Monthly Archives: June 2024

Those Golden Days of Yore (1942)

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A bunch of old college friends assemble in Helsinki on the thirtieth anniversary of their graduation, revealing many of them to have gone down different paths from the one they expected. United by their “least” successful classmate Joonas (Urho Somersalmi, later the only prominent Finn in Sampo), it turns out that Esko the investor (Yrjö Tuominen) has been diddled out of his savings by a corrupt agent; doctor Risto (Hugo Hytönen) and judge Paavo (Ture Ara) have had a falling-out, unaware that their children have fallen in love with one another. Meanwhile, Paavo’s wife Agnes (Elsa Turakainen) is considering leaving him for the poet Seppo (Pentti Viljanen), a shady sort who is unaware that the father of the woman he has just impregnated is on his way to Helsinki to deliver some rough justice.

Despite supposedly never having made much of himself, it’s Joonas the everyman who fixes everyone’s problems, arranging a “courtroom” only partly in jest to adjudicate the dispute between his friends, making sure that Agnes is aware of Seppo’s craven nature, and badgering Esko’s swindler to return the money that he took in bad faith. At a celebratory party, Joonas sings of love and friendship, and the menfolk pile off home in a semi-drunken state, whereupon their taxi driver reveals that they still owe him for the fare thirty years ago, when they were also too busy singing the praises of their classmate Maj-Lis (Ruth Snellman) to remember to pay.

Maj-Lis is a bit of an afterthought, as is the seventh classmate Berta (Aino Lohikoski), because they are merely the wives of the guys, and this college reunion fable is really about how the menfolk have done for themselves. Setting aside that sexist implication, entirely understandable for the time, Oi, aika vanha, kultainen is an intriguing forerunner of the sort of Hollywood movies of latter years like Return of the Secaucus Seven and The Big Chill, which similarly revisit youthful dreams in middle age, and ask what went wrong… or right.

For a film that celebrates student days, it is strangely anti-intellectual, focussing on Joonas the rural gentleman, and the common ground of ylioppilas, which is to say, high school graduation, rather than the more rarefied air of university, to which several of the characters plainly went on to. But such a low-level achievement remains a sweetly egalitarian feature of modern Finnish society. Almost everyone can say they finished high school, which is why the nation still chooses on Mayday to invite everyone to put on their white graduation gaps and be smug about it together, as if the entire population was running through the streets wearing T-shirts that bragged they had once sat for some A-levels or a City & Guild in woodwork.

Adapted by Nisse Hirn from a Mätti Hälli novel that was still in galleys at the time, and would limp out some time after the movie that was based on it, Those Golden Days of Yore was regarded by director Orvo Saarikivi as his best work. Shot in the summer and autumn of 1941, but delayed in post-production by the outbreak of the Continuation War, it juxtaposes the youth of today with what would have been the youth of 1912, which is to say, the generation tthat had to live through the Revolution and Civil War. Hirn’s rumination on what had changed, and what hasn’t, hence has a melancholy turn to it, as one generation forged in war is forced to watch its children face it all over again. That, in fact, may even have been a factor in the production, allowing a middle-aged cast to dominate while the studio’s younger leads were presumably off making an entirely different film, possibly the same year’s The Wheel of Chance.

The anonymous reviewer in Ajan Suuta saw in it another aim, which was to educate rural audiences about the life and traditions of urban Helsinki, such as the vivid Mayday celebrations, captured here on location, and the student culture of compulsory bier keller sing-alongs, which I have always found unsettlingly regimented and Germanic. Much as such songs are inflicted on diners in Finnish restaurants by exuberant graduates, they similarly lurch unwelcome into the film here.

There is also footage of such new-fangled devices as a phone booth, the likes of which presumably had not been seen before out in the sticks. Amid the staged scenes of the cast’s celebration there also appears to be actual location work, snatched on the run, of such events as the traditional crowning of Havis Amanda, the naked statue on the Esplanade, with a student’s hat. Many critics were clearly in the sweet spot for such nostalgia, and grew misty-eyed at the restaging of songs from their own student days. The reviewer from Uusi Suomi, however, was having none of it, and observed: “Everything that is interesting in the story, ends already at the beginning, and usually it seems as if the whole production only happened in order to stage a few vocal performances.”

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Short History of Finland. He is watching all the Finnish films, so you don’t have to.

First Emperor Audio

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Tantor Media is releasing an audiobook version of my First Emperor of China, read by the wonderful Kathleen Li.

In 1974, Chinese peasants made the discovery of the century . . . Thousands of terracotta soldiers guarding the tomb of a tyrant.

Ying Zheng was born to rule the world, claiming descent from gods, crowned king while still a child. He was the product of a heartless, brutal regime devoted to domination, groomed from an early age to become the First Emperor of China after a century of scheming by his ancestors.

He faked a foreign threat to justify an invasion. He ruled a nation under twenty-four-hour surveillance. He ordered his interrogators to torture suspects. He boiled his critics alive. He buried dissenting scholars. He declared war on death itself.

Jonathan Clements uses modern archaeology and ancient texts to outline the First Emperor’s career and the grand schemes that followed unification: the Great Wall that guarded his frontiers and the famous Terracotta Army that watches over his tomb.

This revised edition includes updates from a further decade of publications, archaeology and fictional adaptations, plus the author’s encounter with Yang Zhifa, the man who discovered the Terracotta Army.

Villain Actor

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Ayumu Mashiro has given up on his dream of being a hero and settled down into the mundane life of a police officer… until one day he transforms into the legendary villain known as Zero! Now a mysterious voice is guiding him as he’s thrown into the battle between good and evil!

Out today, I believe, from Titan Comics, the first volume of Kentaro Harada and Mikumo Seto’s Villain Actor, a very Japanese take on superheroes and conspiracies. Motoko Tamamuro and I worked on the English script.

South End

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I meet the people I dubbed Victor and Margaret in the hotel elevator, where he is shouting at her.

“For God’s sake, woman. You have to tap the card on the thingy or it won’t go anywhere.”

She fumbles in her purse and he stares, fuming, at me, as if to say I don’t believe it.

“It’s all right,” I say. “If you’re heading down, the lift is already going that way, so you don’t need to tap your card.”

“How about that, dear?” says Margaret. “He speaks Chinese.” And she finished with a little smirk that I translate as: And he knows how the fecking elevator works.

The 260 express bus goes straight from Central, Hong Kong’s version of Liverpool Street, through the Aberdeen tunnel to the south side of the island. Where there were once skyscrapers and teeming millions, there are suddenly winding mountain roads and secluded beaches. The bus goes past Deepwater Bay, where the beach is protected by a shark net, and two superyachts lurk ominously in the roadstead, and then Repulse Bay, where what first appear to be bungalows turn out to be the tops of twenty-storey towers, reaching up the steep slopes from a tiny bit of flat land at sea level.

This is where the smarter bankers and brokers live, in little villas on the hill-tops. And there, at the end of the bus line, is Hong Kong’s Leigh on Sea, the seaside town of Stanley. A little shaded pier juts into the bay – it is ten o’clock in the morning and it is already crowded with half a dozen fishermen. There’s an old colonial government building now converted into a seafood restaurant, and – surprise, surprise – a pub called the Smuggler’s Rest that offers fish and chips.

I’m here because the internet makes it sound like a shopper’s paradise, “the place to buy all your souvenirs.” But it isn’t. There are exactly none of the souvenirs I want, nor is there the promised calligraphy master, as someone on the internet has confused “calligraphy master” with “guy who will write your name on a grain of rice.” There are polyester cheongsams and Bruce Lee T-shirts, and I want exactly none of it.

I share the bus on the way back with a soft-spoken broker from Edinburgh and his half-Chinese son, whose name I don’t catch, but I presume to be But Why, because it’s all he ever says. They’re off to Specsavers for But Why’s first ever eye test, and his Dad is explaining why there are men cutting down trees, and why there are cars in the road, and why the bus has stopped at traffic lights. What a life it must be, living by the sea but being able to be in Bank of China building 40 minutes away… except that is surely true of anyone who lives in Leigh as well.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China.

Babbling Brook

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“Zhao Tuo accepting the title conferred by the Han empire” — oil painting by Pan Jiajun, Liao Zongyi, Chen Keng, Zhai Shutong and Xu Guosheng, from Guangzhou’s Museum of the Palace of the Nanyue King.

Zhao Tuo was a general in the service of the First Emperor of China, whose march south left him as the satrap of much of what is now Guangdong. By the time the Qin empire fell, Zhao Tuo had practically gone native, proclaiming himself the ruler of a newly envisioned “Nan (Southern) Yue” – a federation of several of the peoples he had conquered, sprawling across Guangdong, Guangxi and into what is now north Vietnam. For this, he is remembered in Guangdong as the first proponent of Guangdong as an independent state beyond China, and in Vietnam as the first ruler of “Vietnam” – Nanyue, in fact, is pronounced Namviet this far south, and when rulers centuries later wanted to come up with a name for a kingdom a little bit further to the south of here, they reversed the characters to make Vietnam.

Zhao Tuo lived to be 103, and he was succeeded by his grandson, who ruled for ten more years, and was himself buried in a marvellous jade suit. By then, there had been some wily diplomacy from what was now the Han empire to the north, including a diplomatic marriage to a Chinese princess, which meant that the court and royal family were all at loggerheads about whether to go even more native, or to give up and allow themselves to be rebranded as the lords of China’s southernmost province. Eventually, it all ended in tears, with a palace coup and a war with the Han, and it all came apart soon after.

Zhao Tuo and his courtiers lived in an opulent palace, of which very little remains today except smashed pots and a few bits of wood. The museum signage tries very hard to make it sound fun, but glum Cantonese people mope around the site looking at holes in the ground. The most amazing thing for me is the king’s garden, because although none of the shrubbery remains, there is a very clear outline of his sculpted watercourse, a veritable babbling brook that snaked through the garden, and around a bend deliberately designed to create a little whirlpool. It turns out to be the first documented landscaped garden in Chinese history – I can feel the first chapter of a history of the Cantonese people taking shape.

For roughly a century, Guangzhou (Canton) was the centre of a little kingdom with its own unique style, mainly in doubled animal icons where one creature was blatantly visible, and its counterpart was twisted and hidden within the curlicues. Nanyue was known for its swords, and what appears to be evidence of sea trade with ancient Persia.

As with similar sites, like Chengdu, the presence of a quasi-independent state, however brief, and the finding of an iconic symbol to represent it – in this case, an entwined dragon and phoenix – is a hot political potato in China. Nobody wants to talk openly about the possibility of a federal China (an idea once supported by a young Chairman Mao), or of the linguistic reality that it is composed of eight separate “nations”. Ten years ago, such historical curiosities were celebrated as part of China’s glorious ethnic diversity. In the hardline 2020s, as mosques are homogenised and domestic differences denied, such discussions veer towards the Party’s forbidden realm of “historical nihilism.”

And so the museum at the Tomb of the Nanyue king tiptoes around the fact that this 1st century BC ruler, son of the long-lived first king, was the ruler of an independent southern Chinese state. Nor does the museum literature dwell on the actual history of Nanyue, instead wandering off on a time-wasting tangent about a collection of ceramic pillows that helps bulk out the museum collection.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China.

Prêt à Boire

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We drive an hour or so through the Xinjiang countryside and the vineyards of the Turfan Depression, to the Loulan Winery, which is not actually in Loulan at all, but has purloined its name. A private Chinese enterprise, it started up in the immediate years after the Deng Xiaoping economic reforms, transplanting French and Italian vines to Turfan soil. The chef de domaine is French: Grégory Michel, a man from Provence who could not possibly have wanted to live here, except for the handy fact that he is married to a Chinese woman and hence regards it as something of a cushy posting.

Grégory shows us around the huge factory, with giant steel vats towering thirty feet above us. We all wear little white coats, mine looking particularly petit since it is designed for a little girl, or so it seems. It’s a far cry from Ismayil’s hand-cranked meat grinder, repurposed to mash grapes. Grégory’s industrial-size, conveyor-belt macerator is big enough to throw a whole person into.

The Loulan Winery is clearly pushing for the luxury tourist market. We wander faux caves decorated with Buddhist art, and sit in an elegant VIP room, with posh chairs of knotted rope, and a giant slab of a Viking table.

Grégory plainly has no idea that a convoy of Buicks is about to descend on his factory, but brightens with each passing moment when he realises that we are the advance party for an entire posse of journalists, who are shadowing our travels in a long crocodile of cars. “I shall get zem drunque!” he promises me, as we wander the pipes and vats.

We do the interview to camera in French, which ought to help the programme look suitably cosmopolitan, and puts a smile on Grégory’s face, which is very difficult with a Frenchman.

The advance car of the convoy turns up at lunchtime, and we snatch the chance to get some shots of me driving it past some vineyards. Meanwhile, the usual too-many-cooks cacophony of the publicity team is at full throttle. Even though they approved my speech outline two days earlier, they have now decided that they wish that my speech was 20 minutes longer. Luckily for them, I am precisely the sort of guy who can write an extra page about Wine on the Silk Road in sixty minutes.

I do my speech about the stories associated with wine on the Silk Road, including the arrival of grapes in the Han dynasty, the sozzled poetry of Li Bai in the Tang, the Mongols drinking themselves to death, and so on. It fills the time nicely and gets several laughs. Grégory then takes to the stage while his minions pour samples for the crowd, and within another 20 minutes, everybody is thoroughly munted on Chinese wine.

The Loulan Cabernet Sauvignon is very nice. This being China, I have never actually been able to have it chilled before, and it is perfectly drinkable. Grégory has plainly done a good job on quality control, although it remains to be seen if he can turn a profit. He says that the cost of making a bottle of wine in China is roughly the same as making one in France, but the local market won’t bear high prices, and the country is so big that simply putting a bottle in every off-licence costs 1000 times as much. Most of the price label of a bottle of Loulan wine is taken up with marketing.

We are invited to dinner, but need to be in Urumqi for the evening, so we hitch a lift with our local fixer, Ali. Halfway to Turfan, the producer calls for a toilet break (we have long since learned not to ask for any more details), and I lurk outside the bogs with Ali, while he sucks on a cheroot that smells like someone has set fire to an old sofa.

“I realised yesterday,” says Ali, “how difficult your job is. You really have only a few seconds to get it right, and there are people on their phones, and shouting at the crew, and there are radios in the background, and people knocking on the door, and the sun moves – you actually become aware of the fact that the sun is moving and there are clouds in the sky… it’s very hard.”

He doesn’t know that he makes it worse by subjecting me to the Gipsy Kings for a two-hour drive through the desert, but I suppose it is his car.

Jonathan Clements is the author of The Emperor’s Feast: A History of China in Twelve Meals. These events appeared in Route Awakening S02E02 (2016).

Battle of the Bunnies

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The Bunny Hopping championships are underway this weekend in Jyväskylä, Finland, where various bunny trainers get to pit their creatures (with names like wrestlers and gladiators) against each other on courses assessed for height and length. Today was the preliminary rounds, tomorrow at ten we see the elite finals and the distance heats.

Bunny Hopping has been a thing for twenty years, starting over there in That Fancy Sweden before migrating first to the Swedish-speaking west coast of Finland.

“The Swedes have been doing it for longer,” seethed one competitor. “So they’ve got the jump on us.”

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Short History of Finland. Just when he thinks there is nothing left to talk about…

Royal Reviews

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“The strength of this book, and its contribution to military history, does not lie in its periodisation scheme, nor in its assignment of various causes and motives to Japan’s military leadership and citizens. Rather, it is author Jonathan Clements’s flair for rendering complex ideas into readable prose, coupled with his eye for little-known historical details that are relevant to the story of World War II, that make this book an apt introduction to the Asia-Pacific War, or a fascinating read for those who consider themselves to be experts.”

A glowing review of my book Japan at War in the Pacific from Paul D. Barclay appears in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society.

Meanwhile, Ales Kotva in the West Bohemian Historical Review also writes a long and thoughtful piece on the book, placing it in the context not only of what has past, but what might be to come.

The String Lectures

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Today, Mr Jiao is supposed to be showing me the remaining parts of the process for making hempen Bai Yi clothes.  We’ve been shooting the process out of order, so it’s only on day two that we get to harvesting the hemp itself. He takes us to a tiny little patch of weeds at the edge of a cornfield – it is no bigger than a minibus, but turns out to be the only hemp in the village. The director’s plans to have us wandering through acres of it has to be rewritten on the spot.

She decides instead to do an aerial drone pass of the pair of us reaching the patch, where three Bai women in their black wimples and blue tabards are hacking at the copse with sickles. But they are so quick at it that the director has to beg them not to cut it all down before we can get to the wide shot. I am told to stand in the field with Mr Jiao and talk to him about hemp, not the world’s most riveting subject. Our drone is supposed to sail over our heads, recording us and the village above us. Except suddenly I hear a sound like a hedge trimmer hitting a bucket of turtles, and realise that the overhead shot has failed to take into account the presence of terraces. Our Yuneec Q500 Typhoon has scythed its way several feet into a stand of corn before coming to a halt, meekly bleeping a distress signal. Mr Jiao fishes it out and returns it, minus one propeller. Luckily, we have spares.

Meanwhile, the wimple-wearing sickle-girls have got bored. One has wandered off entirely, and the other two are stripping some of the hemp stalks to make a basket. They have to be herded back to work. I manfully wade in with a sickle, and hack out a bunch of hemp stalks, stripping their leaves away and casting aside the long stalks. I put the leaves in a basket and head up to Mr Jiao, feeling pleased with myself.

“What are you doing with those?” he asks.

“These are to make the thread, right?”

“No,” he says. “We feed the leaves to the pigs. It’s the stalks that we use to make the thread.”

There is the sound behind me of furious crossings-out in the director’s notebook. As we move on to the huocao stripping and the hemp bark stripping. We are running so late now that the director just puts the camera on the ever-changing numbers of women in wimples, and tells them to get on with it.

“I can’t help but notice,” I hiss to her behind the camera, “that we have basically spent two days filming a documentary about string.”

At last, we have the result, or rather, one they made earlier. To great fanfare, I hold up Mr Jiao’s Bai Yi traditional tunic, a grotty thing which has not seen a steam iron in the last decade. Making it takes up half a harvest of hemp from their little plot, which turns out not to be theirs at all, but shared by the whole village, who must now wait six months for another crop.

He proudly puts his tunic on, while explaining that it used to be daily wear, but in a common refrain, “nobody can be arsed” and so now they only wear them on special occasions. He tops the ensemble with a blue belt and a man-bag made of leather, which he keeps his phone in.

“Suits you,” I can’t help saying, and he giggles in response.

We are already two hours late for the three-hour drive to Xizhou. The director pleads that we can’t stay for dinner, so we are waved off with a sack of pomegranates, some fresh-made poppadoms, and some nan bread. There is a cup of home-made chili sauce that goes with them, but our fixer drops it in a cowpat on the climb up the hill back to the minibus.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. These events featured in Route Awakening S02E04 (2016).

Back to Variety

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Back in March, Mark Schilling interviewed me as part of a piece he was writing for Variety. As ever, a long answer gets distilled into a couple of soundbites, so here is the unexpurgated version of my replies.

Deals are being signed between Japanese companies and their Korean and Chinese partners, but I’m hearing the pace is slower that might be expected due to everything from structural barriers (the Japanese production committee system) to political and cultural issues (Japanese fan criticism of Japanese anime adaptation of the Korean web novel “Solo Leveling” due to latter’s supposed anti-Japanese bias).

Ten years ago, Chinese investment was looking like it was going to be a game-changer in Japanese animation. We had Chinese companies bailing out troubled productions and snapping up ailing studios, and the potential market for Japanese animation in China was conservatively estimated at twenty times the size of that in Japan.

But China has become increasingly restrictive for foreign media. There was a lot of celebration in the foreign press about the likes of Kung Fu Panda and Mulan making it through to Chinese audiences, but they have come to be derided in China as unwelcome distortions of Chinese culture. The People’s Republic is becoming increasingly bullish about “cultural security” and there are calls in recent Five-Year Plans for it to become a “strong film nation”, in control of its own cultural content rather relying on whatever leaks in from overseas.

In 2020 China introduced the new Law on the Protection of Minors. There were a whole bunch of clauses in that law that gutted the potential for anime in China, including the banning of ownership of a streaming account for anyone under sixteen, and the forbidding of “obscenity, pornography, violence, cults, superstitions, gambling, inducements to suicide, terrorism, separatism, or extremism” for any viewers under eighteen. Now, of course, not all anime is sex and violence, but a good half of modern productions are aimed a late-teen demographic sweet-spot that is now forbidden.

That doesn’t destroy Chinese investment by any means, but it heavily skews the willingness of Chinese corporations to get involved in Japanese production. Pre-COVID, many were happy just to throw in some cash and distribute the result in their home territory. Now, they are well aware that if they pay out for the wrong sort of anime, their investment is worthless in the Chinese market. So, we get an increased focus on “anime with Chinese characteristics,” which won’t necessarily play well in Japan.

That’s the politics. Structurally, I think the real issue that we’re facing (and this applies to both Korea and China as outside investors) is an incredible choke-point in labour flows at the moment. There isn’t just the ongoing aftermath of COVID; there’s the fact that the big streamers like Amazon and Netflix have booked some studios up years in advance.

Meanwhile, Japan has introduced the new Work-Style Labor Reforms. These were actually passed six years ago, but they only phased in during 2020-1, and they severely curtail the amount of overtime that companies are allowed to authorise. Anime companies used to work miracles by working around the clock, but now they have their hands tied. They could bring in more freelancers, but freelancers are hobbled by changes to Japanese tax law (October 2023), which obliged them to collect sales tax on all their invoices. So, if you are a Korean or a Chinese company hoping to lean on Japanese labor, you have all these issues to contend with before someone’s even picked up a mouse.

It’s only then that we get to the content issues. Anime has been through many transformations in the last few decades, with a widely fluctuating relationship to overseas demand, or rather to the degree to which the producers were ready to acknowledge it. There was a point in the 2010s where it was all about making local, domestic content for Japan, and if foreigners liked it, too, that was gravy. Now anime companies talk about foreign investors as the “Black Ships” – comparing them to the American gunboats that rammed open the doors to Japan in the 1850s, imposing an international outlook on a nation that was trying to stay shut away in its own little world.

People are drawn to anime because it’s different. But so many overseas investors are trying to use anime talent to make shows that are focus-grouped to within an inch of their life to appeal to audiences in 70 countries at once. And if you are trying to please viewers in London and New York, Nairobi and Dubai, Buenos Aires and Beijing it can be incredibly limiting, artistically.

I don’t know if I want to get involved in the hoo-ha over Solo Leveling. Because you have people online getting offended at a hand gesture that they think means animators are making insinuations about Koreans having small penises, even though the studio that made the opening animation was Korean…. I mean, I am already boring myself. One of the corollaries of truly international, immediate streaming productions is that you now have the chance to offend several million people at once, and that they have the ability to make a stink about it in real time. Companies can be quick to pivot, not only in how they steer their content in production, but also in reaction to such drama after broadcast before their share prices drop. That’s the problem when everything is connected: everything is connected.

Do you consider Japan’s production committee system a co-production barrier? Or have foreign partners learned to live with it and even use it to their advantage?

In my experience, it is often a terrifyingly tedious chicane of obstacles, particularly with old shows where things that you could once agree with a handshake and a whisky now have to be run past a group of disparate strangers, some of whom are inheritors or purchasers of someone else’s intellectual property, with no real interest in making useful decisions. It’s one thing to be dealing with the original manga creator and the woman who runs the studio. It’s another to have to track down the dead producer’s ex-wife and the venture capitalist who accidentally purchased a dormant animation company.

I suppose the one way in which foreigners were able to use the production committee system to their advantage was by buying into one as a means of securing overseas rights without having to get into a bidding war. Manga Entertainment did that with Ghost in the Shell in 1995 in order to head off local competition in UK and European markets, and there were some similar shenanigans recently over who got to own the new Shinkai. So, in that sense, the ability to buy into the “ownership” of a new anime while it is being made can save a canny investor hundreds of thousands of dollars at the distribution end.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History.