After the police raid her workplace for selling contraband goods, secretary Jutta Laakso (Birgit Konström) walks out on her feckless boss and into the street, where she runs into her friend Erkka (Kullervo Kalske), a journalist on his way to a party. Tagging along, Jutta manages to convince the rich party-goers of the Suurmetso family that she is a cultured noblewoman, and snags a job at their company.
But Jutta is actually the child of a theatrical family, whose attention-hungry mother and siblings are soon descending on the Suurmetso home, causing utter chaos, and leading to a series of misunderstandings and coincidences that lead to the ambassador’s orchestra performing for a party in the wrong building, and a government inspector locked in the bathroom after he threatens to confiscate the actors’ “borrowed” set materials. The kind-hearted Mr Suurmetso (Tauno Majuri) takes pity on his wayward secretary, and helps her family set up a new ballet production, The Emperor’s New Points, which riffs on the old Hans Christian Andersen tale in a setting of wartime rationing.
By the end, Jutta and Erkka have realised they have feelings for each other, and Mr Suurmetso has fallen for Jutta’s stepsister, the singer Sointu (Tuire Orri), in a light-hearted riff on Frank Capra’s You Can’t Take it With You (1938), that also rips a page from the playbook of the previous year’s SF Parade (1940), cramming in so much song and dance that the play-within-a-play takes up a quarter of the whole film.
The Finnish press was forgiving of a movie that existed purely as a hanger to hold up a series of song and dance numbers, noting that whatever it was that Poretta thought it was doing, it was doing it well. Even when Kullervo Kalske is asking Birgit Konström what time it is, they are doing it as a song, although this is very much Konström’s film, while Kalske’s stellar good looks are somewhat crammed into the shadows, hidden behind a moustache and framed repeatedly as if he just some guy who has wandered in, and not the Most Handsome Man in Finland.
If you happen to come from a family of actors (and don’t get me started…), then many of the moments in Poretta will be familiar torments – none of the cast can walk past a piano, or a parrot, or a silly hat without diving in and turning it into a performance. The script, credited to Elsa Soini and Seere Salminen of The Suominen Family (1941), along with director Ilmari Unho, is sweetly indulgent of thespians, portraying them as much needed carnival sorts, driving through everyday life like a clown-car of holy fools, brightening the days of normal people with all their singing, dancing and folksy wisdom.
There were vague complaints from the critics that the final performance went on for a bit too long, but then again, 1941 audiences were somewhat dazzled by the closing “under the sea” dance number, filmed with a graphic overlay of bubbles and passing goldfish to add a sense of submarine fun. Everybody seems to be trying a little too hard to enjoy themselves in a pastiche of Busby Berkeley musicals, but that was the inter-war tension that got Poretta into production in the first place, and it seems churlish to criticise it for trying to have a moment of joy in troubled times.
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Short History of Finland. He is watching all the Finnish films, so you don’t have to.
“The evidence slowly builds, through plane crashes, car accidents, and a series of odd wild animal migrations, that America is suffering a nationwide breakdown of digital communications, which may or may not be the act of a malicious invader.”
Over at the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, I write up Sam Esmail’s movie Leave the World Behind, in a spoiler-ridden entry that only mentions one of several Easter eggs that link it to his earlier Mr. Robot.
Just back from a trip to Hong Kong and China, where I tested out digital apps and payment systems. In Hong Kong, I only needed cash money on my way home, for the taxi to the Kowloon airport express station and the strangely traditional left luggage office there. The rest of the time I used Apple Pay, my credit cards, and the wonderful Octopus for Visitors, which is a top-uppable travel card that also functions as a payment app in a number of handy situations.
China was the big test, as I hadn’t been for several years, and post-Covid, the country has gone almost entirely cashless. Mercifully, Alipay worked right out of the box, happily beeping at the 7-11 counter at Guangzhou station as I bought myself a coffee on arrival. However, the vast majority of retailers and services favoured WeChat Pay, which also worked straight away. I’d only installed it as an afterthought, but it turned out to be much more useful for me. You can find both these apps in the Apple Store or Google Play, and while they won’t work until you are in China, it’s best to get them early just to familiarise yourself where stuff like the Scan QR Code button actually is.
The big disappointment was my Bank of Shanghai virtual debit card, on which I had pinned huge hopes, but which embarked upon a Maoist self-criticism session and suspended itself the moment I tried to use it, claiming to have detected “suspicious behaviour.” This turned out to be “buying a ticket on the metro”, and I couldn’t really afford the day’s wait for an appeal, or indeed work out how to appeal when standing in front of a ticket machine in Guangzhou, so I gave up on it. I had been expecting it to be my default payment method in China, but I ended up not using it at all and getting a full refund. Your mileage may vary, but don’t rely on it.
My Alipay/WeChat digital payment apps worked as local interfaces for several non-Chinese Visa and Mastercards, as well as debit cards, although in one store they failed me and I had to resort to cash, while a crowd huddled around to look at the strange pieces of paper that once bought things, but were now more like museum pieces.
The thing that really did prove vital was my eSIM — a virtual SIM card that could be loaded onto my phone and activated when needed. It allowed me to keep my usual phone number, but to use the internet without breaking the bank. I bought one for Hong Kong and one for China, and they allowed me to save money on data roaming and internet access. I spent just $10 on two gigabytes of data in two countries, whereas my mobile phone provider would have charged me $40 for the same, and data roaming would have gone off the charts. None of the digipay apps work without efficient access so I do recommend it. The company I used was a Canadian outfit called aloSIM, and if you want to give them a go, you and I both get a $3 discount if you use my sign-up code: M74D4V9. I’ve bought eSIMs for Europe as well, and I’ll get myself one for America next time I go.
The do’s and don’ts for for travellers in China in 2024 using digital payments are:
(1) Get Alipay and WeChat on your phone, before you travel. Some of the set-up requires real-name verification, such as an uploaded ID page from your passport, and you don’t want to be doing that in an Arrivals concourse while a line backs up behind you at Pacific Coffee. Likewise for your credit cards and debit cards, some of which will require verification from your provider before they can be installed. When they work, they work just like Apple Pay.
(2) Take some spare old-fashioned money for emergencies. Nobody will have change, but they will have to go and find some if all your apps suddenly fail you for some reason.
(3) Install an eSIM on your phone. If you are travelling to more than one Asian country, I recommend aloSIM’s regional package, which will cover you in 14 countries and save you the bother of toggling your data provider at each border. It will save you a fortune in roaming costs, and is sure to be cheaper than the deal you are offered by your phone provider.
(4) If you want to use Google Maps, Gmail, Facebook, or various other pernicious agents of the capitalist west, they will be blocked in China. You will need to put a Virtual Private Network on your phone that allows you to tunnel around the Great Firewall. I couldn’t possibly comment, but if you want to use ExpressVPN, this link will give you (and me) a free month. But remember to turn it off when you are using the digital payments, otherwise your phone will tell your bank that you are in Singapore while you are buying a jacket in Xi’an, and it will immediately assume foul play.
(5) Make sure your phone is up to date. I clung for years to an iPhone 7 that was perfectly good for my everyday needs, but a lot of these new apps require iPhone X or above. If you are going to China, in particular, you may want to double-check that your old phone is up to some of the new things, and if necessary, do what I did and reluctantly embrace the 2020s with a phone upgrade. I presume there is a similar technology event horizon with older Android phones.
(6) In Hong Kong, it’s much less hassle because Apple Pay and credit cards work normally, as indeed does old-fashioned cash. But the real joy of Hong Kong travelling is the Octopus card, the tourist version of which can be installed on your phone as a handy key to open access to buses, trains, and ferries, and also used to pay in convenience stores and many other retailers.
(7) When travelling in China, and in many other countries, I swear by Trip.com. I’ve been using it since back when it was called cTrip, and it has a very handy English-language user interface. Make sure your passport details are uploaded beforehand, and you will be able to book train tickets and hotels on the fly. Trip allowed me to reserve a first-class ticket on the high-speed rail to Guangzhou before ticket sales opened; it booked the ticket for me using the ID details it had on file, which meant my passport was my ticket.
(8) And while this may sound like a statement of the blindingly obvious, do make sure that you are travelling with adequate charging facilities — cables and a power bank for a top-up on the move. If your phone runs out of juice, you’ve effectively lost your wallet, so you can’t afford to be cavalier with the power bars.
After a giant kaiju threaten to destroy Japan, the guardian spirits of the nation, known as ‘Yokai’ appear before the young boy Kei… They tell him he is the descendant of the legendary monster slayer Watanabe no Tsuna, and may be the only person who can stop the catastrophe. Great Yokai War Guardians is the epic manga adaptation of the hit movie!
Out today from Titan Manga, the first volume of Yusuke Watanabe and Sanami Suzuki’s manga based on the film, The Great Yokai War. The English script was translated by Motoko Tamamuro and I wrote a translator’s afterword in the hope of explaining some of the weirdness, but it was not included in the book, so here it is instead below:
A “night parade of one hundred demons” is a popular theme in Japanese folklore. There is a belief that supernatural beings march through the street at night and anyone who encounters them will perish if they do not have religious protection. Often, these beings are referred to as yokai, a name deriving ultimately from the first and last characters of the Chinese yao-mo-gui-guai (“phantoms-monsters-ghosts-apparitions”) – a catch-all title first used in the middle ages to refer to supernatural creatures.
There are two major schools of thoughts regarding the yokai. One is that they are all gods and those that have lost their respect and status have become regarded as demons. Another is that both yokai and gods have existed from the dawn of time, but that those that gain worshippers are upgraded as gods.
The centrepiece of the first volume of Sanami Suzuki’s manga Great Yokai War: Guardians is not a scene of apocalyptic urban destruction, but a grand conference of all the world’s apparitions, spirits and supernatural beings, playfully and punningly named with a combination of the terms yami (shadow) and summit – a Yammit. At this Shadow Council, we see a who’s-who of monsters, including a Gorgon, Dracula and Cyclops, familiar to Western readers.
But who is Backbeard? Is he some sort of piratic misprint? An eye in the middle of a dark circle, from which a bunch of tentacle-like limbs branch out, he is, in fact, a Japanese creation, first appearing in a 1965 manga by Yukihiko Kitagawa and Yoshio Okazaki. By 1966, he had been co-opted by Shigeru Mizuki’s Spooky Ooky Kitaro in Shonen Magazine, now introduced as the commander-in-chief of all American monsters. Often an adversary – he makes several attempts to invade Japan in the course of Mizuki’s stories – he appears here as a craven foreign dignitary, trying to make a swift buck on the back of Japan’s latest media obsession with the supernatural.
Backbeard in fact, was supposedly killed off in an early issue of the Kitaro manga, but kept returning because Mizuki found his unique appearance so compelling. He is immortalised today in one of the bronze plaques that decorate Mizuki’s home town of Sakaiminato, a permanent addition to Japan’s own mythology of monsters.
Shigeru Mizuki (1922-2015) is a crucial figure in the history of Japanese ghosts and monsters, not only cataloguing folktales from all around Japan, but inventing many of them himself. His works have become so ingrained in the Japanese psyche that one often has to go to his own publications, such as the magisterial Compendium of Japanese Yokai (1994) to work out which ones are his, and which ones belong to the nation.
It’s through the works of Mizuki that Japanese children often first encounter Nurarihyon, the old man who invites himself into your home and takes charge; Yuki-onna, the temptress who waits in the snows to entice passing travellers; the one-eyed, one-legged Ippon-datara that trample-hops onto people on one day of the year; or the zashiki-warashi urchins that haunt storage spaces. Here, we see them all banding together at a peace summit… sorry, yammit, in order to discuss a terrible tectonic event.
The silly humans think it’s just a natural disaster, but it’s really a mass haunting, of all the sea creatures who died during the forming of Japan millions of years ago. In the wake of the Tohoku earthquake of 2011, it is one of many media allusions to Japan’s modern traumas, leavened with a grand monster party, and a pre-teen hero who can save the day.
In an early scene, we see the young boys getting a fortune from a temple kiosk. Omikuji or fortune telling is common in Japanese temples and shrines. Worshippers draw a stick with a number on it and then open a drawer to find the paper with that number on it. In this manga, they draw a stick with the unlikely number 8 million (八百万). Traditionally the Japanese believe a god resides in everything and the expression ‘8 million gods’ means a myriad of various gods that exist in this world. What it signifies in this scene is that the protagonist ‘wins’ all the gods, but as far as he is concerned, all he is getting is the short end of the stick.
Grand Yokai War: Guardians ran in Shonen Ace magazine in December 2020, a few months ahead of the 2021 release of the film of the same name, itself a sequel to a 2005 movie that was based on a novel by Hiroshi Aramata, itself inspired by the multiple monster works of the 1960s. By this point, it is impossible to work out who came up with what, although the Daiei-Kadokawa conglomerate did its best by roping in as many creators as possible as producers. Sanami Suzuki’s manga retains the central motif of a young Japanese boy who discovers that he is the distant descendant of Watanabe no Tsuna (953-1025), the medieval samurai who wielded a sword with the ominous name Onikirimaru (the Demon Slayer).
The manga alludes to a popular legend that modern-day Watanabe family members do not take part in the Setsubun cleansing festival, in which each February Japanese households cast beans into the air to banish demons. Watanabes, it is said, have no fear of demons entering their houses, and need not bother, although tellingly, this story appears only to have arisen in the last few years. Could this, too, be a modern media myth, already sinking into the common ownership of Japanese folklore…?
“I can make you look taller,” says Tarzan. “I can make you look thinner.”
“Can you make me look more fun?” I ask.
“Almost certainly,” he says, pretending not to notice my Marks & Spencer’s trousers.
He is already leafing through samples of cloth discarding the plaids and herring-bones that would create a distracting moiré effect on camera. He sketches out a plan for a three-piece suit, with peak collars to draw the eye, and a ticket pocket to… keep a ticket in. When I can’t make up my mind between cufflinks and buttons on the shirt, he offers to do both, like I have become an international plug adapter for wrists.
“You can have a little JC monogram,” he adds, “and I think some cream edging on the buttonholes. Thick buttons. Do you want thick buttons?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Do I?”
“Yes,” says Tarzan. “Now what about the lining?”
“Something Chinesey would be nice,” I say.
“You mean like dragons or something?”
“Yes. Can you do that?”
“I can do anything you want. You’re in charge.” He hands me a scrapbook of wacky silk linings, including the Bitcoin logo, skulls and crossbones, the poster for The Godfather, and some dragons.
“Oh yes,” I say. “Those.”
“You like them now,” says Tarzan. “But will you still feel that way in a few weeks?”
He’s right, the dragons are a bit naff. I keep poking around in the book until I see a pattern called “Queen of Dragons”, which is actually a series of repeating phoenix designs, gold on black.
“Thatsh the one,” I say, slurring a bit, because Sam’s Tailor, on Hong Kong’s Nathan Road, also make their own signature beer, and it’s a terrifying imperial IPA with 8.8% ABV. I’ve had three cans while Tarzan is talking through the design, and now I can’t feel my legs.
The first-generation founder, Sam Melwani, arrived in Hong Kong in 1952, and worked for another tailor before going it alone in 1957. By the end of the decade, his son Sham tells me, he had cornered the lucrative market in uniforms for the servicemen of the colonial administration. Which explains why the form I am filling in includes a space for my rank. Sham and his brother Manu can still be found lurking on the premises – it’s Manu who hands me what might have been my fourth beer, but by that point I had lost the ability to count. But it’s Manu’s son Roshan who is the modern face of the family business, rocking a waistcoat design that Tarzan has already sold me as “boss-style” (I realise now that he meant his boss), and with a clash of vibrant patterns on a shirt that has elbow patches just to show off.
“We get staff discounts on fabrics,” says Tarzan with a shrug. “We try stuff out.”
“Covid was a disaster for us,” says Roshan. “It used to be there was a queue going out the door. We were so busy. But then we had month after month where nobody was coming.”
I ask about the regulars. Because one of the delights of Sam’s is that they now have all my details on file, and I can literally send a WhatsApp message asking for a two-piece safari suit in Marimekko camo pattern with a purple paisley party shirt, and they will post it to me three days later, possibly just before they call the fashion police.
“Yeah,” says Roshan thoughtfully. “But everybody spent a year indoors. Nobody needed a suit.” Even so, he pursued them on social media. One of the reasons I can reach out to Roshan at seven thousand miles distance is that he has spent the last couple of years perfecting online consultations. If I do ask for that Marimekko safari suit next week, he’ll be there on a digicam trying to discreetly talk me out of it and save me from myself. But if I insist, he will do what I want and let me endure the ridicule.
And business hasn’t picked up?
“Maybe only twenty, thirty per cent of what it was,” says Sham.
Which makes me wonder what chaos there must have been pre-Covid, because when I come back a mere five hours later for my first fitting, the shop is heaving. There’s a picky Frenchman who isn’t sure he wants a suit at all (testing even Roshan’s patience), and a thick-necked man with a crew-cut who seems likely to be a holdover from the military days; a repeat customer dropping in to pick up something new and he’s arrived with three friends of his who all want suits of their own. They’ve never had a tailor before. I’m a bit surprised I got through the first five decades of my life without one myself.
In the last five hours, a Nanjing-born tailor called Mr Zhang has run up the first draft of my suit, and now he wants to stick pins in me to make sure that the cuffs show just enough shirt.
“Can you tell him to stand up straighter,” he mumbles at Manu.
“Tell him yourself,” laughs Manu in perfect Cantonese, “he speaks Mandarin.”
“No, he doesn’t,” says Mr Zhang.
“Yes, I blimmin’ do,” I say in Chinese, and we’re off, with Mr Zhang interrogating me thorough a mouthful of pins about how I could have possibly ended up in Xi’an, and what kind of temperatures I had at home, as that was going to affect the way the suit was built.
“I doubt very much,” I say, “I will ever have a chance to wear this suit at home. It’s probably only going to get outings in Scotland and on telly.”
“Ah yes,” says Tarzan. “The other shirts!” He is intrigued about the mechanics of shooting a television series, and his eyes light up at the thought of a schedule so punishing that I need up to five duplicate shirts for continuity purposes. One on; one off; one in the wash; one supposed to be in the wash but actually held hostage by a chamber maid in Gansu; and one irredeemably spattered with mud from a tribal fish-throwing ritual. I learned my lesson after my first big National Geographic job, where the shirt I wore on day one had to be worn again on days two, three and four, and never quite recovered. And on the Confucius shoot in Shandong, my biggest problem was our sound-man’s lavalier microphone glue, which ruined several mercifully cheap shirts as well as a few sizeable clumps of my chest hair.
I bring Tarzan one of my current crop of shooting shirts, and he sets about it with professional precision, tutting at the sleeves and scowling at the edging, and telling me that a shirt worn tucked out needs to have a certain kind of pointy thing. Tarzan knows his stuff, and if I let him steer me, it will look like I do, and that is surely the nature of good tailoring.
I walked into Sam’s on Wednesday morning. My suit is ready by the Saturday. When I walk back into the office, there is a small crowd admiring it as if it is a painting on the wall.
“I love the gauntlet cuffs,” says one man to me. I mutter something about not knowing what they are but… ooh, that’s what they are. Tarzan insists on putting the waistcoat and jacket on me himself, in order to demonstrate his dual cufflink/buttoned cuffs, the secret band that holds the suit in place, and the way to adjust the waistcoat shape.
The finished item comes complete with carefully stitched piping, a little pen pocket, and the Queen of Dragons motif repeated throughout. The shirts have my initials on the cuffs, and the act of putting them on feels strangely familiar… as if they had been made for me… which they were.
I am similarly happy with the sample shirt for on-camera appearances, and approve two more duplicates on the spot. Tarzan asks Tony the shirt-maker if he can turn them around before I leave tomorrow, and Tony tells him it’s too much of a faff — so they will just send them to me at home. Now I know I can just ask for whatever I want, and they can just make it happen, I fear they may have created a monster.
What if, I ask Tarzan, I come back with my wife? Can they fit her out with whatever she wants?
“Yes, we can,” says Tarzan. “But we can’t turn it around as fast as your suit. Women’s clothes can take one to two weeks. There’s more…. variables.”
It was an eight-year-old boy, in March 1278, who gave the name to what was then the forested, hilly lands to the north of Hong Kong island. He counted eight hills – today’s Lion Rock, Tate’s Cairn, Unicorn Ridge, Beacon Hill, Crow’s Nest and so on, which today separate the urban coast from the New Territories. There are, he said, eight dragons.
No, said one of the men with him. There are nine. Because the boy was the 17th emperor of the Song dynasty, on the run from the invading Mongols. For as long as his dwindling naval forces kept heading south, for as long as he evaded capture, there was still a Song dynasty, and he was still its emperor. And so nine dragons it was Jiulong, or as pronunciation would have it in these days, and probably in those: Kowloon.
The boy Zhao Shi didn’t live long afterwards, dying of an illness on the run. Even then, he was the commander of a fleet of stolen boats, requisitioned with extreme prejudice from an angry Muslim merchant in Quanzhou, who would take his revenge by embracing the Mongol cause soon after. He was never quite the same after his boat capsized in a storm outside Leizhou, and even his presence in the area of what today is called Hong Kong was a feeble attempt at recuperation for the dying leader of a dying regime, mourning his drowned sister and his lost empire.
His even littler brother would be the last emperor of the Song, famously dragged beneath the waves by his suicidal courtiers as the fleet collapsed at the Battle of Yamen.
There was a monument in Hong Kong to the presence of the ninth dragon, at what came to be known as his Sacred Hill (sheng shan) – a hundred foot slab of rock, carved with the words Terrace of the Song King (song wang tai). This has made it into Cantonese as Sung Wong Toi – seemingly a deliberate move after the Mongol takeover to describe him as a lowlier royal, as calling him an emperor would have invalidated the mandate of the new rulers. The words for emperor and king are homophones in Cantonese, so possibly the people from the north didn’t realise they were being trolled. Under the British administration, placenames in the area were bullishly renamed Terrace of the Song Emperor, although this made no difference to the locals – see above re: pronunciation. It means that the actual slab has “king” written on it, but the station you get off at to look at it has “emperor”.
The boulder lasted until the 1940s, when the Japanese dynamited it to make extra space for the Kai Tak airfield. In 1945, the bit of the rockface that bore its name was relocated to a little area of parkland nearby. Today, the airfield has gone as well, and it is a sad little park in the middle of a busy road intersection, the air ripe with the stench of the nearby sewage works. But one of the last of the Song once took shelter here beneath a towering rock, and counted dragons in the hills.
One of his generals and guardians is memorialised a few stops along the metro, at the Che Kung Temple, remembered less for his doomed defence of the boy emperor, and more for scuttlebutt that associated him with the dispelling of plagues, for which he was deified in the Ming dynasty. Visitors to his temple are encouraged to spin ceremonial windmills and beat a ceremonial drum. No plague here today, so presumably it is working.
Taierzhuang is a charming “old town”, full of little bridges and temples in alleys. It’s new, of course. Most of it dates from 2008, but it is a faithful reconstruction of the town that previously existed on this spot, which was torn apart in 1938 in a famous battle with the Japanese army. It sat in ruins until the 21st century, and then got toshed up. “I like it,” I tell the camera as I walk through the streets, “because the reconstruction isn’t just about the buildings. This place also seems to reconstruct the visitors. Everybody is encouraged to leave in peace and harmony, and to indulge in traditional pursuits…, it’s the sort of place that Confucius would have loved.”
It won’t last, of course. I give it five years before the leases run out on the classier places, and they transform into mobile phone franchises and plastic machine-gun shops. There are already three bongo stores, which is my litmus test for the decline of civilisation. But for now, it is lovely, and so are the boatwomen.
Xu Zhenzhen is a graceful lady in a blue cheongsam, who sculls a gondola through the nearby canals, singing songs about the neighbourhood and delivering a constant tour-guide patter. I spend most of the day being squired through the canals with a film crew in the boat, then again along the same course with the crew chasing me in another boat, then again with a drone following us under the arches of the nearby bridges. She shows me how to flip the big oar back and forth, and sings a song about the wonders of Beautiful Taierzhuang.
The lyrics seem a little too simple to me, devoid of classical allusions and tonal assonance, leaning too heavily on rather simple concepts like “beauty”. It smells way too modern for me, and so I ask if it is an old song.
Oh yes, she says, it dates all the way back to 2005.
“I’ll stop you there,” says Frances the producer, literally rocking the boat. “National Geographic will need to clear the rights on any song that isn’t in the public domain. Something knocked up by the marketing department isn’t going to cut it.”
Xu protests that other film crews have recorded her singing without complaint, but other film crews aren’t planning on broadcasting outside China. She will have to sing something else.
I am very careful not to address her as a “sing-song girl”, which carries with it implications of Qing dynasty prostitution. The Girlfriend Experience in the 18th century would involve buying a night on a boat with a girl, who would punt you around for a while, cook you dinner, sing you some songs and then climb into bed with you, all on the boat. I carefully address her as Teacher Xu, using the same levels of honorific that I have used with all the middle-aged men who have formed most of the interviewee population on this shoot. Jonathan and I have already been debating the gender balance among our interviewees, and there is a degree of pressure on Xu to supply a bit of femininity among all the blokes. She’ll appear quite early in the show, which is handy, and she has plenty to say about her town.
I ask her if any tourists fall in the water.
“Not this year,” she replies. “We had a couple of drunks fall in last year, though, so we’ve actually put an underwater deck in the harbour. The canals are two metres deep over most of the town, but if you fall in near the dockside, the water’s actually barely deep enough for the boats.”
It’s time to record the opening words of the documentary, which we get in record time because Taierzhuang in the daytime is so sparsely populated, and I am the man who can recite pertinent passages of The Analects from memory. There are no distractions as I walk along the canal side and say: “Confucius said: ‘It is a pleasure to learn, and to put your knowledge to good use. It is a joy to welcome friends from afar.’ Well, I’ve come from afar, and I want to learn. I want to find out what’s so special about his homeland, the north-east province of Shandong, and how it has shaped the culture and history of the whole of China.” It’s the big opening for the whole show, and we shoot it so fast that the director gets whiplash.
Pieces to camera are not so much written as devised. Jonathan the director and I wander around the streets brainstorming what needs to be in them, and I supply a quote or an observation that might justify my particular presence. Then he argues about how it ought to sound, and whether it is too NHK (“Let’s have a look, shall we…”), or too ITV “CHINA! A LAND OF CONTRASTS…”).
It was Jonathan who put the full stop after “want to learn”, to create a momentary lull to be filled with “I want to find out…”
“It’s good to have a caesura there,” he says. “And wonderful to have a presenter who knows what a caesura is when I ask for one.”
Tomorrow is the last scheduled day of shooting, and the Chinese director will be leaving early, so tonight is a wrap party of sorts. There is lots of toasting and many proclamations of friendship. The Chinese director apologises repeatedly for shouting so much. Little Fish the sound guy apologises for ripping out all my chest hairs every time he has to adjust the microphone, and I make everyone laugh by telling him they are my gift to him. Bumfeely the grip gets so drunk he can hardly stand, and there are multiple toasts from Chunky the A cameraman, Specs the B cameraman, Baldyhat the grip, and a bunch of crewmembers as yet unassigned nicknames. Because the two foreign men on the production are both called Jonathan, I am constantly addressed hectoringly as “CLEMENTS!” as if I am still at school.
I am pleased. I have not troubled anyone by being crap. I have hit my marks and rarely fluffed my lines. Having two cameramen reduces the number of pick-ups, because they can shoot a wide and a close-up on the same take, so if I get my lines right, we can be done in mere minutes, even if it takes them an hour to rig the lights. So here’s hoping that the producer gets what she wants, and that this Shandong travelogue turns out to be a backdoor pilot for an entire series on China. If it is, then there should be other provinces for me to explore.
“At the time of his death in 1993, Booth was already famous for having written one of the best-ever books about travelling in Japan, The Roads to Sata (1985)… With a degree of nerdish delight, I discovered that This Great Stage of Fools has an entire section of anime reviews, with Booth according the creators of the 1970s and 1980s a degree of respect that he refused to grant the purveyors of V-cinema.”
Over at All the Anime, I write up a posthumous collection of journalism by Alan Booth.
The Official Schoolgirl Milky Crisis Blog 