: A History, if only to argue with it.

Watzky’s comments also display his perceptive sense about something else unsaid. Should the book have a different title? He thinks that Anime: A History is too general a descriptor, and the Amazon reviews, too, include a number of people who picked up a peer-reviewed book from an academic press, based on a PhD thesis written at a faculty of Applied Design and Engineering, viva’ed by a committee of two engineers and a Japanese historian, with a blurb that promises to investigate “how anime’s history has been written by Japanese scholars,” and then complained that it didn’t have enough pictures in it or mention One Piece. Indeed, it is not a general introduction to Japanese cartoons, it is a work “for experts, by an expert,” and I like it that way; I think Watzky does, too. It was called An Industrial History of Japanese Animation all the way through the writing process, until my publishers decided it needed to sound a bit zingier. Similar redactions attended Japan’s Anime Revolution: Twenty Animated Films that Changed the World, which was delivered to its publisher with the somewhat less vainglorious title of Anime Icons.

One thing I will say, to whomever it is that takes on the task of writing an alternate history of Japanese animation, (Can anyone think of anyone? Yes, you can!) quite possibly from an audience perspective. Please don’t keep referring to “historical actors.” The term is perfectly reasonable among historians, but when broadening and deepening studies of Japanese animation, future researchers will ultimately have to integrate actual actors. Minori Ishida’s work on voice acting is already doing so, and frankly, a chapter on that topic is also something I would consider in a notional third edition of Anime: A History. But in the interests of not baffling humans and search-robots alike, please let’s all use the term “actors” when referring to thespians, and not just anyone involved, otherwise there is sure to be confusion.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History and Japan’s Anime Revolution.

Nothing quite sums up the tone of Ango Sakaguchi’s 1946 short story as this surreal opening, in which idle, listless losers live in blank, carefree existences amid the destruction of their nation. Sporting the Vidal Sassoon haircut first popularised by Mary Quant in the 1960s, preening models cavort in the wreckage, while the traumatised victims of war stare blankly at them, still in monochrome, as if the past is watching the future.

We are in a world where the Second World War never stopped, where Japan somehow barrelled along, until the saccharine media performances of 1980s J-pop end up co-opted into national propaganda. We see cutaways to soldiers on the frontline; our starlet appropriates Siamese costume for her big number – this is a Japan where the Empire endures, and where the media pump out dross about how “Love’s Power Will Crush My Enemies.” The inanities of pop songs are here repurposed, as they once were in the 1930s and 1940s, as unsubtle allegories for military efforts.

Initially staying out of the family business, the young Macoto Tezka chose to study film, one of many young wannabes working with 8mm and video, but inevitably one who could call upon his father’s monstrously powerful contacts in the business. He directed his first feature, Legend of the Stardust Brothers, when he was still a student, and went on to work in a dozen different media enterprises. His resumé includes not only directing, but novels, a computer game, theatrical events and even the opening ceremony of the 2001 East Asia Games.

His career has always had a strange, double-sided nature, in which Tezka often appears to be a fiercely original, low-budget independent film maker, and yet also serves on the board of the family business, Tezuka Productions, which remains a powerful presence in the Japanese media and a ready source of support. It gives much of his work a bizarre, metatextual shimmer, as if an indie director finds a magical address book that allows him to speed-dial anyone and everyone to call in favours. In particular, Tezka developed a habit of sneaking celebrity associates into his films as extras, such as a party scene in Hakuchi where the guests include the actor-photographer Masatoshi Nagase, the writer-director Kaizo Hayashi, and the writer-musician Sunplaza Nakano.

But there is also a degree of self-figuration here. Tezka’s own biography fixates on an 8mm film he made at college, which for him might well have been the one moment that he got to be himself in his early twenties, before he was dragged into a vortex of family legacy management and years of bill-paying jobs in advertising.

The casual viewer might be forgiven for thinking that Tezka was making two films at once, and considering Hakuchi’s long gestation period and running time, that may well have been what happened. A straightforward, narrative reading of Sakaguchi’s story is interwoven with a sci-fi media satire in the same vein as Tezka’s Legend of the Stardust Brothers, and the only real point of contact is that the protagonist in the original story also worked for a state media outlet. Tadanobu Asano, our supposed leading man, disappears for minutes at a time, while Tezka populates the film with towering models from his advertising contacts, comedy business from Japanese bit-players, and a lavish Busby Berkley-inspired that frames the star of the moment as a Thai goddess, surrounded by flying apsaras and dancers on giant prayer wheels.

We are asked a question common to many historical periods. It’s asked by Aaron Sorkin in Studio 60. It was asked by Japanese intellectuals during the war. And it is asked today, whenever you are hearing me say this. What use is art, at a time like this?

From my video essay on the Bu-ray of Macoto Tezka’s Hakuchi: The Innocent, coming in January 2027 from Toy Robot.

And off I go to Glasgow to introduce the films in the first leg of this year’s Scotland Loves Anime festival, which features post-apocalyptic lesbian vampires, a samurai ballerina, a loveable Italian stalker, doomed teenage nurses, talking swamp-gas, a condemned fireworks factory (what could possibly go wrong…?), Rashomon with school kids (although the director says it’s not Rashomon) and a welcome return from everybody’s favourite toxic-blooded lady ninja.

And that’s just the staff. What’s it really like? It’s sort of like this:

Producer Haruki Kadokawa also sneaked on-screen in his own film, playing a detective. In his memoir, My Struggle (2005) the flamboyant media mogul describes how as a twenty-something nepo-baby, handed the reins of his father’s publishing company, he decided to revive the fortunes of an obscure novelist whose works were falling out of print. Seishi Yokomizo, for it was he, had supposedly become so obscure that Kadokawa himself wrongly believed him to be dead, and was surprised when the novelist, very much alive, answered his own doorbell.

At the turn of the 1970s, Kadokawa began to create a Seishi Yokomizo brand, repackaging his novels for teenage readers. In Japanese, this involved stripping out some of the more complex characters, and adding furigana pronunciation guides, transforming them from 1950s throwbacks to what today might be more akin to “light novels.” This careful redaction took the Yokomizo detective novels out of the dusty stacks in libraries, and back in bookshops all over Japan, targeting a new generation.

Kadokawa was a firm proponent of what is now called the “media mix” – a synergy of multiple media in which each format became an advertisement for the other. His first Yokomizo reprint was The Village of Eight Graves (originally serialised 1949-51), not because it was the best, but because Shonen Magazine was running a manga adaptation by Go Nagai.

“Comics,” wrote Kadokawa sagely, “tend to be ahead of their time.” If the teens were devouring Yokomizo-based manga, he reasoned, then the time was right for a revival of the books. Kadokawa makes no mention of what was surely another huge influence on his decision – the high ratings for an American show about a similarly scruffy sleuth, Columbo (1968), which began running on Japanese television in 1972.

From my sleeve notes to the new Blu-ray box set of Kon Ichikawa’s Inugami films, coming soon in Australia from Umbrella Entertainment.

Outside the Brixton auditorium, I shuffled my papers and checked my notes. Only a few minutes to go, and we could go in and get on with the event. I had been dreading it all week, but the crowd seemed to have the right mix. A few kids, a few fans, a few Japanese people; I hoped they’d get along and not throw things. One drifted nearer, and I realised she was going to ask me something. That’s what you get for being tall and holding a clipboard in public places.

“What’s the movie again?” she asked.

“Er… It’s called Tomorrow’s Joe,” I said.

“Not Akira then?” she pressed.

“Er… no,” I said. “Not Akira.”

“I was hoping for Akira,” she added, helpfully.

As best as one can in a crowded cinema, I tried to explain that no matter how much she pouted, Akira was not on the menu this morning. Instead, the cinema was going to be screening Tomorrow’s Joe, the most famous anime based on the most famous manga by Tetsuya Chiba.

“Never heard of him,” she said. “Is he famous?”

“Yes! He’s famous!” I said. “He drew Tomorrow’s Joe! It’s been one of the top ten manga in Japan for the last thirty years, and we’re talking about a story that finished before you were born.”

“Oooh!” she breathed. “That sounds impressive. Is there a lot of fighting in it?”

“It ends with a fifteen-round boxing match,” I replied.

She curled one side of her lip and thought for a moment.

“Doesn’t sound violent enough for me,” she said. With 20/20 hindsight, I wish, I so wish I had asked her what could possibly have sounded more violent than that.

“But,” I said, knowing I was going to regret it. “The reason this cinema is showing Tomorrow’s Joe today is that Tetsuya Chiba himself is here. He’s going to do a talk, and a live drawing demonstration, and answer questions from the audience and all that kind of stuff.”

“Meh,” she said. “Let us know if you show Akira again.” And with that she was off.

“What was that all about?” asked Tetsuya Chiba, who had been standing next to me all along, the conversation bellowing about him in super-fast English. An affable man, wearing a baseball cap over his white buzz-cut hair, he’d been studying the language for years, but nothing had quite prepared him for the staccato argot of South London. I thanked the Lord for small mercies.

“She was looking for a friend,” I said diplomatically.

“Was his name Akira?” he asked.

This article originally appeared in Newtype USA, #208, 2003. I reprint it here now with the real names restored.

If written ten years later, this might have become an isekai story with a lame title like I Drowned in Ancient Rome and Woke Up in Japan Where I Learned About Marketing. But the 2008 publication date for the first volume of the Thermae Romae manga kept it classily Latinate, infused with its creator Mari Yamazaki’s fascination with the classical world, and peppered with her hectoring rants about modern-day European hygiene. Its movie incarnation, in particular, emphasized the very personal nature of her storyline—despite being played for laughs, it is also the tale of a struggling manga artist who finds herself sharing her life with a man who knows a lot about the Roman Empire.

Although Yamazaki received a paltry million yen for the movie rights, a live-action film went into production starring heartthrob Hiroshi Abe as the manga’s Lucius Modestus. It turned out that some of the majestic sets built for the sadly truncated HBO series Rome (2005) were still standing, allowing the Japanese cast the chance to cavort around scenery that looked far more salubrious than one might expect for a low-budget movie.

Over at my “Behind the Screens” column at MediaOCD, I write up the time-travelling-Roman-bather tale Thermae Romae.