“The problem with Taisho-era Tokyo is that almost all of it was wiped out by the fire-bombings of the Second World War. Director Kiyoshi Saeki is forced to keep his camerawork close on street scenes and most exteriors, because a wide-shot of 1920s Tokyo, filmed in 1968, would have been an impossibility before the rise of digital effects. Only the temples remain constant, existing in a time warp unchanged for centuries, allowing the camera to linger on monastic scenes in a way it cannot do with the urban.

“The production team seize upon a fact that is often true the world over – that traditional events, like funerals, and traditional uniforms, like the Salvation Army, are much slower to change than other elements of society. Imagery of the Taisho era is instead telegraphed through the costuming, such as the plaid trousers and straw boater worn by Kentaro , the must-have fashion accessories of early twentieth-century Japan.”

From my video essay in Arrow’s forthcoming Blu-ray box set of the Wicked Priest films, starring Tomisaburo Wakayama.

Sori’s idea was to treat Ping Pong like a science fiction project or a fantasy movie – to get all the mundane stuff in the camera, and then treat it afterwards to add the special magic, which in this case, was the ball. By his estimation, 90% of the balls in the table-tennis scenes were animated effects, storyboarded by Sori’s long-time collaborator Shinji Aramaki, with whom he would later make Appleseed (2004).

“Actually,” he noted, “a quarter of the entire film, or about 300 shots, were processed with CG.”

In order to ensure that the actors were physically matched with the way real table tennis players would move, Sori drafted Yoshihiro Hiraoka, the coach for the Meiji University table tennis club, to give the cast a crash-course. Players from the real-life club can be glimpsed among the background players, while Hiraoka himself was cast as the coach from Kaio Academy.

“The actors were completely choreographed, or rather, they were practicing their swings. But in the end, they trained for about two months,” said Sori. “After that, they were all young, so they got really good, and they could really hit the ball. But in this production, the setting was super-players, so we added the CG ball later. In the end, that was just an added bonus; the power and beauty of the swings were everything.”

The concentration on interaction with an invisible object proved to be an exciting discipline for the actors, returning them to a stripped-down form of theatre, like stage performers swaying with the motion of an imaginary boat, or mimes negotiating an invisible obstacle.

“We were filming without the ball in sight,” said Sori, “but at that point, the image was almost close to the finished product. I’m not exaggerating; the actors themselves said, ‘When I’m practising, I can see the ball.’ ‘I can tell the ball is there.’ And the cameraman was also following the ball, which he couldn’t see, so it’s amazing.”

From my sleeve notes to the upcoming 88 Films Blu-ray release of Fumihiko Sori’s Ping Pong (2002).

“The backers were all expecting Totoro to be a flop. I mean, who cares about a movie where nothing happens in the countryside, right? Suzuki came up with the idea of shoring up Miyazaki’s mad pastoral project by running it on a double bill with something that the schools would have to block-book as ‘educational.'”

Over at Animation World Network, Andrew Osmond interviews me about my book Japan’s Anime Revolution.

“Japan’s Anime Revolution is a greatly enjoyable, informative read, even on films you thought you knew back to front. Hey, Pokémon fans! Did you know Mewtwo’s Japanese voice actor, Masachika Ichimura, was picked for that role because he’d played the masked hero in the stage musical of The Phantom of the Opera?”

Over at Anime News Network, Andrew Osmond posts a long and gritty review of my book, Japan’s Anime Revolution.

“Fujisawa drifted into industrial journalism, working for a while as a reporter for that scandal-ridden gossip rag, the Japan Food Processing Newspaper. His area of specialty was ham and sausages, and even as editor-in-chief, he wrote a column called ‘Sweet & Spicy’, which frequently called out declining food safety standards.

“Widowed at 36, he moved back in with his ailing mother, and cared for her while trying to raise his daughter. Eight years later, he married his second wife, who took over the household chores and bought him vital time to write fiction. He began winning literary prizes in 1971, and in 1974 quit the turbid world of food processing newsletters to become a full-time novelist.

“‘When I reread my novels from that time,’ he wrote, ‘many of them are so dark that I feel a little pain. Love between men and women ends in separation, and stories end with the death of samurai. I couldn’t write happy endings.'”

Over at Media OCD, I commence my new column by relating samurai to sausages.

“Now the monks working for Kashinkoji are specifically described as Negoro monks, who were a real-life group operating out of the Negoro temple in Kii province, who were famously and obviously much more military than they were monk-y. They were legendarily accomplished not only with muskets, but with gunsmithing, and archery, and would be a major playing pieces in the samurai battles of the 1570s and 1580s.

“After their temple was destroyed in 1585, some of them ended up fighting for other clients, most notably forming some of the best musketeer platoons in the army of Tokugawa Ieyasu. And this film is set, as best as I can tell, somewhere in the late 1560s, shortly before the historical death of Matsunaga, so possibly the temple has yet to be destroyed.

“So the opponent here is a monk called Suijubo, the Fluid Spitting Monk, played by Gajiro Sato, who was a familiar face to mainstream Japanese audiences. He played another monk, although not one who vomited viscous gunge, in almost every installment of the Tora-san movies, for decades. He only missed one, due to a car accident, but he was still credited on the poster!

“That punch perm you see really marks him out as an unusual character in a period drama, but it was a part of his general look, and was a feature of many of his onscreen appearances throughout the 1960s and 1970s.”

From my commentary track to Arrow’s forthcoming UK/US release of Ninja Wars.