Monthly Archives: March 2013

La storia segreta dei samurai

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Out now in Italian, my Brief History of the Samurai, although now it’s a “Secret” History.

I samurai sono l’incarnazione della tradizione marziale giapponese: eroi senza paura, che seguono il rigido codice del bushidō e preferiscono affrontare una terribile morte per harakiri piuttosto che conoscere il disonore della sconfitta. Eppure pochi sanno che in origine i samurai erano umili soldati di frontiera e guardie del corpo di ricchi signori, e solo nel corso dei secoli hanno acquisito sempre più potere, fino a diventare la classe dominante del Paese del Sol Levante, spesso più autorevole persino di shogun e imperatori. Un potere fondato sulla tattica militare, sull’estetica della guerra, sulla ferrea disciplina, su un’etica severa, ma anche su insospettabili intrighi di corte e su vendette sanguinose e spietate.

In questo libro, Jonathan Clements – basandosi sui resoconti dell’epoca e su famose opere della tradizione letteraria giapponese – descrive le battaglie più avvincenti, le armi segrete e i personaggi che hanno reso immortale, e famosa in tutto il mondo, la figura del samurai.

Chinese Whispers

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Science fiction is not as easy to find in China as one might think. I never saw a massive “SCI-FI” section in Chinese bookshops, although there were often entire bays dedicated to internet novels and how-to-draw manga books; SF is more often than not still lumped in with children’s fiction. It’s a long story.

I pestered numerous newsstand vendors in four or five Chinese cities for the latest issue of Kehuan Shijie (“SF World”, pictured), but only struck gold outside the gates of the Beijing University of Astronautics and Aeronautics, where the passing traffic might be reasonably expected to be interested in all that Buck Rogers stuff. Otherwise, science fiction in China, with a readership in the tens of thousands, is still something of a minority interest in the People’s Republic.

Which makes it all the more ironic that I should get back to my office and find in my in-tray two publications that massively increase the footprint of Chinese science fiction abroad. A double-issue of Renditions, published by the Chinese University of Hong Kong, is packed with translations of Chinese SF, including stories by Liu Cixin, Han Song, La La, Zhao Haihong, Chi Hui and Xia Jia. There’s also some intriguing proto-sf such as a piece from 1912 by Xu Zhuodai, as well as an incredible exercise in academic recursion: a translation into English of Lu Xun’s translation into Chinese of a Japanese translation of a story by Anna Louise Strong, showing to what degree Chinese whispers might be reasonably said to have set in.

Fei Dao, another author in Renditions, also shows up in the latest issue of Science Fiction Studies under his real name of Jia Liyuan, with a different hat on as a doctoral candidate in Chinese literature. The new SFS is a China special issue, and includes articles about utopias in Chinese fiction, Chinese SF movies, alien contact and the role played by translation in the spread of the medium, as well as non-fiction essays by Liu Cixin, Han Song and Wu Yan. In my role as a contributing editor to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, I was asked to be a peer reviewer on several of the papers in this issue, and I was very impressed with the level of achievement. It’s certainly very salutary, albeit rather odd, to see the amount of work on Chinese SF in English increasingly so exponentially, almost overnight.

New Podcast

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Your vertically-enhanced host, Jeremy Graves, is joined by the newly-healed, disease-free Jerome Mazandarani, Andrew Hewson and Jonathan Clements for another rip-snorting, fan-baiting, Jerome-bashing podcast, featuring questions from you, yes you, answered by us, yes us.

00:00 JC on the costs of living in China, and the prospects of a Chinese middle class. Singing the praises of Western Phoenix booze. How on earth does that relate to anime? No worries, here’s a picture of Karen Allen impersonating Jonathan Clements.

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05:00 Pricing and quality in China.

09:00 parallel importing.

13:00 Why are people still asking about One Piece? The behind-the-scenes panic last month that led to our hasty previous podcast (thanks, Amazon!). JC sleeps like a baby while Andrew and Jeremy run around in ever-decreasing circles. Mark Smith and his human minions. The problems of coordinating announcements and products.

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16:00 On which note, announced on Amazon and exclusive to Amazon right now: Supernatural the Anime, about which we are instant experts, thanks to Wikipedia. Check out our article about Warner Brothers and the anime world.
28: 00 Recent releases – what’s out this week and coming soon. Including discussion of the unlikely connection between Oblivion Island and Skyfall.

33:00 Disney’s announcement (or lack thereof) of no new 2D animated films coming, and what people feel about that. Is it really the end of an era, or did “the era” really end some time ago? The controversy over Rhythm & Hues filing for bankruptcy despite Oscar attention.

40:00 Outsourcing in the film business, and the devious actions of accountants who can chase the money around the world. Bob the Builder is now made in Poland… make your own jokes. How can a film about Space Nazis, shot in Germany and Australia be called “Finnish”? And Revolver Entertainment gets shown the revolving door.

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47:00 The history of the PlayStation, and what effect it’s had on modern media.

50:00 It’s brand spanking new news. Manga UK new release announcements: Deadman Wonderland and Steins; Gate.

57: 00 The MCM Expo is now the MCM Comicon.

60: 00 The death of Toren Smith and matters arising, including the top five Toren accomplishments. And in his memory, a rehash of the old Oh! My Goddess argument, just for old time’s sake.

75:00 Ask Manga UK. Almost an hour of your questions, yes yours, answered, dodged or otherwise belittled. The fate of Lupin III; the possible return of UK-based dubs and a tangent about looking for work as voice_over.jpga voice actor. What links Naruto to Hawaii Five-0, at least next week? A plug for the book Voice-Over Voice-Actor by Yuri Lowenthal and Tara Platt, and for the scheme to raise money for Peter Doyle.

87:00 Happy memories of Saiko Exciting, and the likelihood of there ever being anything like it again. The recent ratings for Summer Wars on Sky, and how those ratings are reflected in Japan.

94:00 The return of fifteening? A release date for Aria: The Scarlet Ammo? Would you rather have the Japanese market or the UK market? The possibilities for the Macross franchise in the UK.

101:00 Possibilities for Blu-ray releases of things thus far only released on DVD. The possibilities of UK Blu-ray only release. The mechanics of an Irish release, and why we don’t do many. The nature of the subtitles currently used.

110:00 Fate/Zero’s dub; what’s wrong with lending DVDs to friends (nothing). Chihayafuru’s chances of getting licensed. The perils of letting people know when a licence is about to run out. And the plans to have a live recording of the *next* podcast at the Birmingham Comicon. And we’re out!

The Podcast is available to download now HERE, or find it and an archive of previous shows at our iTunes page. For a detailed contents listing of previous podcasts, check out our Podcasts page.

Hot Dam

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In 2009, the Chinese government decided it was time to protect its netizens from the dangers of the internet, by bundling a new piece of software with all new PCs. Green Dam Youth Escort was designed to keep life harmonious (and “green”) by filtering out any images with too many pink pixels (including pictures of pigs), and blocking a list of proscribed sites. It was notoriously buggy, and, well, annoying.

The Chinese internet community was swift to protest in an oddly creative way, knocking up images of a manga-style heroine called Lu Ba Niang (the Green Dam Girl). Clad in a quasi-military uniform with an ironically short skirt, Lu Ba Niang patrolled the interwebs with a paintbrush for censoring, and a red armband that read “Discipline.” Her perky little hat was sometimes depicted with a little crab insignia, since a “river crab” in Chinese is hexie, a homonym for “harmonisation”.

What’s interesting about the Lu Ba Niang protests is what they reveal about Japanese pop culture among the Chinese. The amateur artists and satirists co-opted the modes of Japanese artwork with apparent ease. It’s not just the moe look of Lu Ba Niang, but a dozen little touches, including Vocaloid censorship anthems and hentai spin-offs in which she inspects the bottoms of embarrassed anime girls. The tone and content of much of the protests seemed very much informed by hentai fandom, with some images even in imitation of erotic visual novels, with text that includes Japanese characters. One even calls the character Lubako, as if she were a Japanese girl.

Download statistics and piracy complaints suggest that Japanese works have an “informal” following in China. The size and scope of the Green Dam protests suggest that there is a sizeable community of Chinese “otaku”, even today when Japanese material has supposedly fallen out of favour in the wake of ongoing territorial spats over the Senkaku Islands. Meanwhile, Green Dam never really took off; it became “voluntary”, and then lost its government funding when it was found to contain programming code plagiarised from an American software company. Oops.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade. This article first appeared in NEO #107, 2013.