Liisa Harju (Lea Joutseno) is a quick-witted, vivacious girl from Savo who has been posted to Ostrobothnia, the uppity west coast of Finland where the locals think that she is no better than she ought to be. She thinks she is just being friendly to the handsome local doctor Eino Korpinen (Tapio Nurkka), but their increasingly flirtatious interactions meet with umbrage and annoyance from local womankind, who regard Eino as theirs to fight over. In particular, her arrival seems to irritate the school principal Mr Iipo (Eino Jurkka), whose snooty wife Kristiina (Elli Ylimaa) expects Eino to propose to her insufferable daughter Ester (Rakel Linnanheimo, sister not only to the more famous Regina, but also to the woman who is playing her own mother!).
We have, in a sense, been here before. The tensions and conflicts in Varaventtiili are almost exactly the same as those in Suomi-Filmi’s earlier The Women of Niskavuori (1938), and indeed, Niskavuori’s fearsome matriarch Olga Tainio has a far less substantial role here as a sulking matron. Both films are based on novels written two decades after Finnish women won the right to vote in 1907, grappling in their own way with the impact and attitudes of the first generation to grow up in such an environment. Whereas The Women of Niskavuori ultimately presented its go-getting lady teacher as a clueless, home-wrecking hussy, Safety Valve is more sympathetic to the fact that times are changing. True enough, Liisa doesn’t turn up and steal another woman’s husband, but in the eyes of the townsfolk, she pretty much steals another woman’s potential fiancé. The difference is that Eino is there for the wooing, and if the local girls don’t like it, they’d better up their game and bring something to the party.
Safety Valve wonderfully encapsulates the town-versus-country issues that lie beneath many a Finnish movie of the era, here landing firmly on the side of urban urbanity. The Ostrobothnians think of the people of Savo as uncultured hicks, whereas the Savonians find themselves in close proximity to the growing new towns of Kuopio and Tampere, and Jyväskylä, the “Athens of the North”, the site of the first Finnish-speaking teacher-training college, and hence the engine that churned out thousands of women like Liisa to go out into the world and force gurning farmers’ children to learn about stuff.
The children are the low point of the film – listless child-actors bored by their own lines in the scenes where Lea Joutsena is obliged to pretend to be teaching them. Meanwhile the locals harp on about “traditional values” and the “way things are done” to a ridiculously obsessive degree, acting as if they are preserving the heritage of Western civilisation, but coming across like drunken tramps fighting over a cardboard box in a skip – much of the drama circles around whether the teaching staff are allowed to use the school sauna.
An intriguing subtext of the film revolves around the application of reading and writing. Eino’s true love is destined to be the woman who reciprocates his bizarre interest in “a volume of Chinese poetry, translated into German”, while Liisa’s constant companion is her “safety valve” – the diary that allows her to blow off steam about some of the outrageously dismissive things that the local women say to her.
At least Liisa isn’t left alone to face the yokels. Her fellow teacher Rauha is played by the lovely Irma Seikkula, still displaying the vim and poise that brought her fame as the similarly pro-active Juurakon Hulda (1937). There are moments when the film threatens to break out into genuine humour, with Liisa and Rauha as a pair of icon-busting jokers, like Melissa McCarthy and Sandra Bullock telling everyone to go eff themselves, but sadly that potential never quite manifests.
Safety Valve was based on Hilja Valtonen’s debut novel The Safety Valve of the Young Teacher (1926), a roman à clef about the life of a young woman transplanted to a distant Ostrobothnian town, that had somehow made its way into eight reprintings. This adaptation by scriptwriter Yrjö Kivimiehen sets the action in a timeless rural setting entirely untroubled by the rumblings of the Continuation War that clearly concerned the production team. While the cast of Valentin Vaara’s film go about their business without a care in the world, the backstage crew are dashing feverishly to get the film in the can and into cinemas before wartime austerity bites again – a behind-the-scenes panic that can largely be held responsible for some rushed shots, shaky camera work from a moving train, and substandard location work, clearly shot on cloudy days.
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Short History of Finland. He is watching all the Finnish films, so you don’t have to.
Mr Wang’s studio is literally next door to our hotel, which gives everybody a lie-in. I start to wish, however, that I had never got out of bed, since Mr Wang’s studio appears to specialise in pictures of pets. Why UNESCO accorded him intangible cultural heritage, I’ll never know, because his output seems to include funny pandas, twee scenes of traditional mountains-and-water, and the silk-weave equivalent of a painting of two dogs playing billiards.
The people in Mr Wang’s studio are heartily sick of film crews, and would really much prefer to be left to get on with their work. Mr Wang makes himself scarce when we arrive, thereby depriving us of the chance to interview anyone but his flunkies. But they tsk and tut and bend over their looms as I wander around them, enthusing to camera about the not-particularly-lost art of kesi, in a single 45-second speech that I manage to get right more often than not.
We drop in on a dye factory for more B-rolls, and then stop off at a water-town to send up the drone to get pictures of little pagodas and winding, flagstoned streets. This particular one, Shantang, stretches along either side of a seven-mile stretch of canal, and is infested with pushy rickshaw drivers and people who want to shout hello and/or stand behind the camera peering into the viewfinder.
The day finishes up back in Suzhou proper, next to another picturesque canal populated by fan shops, ice cream parlours and dumpling shops. We’ve come to see Chen Yingqin, a lady whose kesi is way, way better than Mr Wang’s. She seems to spend most of her time telling clueless customers in her shop that, no, the “watercolour” on the wall is not a watercolour at all, but actually an image composed of thousands of silk threads. She also does calligraphy, replicating everything from the pressure of the ink brush to little imperfections in the characters. I ask about one picture, of a Chinese landscape, and she confesses that it took her nine months.
The prices reflect this. A square embroidered image of a single Chinese character, (Chan, which is to say, what the Japanese call Zen), the size of an LP, retails at a steep £3000. She also makes wallets at £100 a throw, and similar luxury goods for the super-rich.
A neatly “printed” series of characters on gold silk is recognisable to me from the simple layout, even before I get close enough to read it, or its title.
“Is that the Heart Sutra?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says, flabbergasted. “I am slightly disconcerted that you know that.”
She is giggly and vivacious in her interview, which makes a nice change from stage-struck old men, and seems genuinely sorry to see us go. She even laughs along when the producer and I have a fight about the statue on the mantelpiece, with her maintaining that it is Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy, and me maintaining that it is Buddha himself.
“If it’s Guanyin,” I protest, “then where are her tits?”
Apparently it is Buddha. Although Guanyin is also Buddha. It’s complicated.
To Japan, where four twenty-something university buddies have been charged with a new type of crime – illegally selling anime production materials from Strike Witches. To be clear, they weren’t ripping Blu-rays or scanlating manga. They were making copies of sketches, in-between drawings and backgrounds, and then flogging them online, racking up around 10 million yen (£52,000) over the last eight years.
According to the Yomiuri Shinbun, one of the defendants argued “It’s not a copy, so its not a violation” (Fukasei de wa naku, ihan de wa nai), which is, I might note, a use of the Japanese plain verb-form in front of the police, where the polite form might have been a better idea.
Production materials used to be regarded as industrial waste – something the companies couldn’t give away. Carl Macek famously took a container-load of Akira cels and sketches off the hands of its producers, to give away as freebies with the VHS release. Now we’re living in an era when production materials are not only valued in film criticism, but bought and sold as collectables, and now, it seems, even faked by would-be entrepreneurs. The copyright implications of the case, in terms of the notional value of scrap paper and literal bin-ends, is going to be fascinating.
Now, you may be wondering what it is about a newly resurrected nineteen-year-old franchise that excites such activities at all. Well, Strike Witches isn’t just your average under-dressed-girls-with-guns-and-rocket-feet-fighting-alien-invaders anime, because it also takes place in an alternate universe World War Two, in which the nations of the world stop trying to kill each other and instead use teenage magical girls to hold off a global threat. Its reimagining of real-world war heroes as spell-casting schoolgirls in their underpants led to some wonderful real-world situations, such as queries to the Finnish embassy in Tokyo in 2012, asking whether or not the ambassador was aware that the veteran “Terror of Morocco”, Aarne Juutilainen (1904–76) was now a 21-year-old cat-girl in the manga spin-off.
The Finnish embassy merrily played along, wishing Juutilainen’s aerial ace sister Eila a happy birthday on its Twitter feed, and taking the opportunity to educate social media about how to say it: “Hyvää syntymäpäivää Eira Ilmatar Juutilaiselle!” Ah yes, said the enthusiastic embassy tweeter, whose switch from r to l in the character’s name implies a familiarity only with the Japanese materials: Juutilainen transforms to Juutilaiselle when it’s in the allative case, one of the Finnish language’s many exciting grammar forms. Let me tell you all about… [That’s enough – Ed.]
Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article first appeared in NEO #243, 2024.
Kiyomizu-dera, Kifune Shrine, and Adashino Nenbutsu-ji — to most these places are merely tourist hotspots in the busy city of Kyoto… but each is hiding a dark history, tales of ghosts and bloodshed! In this volume come and hear the true stories of these haunted places, and the creatures that lurk just out of sight…
Out tomorrow from Titan Manga, Yumeya’s Shadows of Kyoto, translated by Motoko Tamamuro and me.
At a loose end in Shanghai, I dropped by the site of the first congress of the Communist Party of China, a nondescript building at what used to be 106 Rue Wantz in the French Concession. A small museum inside chronicles the various individuals and events that literally got that Party started, although most of the Chinese visitors were keener to have their photograph taken by the entirely everyday front door with its “106” nameplate.
I was more excited by the presence of a bona fide First Congress of the Communist Party of China gift shop, where I shopped in a frenzy for my First Congress of the Communist Party of China umbrella, my First Congress of the Communist Party of China pen, my First Congress of the Communist Party of China tote bags, and my First Congress of the Communist Party of China fridge magnet. There was even an I’ve Been to the First Congress of the Communist Party of China frame outside, where I had my photograph taken, loaded with First Congress of the Communist Party of China swag, while Chinese onlookers giggled nervously and said: “Heehee, foreigner.”
For author Lin Chunfeng, I am one of millions of people taking part in the subject of his new book, Red Tourism in China: Commodification of Propaganda. I have always been interested in some of the big Communist displays of statuary and commemoration, such as the Martyrs Cemetery in Shanghai and the Martyrs Park in Guangzhou, but Lin’s book examines such sites as part of a growing and, in some sense, relatively recent phenomenon, as the Communist Party attempts to merge the disparate disciplines of education, propaganda, national cohesion and social harmony. Today, Red Tourism is a massive component of Chinese leisure travel, amounting to 540 million visits a year, or 20% of all domestic Chinese tourism. To put this in context, private investment in tourist experiences in Mao’s old base at Yan’an has topped 50 billion yuan, ten times the amount spent to build Shanghai Disneyland.
Not every venture is a resounding success. Lin recounts the folly of the great golden “Mega Mao” that was erected by an earnest entrepreneur in Henan province in 2016, only to be pulled down at the orders of the authorities shortly before it was completed. The precise reason is unclear – possibly, the Trumpish extreme of the golden Mao was too much even for garish Chinese pop culture, with social media commentators archly commenting on its evocation of Shelley’s Ozymandias. Others pointed to the bitter irony of a statue glorifying the Sun in Our Hearts in the province that arguably suffered the most at the hands of his social experiments. The truth probably lies somewhere in between, tied up in complex issues over patriotic land use and the unsanctioned rezoning of an agricultural area.
A large chunk of Lin’s book is taken up with a discussion of the history and culture of tourism and propaganda in China. He points out that ancient progressions by emperors and princes around the country were often ostensibly undertaken as acts of religious pilgrimage, although the “long, grand journey of the monarch to the ceremony site was often just as propagandistic as the ritual ceremonies for legitimating monarchical power.” And Lin points out that it’s not just the monarchs who are putting on a performance. “Tourism at the grassroots,” he suggests, “has gone mostly unmentioned in both historical records and modern retellings, or at the most, framed as celebrations of holidays along with other rituals and ceremonies that somehow involved travel.”
In part, this performance of pilgrimage can be laid at the feet of Confucianism, which Lin terms an “anti-leisure” philosophy that early tourist companies in China had to wilfully fight among the middle classes, convincing them travel for fun was both desirable and appropriate. Paramount among such entrepreneurs was Chen Guangfu (1881-1976), the Ivy-league alumnus who founded China’s first locally run travel agency back in his native Shanghai, the China Travel Service (CTS). It was Chen who came up with the idea of giving away 20,000 travel pamphlets at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, hiring the journalist Edgar Snow to knock up five different accounts of travel tips, framed as anti-Japanese polemics.
After the end of WW2, tourism was first pushed by a professor from the Department of Foreign Relations of the University of Politics, who argued that it was “not merely a form of education, but a very important part of education in general.” Here, Lin tracks the interests in education and propaganda (a word that he carefully argues has nowhere near as negative an implication in China as it does in the West) of both the Communists and Nationalists, particularly when it came to promoting the commemoration of the war against the Japanese, and pointedly celebrating 1950s China as a melting pot of multiple ethnic groups. Lin identifies some of the mass movements of the Cultural Revolution as a prototype of today’s “Red Tourism”, noting the swift declaration of the Great Rally – a series of sites with revolutionary importance, which no true Red Guard should miss out on. Such fanatic pilgrimages of the Party faithful were eventually shut down by the Party itself in 1967, after several people suffocated on overcrowded trains on their way to lay wreaths at sites like Yan’an and Jinggangshan.
As China “opened up” following the death of Mao, tourism was one of the first topics on the mind of the reformer Deng Xiaoping, who had his beady eye on the potential of a permanently renewable resource of American hard currency. “If each foreign tourist would spend $1000 in China,” he argued in 1978, “with a total of 10 million tourists visiting China every year, China could earn $10 billion.” But Deng’s vision, of course, was a more traditional form of leisure travel – the Great Wall (which was soon opened to visitors on multiple locations), the Terracotta Army, the Forbidden City and whatnot. For many foreigners, the experience of China would be a once-in-a-lifetime whistlestop fortnight of bussing, banquets and an overload of temples.
Official endorsement of tourism as a patriotic and educational Party phenomenon, would not come until 1991, two years after the Tiananmen Square protests caused the authorities to question if modern youth was on-message. Lin smartly relates it to a generational conflict, not only over a young China that had not experienced the formative conflicts, but of the “Little Emperors” born after the instigation of the One-Child Policy, regarded by some sectors as snooty snowflakes with no recollection of true hardship. The actual term Red Tourism (hongse lüyou) is first seen in a magazine article in 1996.
Lin has some great number-crunching on the economics of Red Tourism, which is often counter-intuitive or unexpected. He notes that many sites are piously free-entry, which disincentivises everyday tour guides from bringing their groups there in search of the usual rake-off. Conversely, a suitably high-level Redness in local sites can hoist the local economy way above its expected height –bringing in amenities usually reserved for much higher-tier cities. Apparently, the average Baskin-Robbins franchisee will not get out of bed for a third-tier city, unless it is guaranteed to have a regular influx of middle-class tourists. Tutting over his noodles in Yan’an, Lin observes that they have cost him three times as much as they would in the major metropolis at Baoji.
Lin’s chief case study is the city of Yan’an, the site of Mao’s 1930s guerrilla resistance, once favoured because it was remote, inhospitable and inaccessible. Now it is a mecca of Red Tourism, blessed by ultra-modern transport links – starting in 2025, it will be just 2.5 hours from Xi’an by bullet train – where the economic impact leisure travel has outstripped agriculture in the local economy. As is true all over China, out-of-work farmers form a huge labour pool for the tourist trade, which is one of the reasons why female soldiery is over-represented in the local re-enactment shows.
And what shows! Lin zooms in on Yan’an Defence, an explosive military spectacular re-enacting life in the Communist bolthole, interrupted by a sudden assault by Nationalist bombers. Originally performed four times a day to appreciative and occasionally fearful crowds, it was one of the lynchpins of the Yan’an experience, unwisely boasting in its advertising of featuring “real guns and real bullets” – one of which killed a performer in 2010. Lin gets to see Yan’an Defence at the height of its glory days; today, apparently, it is only put on once a day, with a reduced complement of “one horse and three donkeys.”
A similar celebration of the Battle of Taierzhuang requires so much explosives per performance that it cannot possibly operate without government contacts. Lin reports on multiple daily onstage injuries for the performers, who must wade through the pyrotechnics of 800 blanks and 80 explosions per show, rattling their eardrums and scorching their costumes. In 2014, preparations for a re-enactment of the Liaoshen Campaign are marred by an unscheduled explosion which claims the lives of two pyro-technicians, two workers, and three Party officials who happened to be walking past.
Lin’s reporting is not only a captivating glimpse of the lives of such performers, often uneducated, unemployed surplus labourers, exposed to the elements, replaying traumatic military actions several times a day without holidays or injury pay. He also delves into the way that such disasters were “handled” through the use of “soft news” (ruanwen), paid newspaper content that is now largely discouraged in China, although certain Chinese institutions are happy to throw money at it overseas, outside the Party’s jurisdiction.
In such remote areas, Lin smartly follows the money, investigating the way in which the authorities will happily help foster a Red Tourism site as long as their grants return double the investment. They will hand over a million dollars for Famous Pond Mao Once Looked At experience – not as frivolous as it sounds; such a site is one of the barrel-scraping 82 locations in the Chairman’s Shaoshan birthplace – but only if they see two million returned in the form of local infrastructure, transport links, job creation and businesses.
Lin’s book is an engaging introduction to the topic of Red Tourism, and presents a long view of it, dropping back in on his Yan’an case study to observe how it evolves over the years. This is a much overlooked element of so many studies in tourism, which tend to regard each phenomenon as fixed and unchanging. He returns late in the book to sample Golden Yan’an, a new “old” town built on expropriated farmland, and seemingly offering employment to the former farmers by getting them to dress up in a multi-faceted Chinese history experience.
Lin points out the economic issues that are associated with this, as policy wonks neglect to mention to the farmers that the very prosperity they are promised is fated to push up local prices, and devalue the compensation they received for their land, as well as the wages they might earn working on the site. He also has a stern critical eye for Golden Yan’an as a modular experience, with one street evoking the Song dynasty, and another the Qing, while a third recreates the era of Yan’an as a revolutionary headquarters. Shrewdly, Lin points out the difference that the visitors themselves can bring as participants, noting the contrast between an almost deserted street populated by pious statues, versus a vibrant marketplace thronging with cosplaying visitors.
It’s difficult to get the visitors to provide their own entertainment, of course, but sometimes it pays dividends. In its heyday, Yan’an Defence would even charge visitors $2 to dress up as revolutionaries and cower from the bullets onstage, rather than in the bleachers. In a perfect world, the visitors can bring their own passion – one of the most moving sites I have visited outside China is Ellis Island in New York, not for the museum to be found there, but for the emotional reaction of the many visitors, confronted with the fact that they are standing on the very spot where their ancestors became Americans.
In the case of Lijiang, famously lampooned by Chen Qiufan as a site of ersatz memories, I have witnessed its rapid transformation from ancient town into classy shopping mall, and as the initial franchises pulled out, into a glorified theme park like everywhere else, that charges an admission fee to the town itself, as if admitting there is nothing worth buying there. But even then, there are hacks and subversions. In 2017, I heard that Lijiang had become the hook-up capital of China, with travelling swingers cheerfully buying their three-day town admission, uncaring about the lack of night-time entertainment, because they were lighting up dating apps like a Christmas tree and meeting each other for sordid orgies. So, at least, I was told by a girl in a bobble hat, halfway up a mountain in Guizhou. Is it still true, seven years on? A lot can change in the world of Chinese tourism.
Two-hour drive out into the hinterland to Chenlu, the heart of the Chinese ceramics industry for the last two thousand years. This valley dotted with chimneys once had a solid square mile of little kilns churning out pottery for the Tang and Song dynasties. Master Wang Zhanjun, a crew-cut slowly transforming into an afro, shows me around his showroom, and the walk-in kiln where he still fires pots in the traditional method. He talks us through the glazes and the temperatures and their fluctuating fortunes, as well as the stories behind several “trick” items that we see on sale in the Xi’an Muslim quarter all the time.
One is the Phoenix Chirping Kettle, said to have been invented to make one of Empress Wu’s dreams come true. It has been designed so that the wine inside it makes a whistling noise when it comes out, which is apparently cause for marvelling in the Tang dynasty.
Another is a wine jug designed to protect Tang princelings from poisoners. Anything poured in the top goes into a reservoir. The wine that actually comes from the spout is secretly filled from the bottom, thereby stopping one’s enemies from topping one up with something toxic. Still another is a “magic” jug that has to be filled from the bottom rather than the top – the result of an intricate maze of internal bulkheads.
The best has to be the Justice Cup, a green receptacle with a dragon’s head rearing inside it. Thanks to something to do with science, a certain amount of liquid will stay inside it, even though there is a hole at the bottom — as the “Pythagorean Cup”, it was a well-known party trick in Ancient Greece. But a single drop over a prescribed maximum, and the entire contents will flow out through the bottom. The cup was said to have been presented to the Tang prince Li Mao by his father, the Xuanzong Emperor, at his wedding to the beautiful Yang Yuhuan. Xuanzong asked the bride what she thought the cup meant, and she replied that it had to be something to do with all things in moderation, lest overindulgence lead to the loss of all.
This is particularly ironic, since the Xuanzong Emperor ended up forcing Li Mao to divorce Yang Yuhuan, who as Yang Guifei, became his mistress, consort and eventual wrecker of the Tang Empire. No, before you ask, still no takers for The Song of Everlasting Sorrow, my book on the subject that has been failing to attract any publisher’s interest for over a decade now. Its time will come; there is no hurry. For my part, I spent much of the day scaring the producers with stories of the atrocities of Empress Wu, which amounts to some small revenge on them for all the times they have talked about their bowel movements at breakfast.
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. These events featured in Route Awakening S02E06 (2016).
“Clements writes accessible narrative histories of East Asia designed for a general readership. In this book, his informative accounts of time and place are interleaved with human interest stories written in a no-nonsense style to provide a bird’s-eye view of the challenging terrain that is Taiwan’s past.”
China history heavyweight Antonia Finnane writes a long and appreciative piece for Inside Story about my book Rebel Island. I am fangirling a bit.
One of the earliest pictures in the Wellington Koo Museum has an innocence to it that belies its importance. It shows our hero as a young teenager clad in a Manchu robe, clutching a straw boater and proudly leaning on his bicycle. This is the young Koo, a student at Shanghai’s Anglo-Chinese School, at precisely the time that his lifelong interest in justice was about to begin. For it was on that bicycle that Koo rode off to school, and on that bicycle that he was stopped and fined for riding on the pavement, whereas the English boy riding just ahead of him was waved through without a word. It was the young Koo’s first encounter with extraterritoriality, that weird concept that permitted foreigners in Qing China to be treated and tried under their own laws, rather than those of the Chinese among whom they dwelled.
The encounter would propel Koo far away from home, to St John’s College in Shanghai and ultimately to Columbia University in New York, where his PhD thesis on “The Status of Aliens in China” would make him the first Chinese subject to earn a doctorate in the United States. He would return to his native China to become the English secretary to the ill-fated warlord and would-be emperor Yuan Shikai. With the end of the Great War in 1918, Koo travelled to put China’s case at the Paris Peace Conference. Despite technically being outranked by the delegation leader, his eloquence and youth propelled him into the public eye, in several forceful speeches in which he argued, unsuccessfully, that the German colony of Shandong should be returned to the Chinese, and not its Japanese occupiers. When Koo’s argument was rejected, he famously refused to sign the Treaty of Versailles on China’s behalf. It was, he would argue in later life, a turning point in history. If the victorious powers had done right by Shandong, Koo believed, China’s liberals would never have embraced the temptations offered by Communism, and the history of the twentieth century might have been very different.
Koo would become China’s representative to the League of Nations, and soon the Chinese ambassador to the United States. In the stormy 1920s, he served on several occasions as China’s prime minister or acting premier, and had to flee for his life from an angry warlord, relying with cringeworthy irony on the very extraterritoriality that he had fought so hard to dismantle by seeking sanctuary with the British at Weihaiwei. He briefly enjoyed a period as a wanted man with a Nationalist bounty on his head, before another warlord, the infamous Zhang Zuolin, intervened on his behalf and had him restored to his diplomatic career.
During World War Two, Koo served as the Chinese ambassador to the United Kingdom, where he initially arrived to find himself facing openly hostile opposition. His reputation preceded him as an advocate of China’s rights to self-determination, and he received short shrift when he dared to suggest that the British might want to send reinforcements to Hong Kong in case of a Japanese attack. It was in his tenure, however, that the British came to increasingly rely on Chinese help in the war effort, and it was in his presence that a 1943 treaty was signed in which Britain revoked all extraterritorial rights in China. He would also get to sign another document of great personal value to him, when he put his name on the San Francisco Treaty that formally defined the conditions of the Japanese surrender. His signature was also the first to grace the charter of the newly founded United Nations.
Koo supposedly retired in 1956, only to embark upon a second career as a judge in the international court of justice in The Hague. He would rise to the rank of its vice-president before his second, and more permanent retirement in 1967.
All of which brings me to Jiading, a sleepy water-town criss-crossed by canals, so far out in the Shanghai suburbs that it is at the very end of the number 11 metro line. Jiading was Koo’s birthplace in 1888, when it was still a separate county from Shanghai proper, and his museum sprawls across a converted local temple, which it shares with another museum to the politician Hu Juewen, another local boy. But it’s Koo who has the real pulling power as a local hero – somehow present at some of the most important moments of the twentieth century, and blessed with a biting wit and a powerful eloquence in both English and Chinese.
Funded and maintained, at least in part, by Koo’s own descendants, the museum is a fitting tribute to Jiading’s most famous son. Its familial connections have allowed for some intimate and unexpected touches, including gifts exchanged among members of the Koo family, and gallery celebrating the bit of his life that so many biographers gloss over, the long years of his happy retirement. The materials end with Koo’s personal diary, left open at its final entry on the day he died.
I found myself thinking that Wellington Koo would make a fantastic subject for a book, although of course, I have already written one about him, available in both English and Chinese, that was scandalously not included in the big cabinet of Koo-ology near the exit. But Jiading’s Wellington Koo Museum told me a bunch of things I didn’t know about my hero, or possibly a bunch of things that I once knew and since forgot in the fifteen years since I wrote my book. One wonders, as with the similar secretarial exploits of Wang Jingwei, how many of the famous quotes from certain historical figures (in Koo’s case, Yuan Shikai; in Wang’s, Sun Yat-sen) were actually the work of their more eloquent assistants.
There has already been a Wellington Koo movie – My 1919, which rather floridly dramatises the events of the Paris Peace Conference. But there are many more elements of his life that would lend themselves just as readily to a mini-series, putting its protagonist right in the middle of some of the most iconic moments of the twentieth century. The museum in Jiading that bears his name functions as a walk-in producer’s pitch, showing just how exciting and momentous a life Wellington Koo managed to lead.
To Japan, where the gaming company Cyber Agent has published its guidelines for employees using AI – a deliberate attempt, it seems, to establish rules and etiquette for a new age where machines do so much of the heavy lifting.
Employees at CyberAgent are forbidden from entering “existing works, author names, works, celebrities, or celebrity names into their prompts.” This amounts to a recognition that saying “I want Seven Samurai, but they’re all badgers led by Nicole Kidman” could be seen as an infringement of the copyright in Kurosawa’s movie, and the image rights of Keith Urban’s wife.
It was only last month (NEO #240) that this column was wringing its hands about the effect of machine translation in the world of subtitling and translation. But we’re back again, it seems, in record time, because so-called “artificial intelligence” works its way into so many parts of the production chain.
The company behind Darwin’s Game and Idoly Pride, CyberAgent has been extending its tentacles throughout modern media for some time, in a lucrative tie-up deal with Kadokawa, the establishment of an anime investment arm, and even the acquisition of a theatre company – live events, of course, being the one thing that can’t be cloned, pirated or replicated, forming an ever-growing sector of the anime-adjacent media mix.
This latest announcement represents an important inflection point in the history of AI in media, as it’s something of a line drawn in the sand. CyberAgent is effectively saying that it recognises machines can’t really come up with anything original, and while it’s happy to use them in various parts of the process, it is wary of wading too far into areas that are liable to be subject to legislation in future.
Even though an “image board”, what you might call a scrap book of magazine cuttings and tearsheets, is a commonplace artefact in creative industries, CyberAgent’s creators are forbidden from creating the digital equivalent. No copyrighted images; no photos of the actress that you’d like your lead to look like; no film poster from someone else’s company that sums up the mood you’re looking for. When they write the prompts for their machines, they have to keep things generic, which will keep the results generic.
It implies they’ll make use of AI for harmless backgrounds like “give me a mountain vista” or “a desert with a temple on a hill”, but nothing that might get them sued. Unless it looks like a famous painting of a desert with a temple on a hill…
Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article first appeared in NEO #241, 2024.
A caption in a newspaper in 1938 causes unexpected ructions when its editor Marja Kauria (Helena Kara) lists herself as the daughter of the late philanthropist Walter Timelius (Hugo Hytönen). His spinster sister Agda (Salli Karuna) marches down to the editorial office to demand a retraction. Marja, however, sticks to her guns, and announces that she is, indeed, Timelius’ secret daughter.
A series of flashbacks reveal the whole story – that in 1914, Marja was the product of an affair between Walter and his housekeeper, Iida (Emma Väänänen). Refusing to marry Walter, Iida instead accepts a proposal two year later from the artist Eemel (Oiva Luhtala), who dies in 1927 after the couple have a son, Marja’s half-brother Ville (Lauri Mehto). When Walter dies in 1931, he leaves a large sum of money to Iida, and his family agree to sweep the matter under the carpet.
Marja develops a strong attraction to Hans Timelius (Olavi Reimas), her cousin. Aunt Agda does everything she can to keep the pair apart, eventually funding Hans’s postgraduate research in America in order to keep him away from her. Eventually, when she discovers that Marja and Hans are still keeping in touch, she confronts Marja, claiming that Hans is not her cousin, but her half-brother, yet another illegitimate child of Walter, who had been adopted by his relatives. This however, is not true, because Hans is really Agda’s son, born of a liaison with an artist (it’s always an artist) and adopted by family members to spare her blushes. Finally, Marja and Hans are reunited, and all is… er… well…
Well, I should say, marrying your cousin is not the brightest of ideas, particularly in Finland where it appears to happen rather often. Your correspondent can only imagine yet another time-jump, this time to an allergy-prone Finnish milksop in the 21st century, complaining through his sneezes that his family had a lot of consanguinity in it.
Preserving the pointlessly complex flashbacks and time-jumps of Seere Salminen’s original 1938 stage play, the production of Neljä naista was disrupted by the Continuation War, so much so that scripted summery activities had to be switched for skiing and snowball fights. But there’s no accounting for taste – the Finnish press loved it, and was even prepared to forgive the scatty structure.
Helena Kara is strikingly strong-willed and confident as Marja, in what would be her last film role with Suomi-Filmi before she defected to Suomen Filmiteollisuus with her husband, the director Hannu Leminen.
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 Official Schoolgirl Milky Crisis Blog 