It’s been seven years since the publicity junkets for Schoolgirl Milky Crisis, the book that led to this blog being started in the first place. And over on Youtube, Nozomi Entertainment have posted up their podcast interview with me from spring 2009, in which we discuss everything from the demographics of fandom to the problem of getting Chinese waiters to do backing vocals on “Help Me Rhonda”.
Toshio Ban’s The Osamu Tezuka Story: A Life in Anime and Manga is a ground-breaking manga biography of one of Japan’s best-loved and best-selling creators, the creator of Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion. At 900 pages, it is a breathtakingly thorough sweep through Tezuka’s post-war struggles to become a comics artist, his misplaced faith in the financial returns of animation, and his pioneering efforts in setting up the studio Mushi Production.
Ban’s approach often has the relentless, linear plod of a TV movie, beginning with his leading man’s infancy, and working all the way through to his death. But in doing so, he draws deeply on Tezuka’s own memoirs, citing childhood incidents as crucial inspirations in his later work, such as the sticky-up hair that inspired the coiffure of his iconic Astro Boy. Most subjects would not warrant this intensive focus, but Tezuka is such a fundamental figure for understanding modern Japanese media that there is sure to be plenty of interest here for fans and scholars.
Ban’s artwork is deceptively simple. At first glance, it looks like the journeyman drafting of an educational comic, but actually goes much further. His depictions of many scenes are photo-real, deriving directly from documents, photographs and location hunts in the places under discussion. When Ban writes about the arrival of a letter from Stanley Kubrick, offering Tezuka the production designer’s job on 2001: A Space Odyssey, he doesn’t just tell you about it. He shows you the envelope it came in, complete with Kubrick’s return address. Translator Frederik L. Schodt almost fell off his chair in surprise when he got to a page recounting a visit by Tezuka to America, realising that the youthful hipster in one panel was himself as Tezuka’s interpreter, faithfully recreated from a forgotten photo.
Here we see the formative years of a young comics artist: the temptations of a career in medicine; the irresistible but risky pull of animation; the struggles of a young studio, and the confusing whirl of international attention. Tezuka is propelled to the height of the manga profession, only to risk it all with a blind-faith bet on animation. Much of the dialogue is taken, word-for-word, from his own books and speeches, including a wistful farewell in which he speculates about how the children of the future might regard the Earth from space. Cue Ban’s artwork running with Tezuka’s ideas to present a slingshot, sci-fi ending, as Tezuka’s work forges on into the future without him.
Ban also injects some subtle artistic elements. As Tezuka’s long-term assistant, he has mastered his boss’s style, drawing much of the manga in a direct pastiche of the original. Clearly channelling the idea of how Tezuka himself might have approached the project if he had been able to draw his life-story from beyond the grave, Ban presents the whole thing as a fantastical documentary, narrated by characters from Tezuka’s own works. The art-style degenerates into more amateurish cartooning when the young Tezuka is telling a story to an indulgent audience of relatives, but blossoms into richly toned artwork when recreating adult memories.
The Osamu Tezuka Story is an unparalleled gateway to Tezuka’s life and work. Many critics, myself included, warn that Tezuka and his estate have been expert curators of his memory, and that Ban’s work typically shines a spotlight so brightly on its subject that many of his contemporaries are confined to the shadows. But that doesn’t stop Ban from noting some of the low points, including Tezuka’s resignation from his own studio and his flirtation with depression. Unless you can read Japanese, this is the closest thing you’ll get to a warts-and-all portrayal, and undoubtedly the most informative, detailed and illuminating work on manga and anime to be published in English this year.
Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article first appeared in Geeky Monkey #10, 2016.
The Chilean newspaper El Mercurio interviews me about the Japanese propaganda film Momotaro’s Divine Sea Warriors, about which I am indeed writing a book for publication in 2017. / El diario chileno El Mercurio me entrevistas sobre la propaganda de guerra japonesa y mi favorito de dibujos animados japoneses: Mar guerreros divinos de Momotaro.
A new collection of essays on Finland in World War II.
Finland fought three conflicts between 1939 and 1945. The first was the notorious Winter War (1939-40), in which the country stood alone against Soviet invasion. “Only Finland,” thundered Winston Churchill, “superb, nay, sublime in the jaws of peril – Finland shows what free men can do.” What Finland, under its famous leader Mannerheim, managed to do was put aside the festering civil strife of Red versus White, left over from the civil war of 1918, and unite against a common enemy, fighting the Russians to a standstill while the world looked the other way. In the process, the map of Finland, sometimes described as the “Maid” for its resemblance to a girl in a dress, lost an arm of territory to the Russian bear.
The second was even more divisive. The Continuation War (1941-44) saw Finland joining forces with Nazi Germany in a renewed attack on Russia. As noted in Tiina Kinnunen and Ville Kivimäki’s insightful collection of academic essays Finland in World War II: History Memory, Interpretations, it was the Germans who swiftly announced this to be Waffenbrüderschaft – a “brotherhood in arms.” It was the Finns who pushily translated this into English as a “co-belligerency pact”, refusing to call themselves allies of Hitler, even as they overshot their original targets, clawing back the land lost to the Soviets and rolling onwards to the East, seizing the lands of Karelia, which had arguably never been Finnish before, creating an entire new industry in manufactured traditions and rescue ethnology, well covered in Kinnunen and Kivimäki’s book.
One might suggest that the third was even more controversial. Whereas the Continuation War was a shocking deal with the devil (a devil that, as noted here, more crucially sent the food supplies that saved the Finns from starvation), the Lapland War (1944-45) was its shocking turnabout, as the Finns turned on the Nazi troops on their territory, chasing them out of the country in a conflagration that saw almost all human habitation destroyed north of the Arctic Circle.
It never ceases to amaze me how historians can find new angles on the war, and Finland in World War II does not disappoint, with space devoted not only to geopolitics and treaties, army operations and tactics, but also to such oddities as the psychological effect of burying the fallen in their home towns (Finland today boasts 600 “heroes’ cemeteries”), the countrywide ban on dancing (an activity regarded by grim Lutherans of a betrayal of comrades’ sacrifices on the front line), and the DIY magicians’ kits sent to entertain troops in their trenches. Modern trends to conflate history with memory also lead to some interesting areas, such as accounts of the historiography of the war as told in movies and novels, as well as changing public perceptions of Finland’s attitude towards the Holocaust. The editors aim to both summarise and outline the most recent researches on the subject, with chapters firmly grounded in Finnish-language academia, and a bibliography of many obscure English-language academic papers on Finnish subjects.
Later essays include several welcome treatments of the role of Karelia in the conflict, not only as a land to be defended, but also as the new frontier of a Nazi-inspired expansion into conquered lebensraum, and a lost land ceded to Russia – source of thousands of refugees in the 1950s. One remarkable section even delves into Sain Karjalan takaisin (“I Got Karelia Back”), a 2003 account of a woman’s trips to the place of her birth, now a Russian republic where her childhood home is occupied by strangers, and where she is inspired by the landscape to stay and build a house.
Jonathan Clements is the author of An Armchair Traveller’s History of Finland, available now in print and on the Kindle (UK/US).
So I have paid my membership for the Helsinki Worldcon next year. Yes, yes, there’s still a year to go, but there are Progress Reports to read, and hotel rooms to book, and plans to be made. Also, who knows how low the pound will sink in the meantime? And for those of you looking for a quick introduction to a nation with a British patron saint, a death metal band in Eurovision, a language that helped inspire Lord of the Rings and an annual wife-carrying contest, look no further than The Armchair Traveller’s History of Finland, available now from all good bookshops, and most of the bad ones.
Over at the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, I sneak away from my usual entries on China and Japan to write up a couple of Russian movies: Hardcore Henry and Calculator (pictured). Yes, that’s Vinnie Jones in the background; he gets around.
In The Politics of Innovation, American academic Mark Zachary Taylor grapples with the implications of Cardwell’s Law – which states scientific and technical innovation in any particular country to be a matter of a short, unsustainable burst of creativity. How can policy-makers grow a vibrant, productive science community, creating the patents, inventions and jobs that can drive a high-tech economy? Is it even possible to artificially generate a smart, inventive society? And why is it that some countries just seem to be better at innovation than others? Why is it, for example, in the post-war period, that Japan achieved such leaps and bounds? Why not France, which had better access to markets?
Taylor’s answer, easily stated but robustly defended in close and detailed arguments, is that nations are prepared to pay the price, deferring comforts and investing in research, if they are in a state of “creative insecurity”. This requires a country to perceive external threats as more pressing and important than the politics of internal tension.
Taylor argues that far too many policy-makers assume that innovation is a black box, into which a state pours money, waiting expectantly by the exit valve for patents and innovation to come tumbling out. As his title implies, politics is a vital consideration in the way that innovation is funded, assessed and implemented, with Taylor offering as one example the old proverb about the four blind men feeling an elephant. All of them are observing quantifiable elements of the animal, but in academic terms, none of them are citing each other. They are ignorant of the discoveries being made elsewhere – their own hang-ups and blind-spots are preventing them from getting to the task in hand, which is understanding the elephant in the room.
The topic, of course, is a minefield of potential triggers for racism, triumphalism, imperialism, and misguided cultural relativism – even the opening question, of why some states are better at innovation than others, is open to abuse by demagogues and bigots, leading Taylor to predict and pre-empt mis-uses of his conclusions. He is swift to point out the likely abuses of his data, starting with the suggestion that the best way to run a successful science and technology policy is to scare citizens into believing their country faces a threat from Evil Foreigners. In fact, argues Taylor with touching faith, people are not liable to be that stupid, at least not for long, and an informed population will soon see through a manufactured bogeyman. He points out, more hopefully, that there is no reason for the external threat to be human – a state is just as liable to make leaps in invention and innovation if it embraces the challenge of, say, coping with climate change.
He also has some compelling things to point out about the environment most likely to foster creativity. Taylor has no truck with the suggestion that some races are just dumber than others, discounting data from third-world countries that have more pressing subsistence priorities than, say, semiconductor research. His remaining data presents a persuasive picture of those countries that spend on scientific and technical development, and those countries that reap quantifiable rewards from doing so. The two data sets are not exact matches, and his argument focuses on possible reasons for this discrepancy.
Hollywood-style, nobody knows anything. Taylor considers the likely elements of randomness that turn some research exercises into “Easter egg hunts” with unclear objectives and unpredictable returns. But he also considers the likely effects of such strange attractors as military funding, a definite contribution to innovation in his native United States, but no longer in Russia, despite the latter country’s still-large arms budget.
Taylor’s conclusions are immediately applicable in the modern world. In fact, they are so applicable that he is prepared to conclude with predictions for the likely national success stories, disappointments and close calls on the international stage in the next two decades. He has good news for Finland and Japan… bad news for Russia and Saudi Arabia. With such careful argument and confident suggestions as can be found in his book, one suspects that he will not be in academia for long, as true politics is likely to come calling.
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China.
Over at the All the Anime blog, I review Kirsten Cather’s Art of Censorship in Postwar Japan, which chronicles several landmark cases, including dodgy films, suspicious books, and tawdry manga.
“Cather’s book tracks censorship in Japan from the landmark Chatterley case, through several key cinema and literary rulings, all the way to the present day and the first manga to have its merits debated in court. Her wit and irreverence takes its cue from VS Naipaul, who quipped on the issuing of a fatwa against Salman Rushdie that the Ayatollah of Iran was offering a somewhat extreme form of literary criticism. She moves into film in the 1960s, revealing that Tetsuzo Watanabe, last seen in Anime: A History leading a group of tanks against striking special effects technicians at Toho, went on to find an even more bonkers job working for the censorship authority Eirin. Eirin saw themselves as defenders of public morals, surrounded by an ever-rising tide as erotica as Japanese cinemas increasingly chased the blue-movie market. The statistics do not lie; Cather uses big data to point to the transformation of Japanese cinema. ‘In 1963, only 37 of the 370 films checked by Eirin warranted adult ratings, whereas by 1965 the number had reached 233 of the total 503.'”
Over on the All the Anime blog, I review Sean Macdonald’s excellent Animation in China: history, aesthetics, media and take the time out for a tangent about the politics of book pricing.
“Macdonald acknowledges the vital importance of Japanese animation for understanding the Chinese market, both in terms of early innovators such as Tadahito Mochinaga, who enjoyed a Chinese career under the name Fang Ming, and later helpers such as Tetsuya Endo, who did the real work on “Tsui Hark’s” animated Chinese Ghost Story. He discusses the famous Uproar in Heaven, the Monkey King from which remains the mascot of SAFS, not only in terms of its Chinese context, but of its parallels with Tezuka’s Alakazam the Great, which was released a year earlier. He even compares the working practices of the Wan brothers (with welcome translated quotes from one of their memoirs) with those of Osamu Tezuka in the age of “limited animation,” playfully comparing the car-crash scene in the first episode of Astro Boy to a famous sequence in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin.”
My Anime: A History has just been declared the runner up in the Society of Animation Studies’ voting for the Norman McLaren – Evelyn Lambart Award for Best Scholarly Book on Animation. The winner was Animated Documentary by Annabelle Honess Roe, “a vital addition to both animation scholarship and film studies scholarship more broadly, expertly achieving the tricky challenge of synthesising these two scholarly traditions to provide a compelling and brilliantly coherent account of the animated documentary form.”
“Clements’ work stood out as the 2015 Runner-Up because of his fearless capacity to continually foreground the challenges of historical analysis, while putting this into practice to provide a much needed early history of anime that is rich with balanced detail.”
The Official Schoolgirl Milky Crisis Blog 