Author Archives: ixarette

60 Years Ago: Mannerheim's Last Battle

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From Mannerheim: President, Soldier, Spy by Jonathan Clements, available now in the UK and in the US.

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Mannerheim began his eighties still talking of responsibility and struggle. As he saw it, Finland still ran the risk of drifting irrevocably too far to the left, and he was determined to hold this off by the last means available to him – writing his memoirs.

‘Was it not my duty,’ he wrote, ‘now that the West seemed to have forgotten the gallant Finnish people, to communicate to all our friends near and far what I knew about its indomitable battle for all that a nation holds sacred, and had not my countrymen a right to hear my interpretation of the causes that had led to the position where Finland now stood?’

His decision was unsurprising, but also unwelcome to some of his successors. Mannerheim’s avowed intent was to educate the Cold War world about recent Finnish history, but his memoirs were sure to attract the attention of readers back home. President Paasikivi, in particular, fretted that his illustrious predecessor would write a tell-all book that was sure to land Finland in hot water with the Soviet Union, with which relations were still strained. Mannerheim did exactly as Paasikivi had feared but was steered into being less forceful in his published comments on Bolshevism and ‘Reds’, and also in his attitude towards the Swedes. In private, Paasikivi grumbled that if he paid heed to every one of the field marshal’s grim warnings then everyone in Finland might as well walk into the forest with a pistol and shoot themselves in the forehead.

Despite the politicians’ concerns, Mannerheim was left to write his memoirs in peace with the help of a small staff of assistants. He seems to have originally planned on doing so in Kirkniemi, a manor house he had bought in what is now the Helsinki suburbs, but continued ill health lured him out of Finland to Switzerland in the late 1940s. ‘If on this earth there is a place to be found which is dedicated to forgetting,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘it is Switzerland, with all the convenience which makes life easy, hotels, communications, order, food and the beauty of the landscape, but above all, the mountains, the Alps which give the impression of being somewhere in the atmosphere, above the clouds, between earth and sky.’ Mannerheim also observed that Switzerland, unlike so many other parts of Europe, had been spared the damage and destruction of the war – it was, in many ways for him, a reminder of the lost Europe of his younger days.

His circle of true friends, always small, dwindled predictably in old age. ‘I begin to see only graves around me,’ he commented, although his dry melancholy was economical with the truth. In fact, he spent much time in the company of a new lady companion, the elegant Countess Gertrud Arco-Valley. Some 30 years his junior, the divorcee countess was a friend of Mannerheim’s younger daughter and was often seen accompanying him on his travels.

Mannerheim spent increasing amounts of time in hospital, troubled in particular by stomach and intestine problems. A perforated ulcer nearly killed him in 1946, and kidney stones and haemorrhages laid him low in 1948. He began to lose weight drastically, and is noticeably thin and frail in the photographs of him at the clinic in Val-Mont, Switzerland, where he both took spa treatments and continued to work on his memoirs.

In early 1951, Mannerheim was hospitalised again in Lausanne with a distended abdomen, and had emergency surgery for a blocked intestine. It was, he joked with his surgeon, his last battle, and one that he was likely to lose. He said his goodbyes to those around him on 27 January, and fell into a sleep from which he never awoke. His heart stopped half an hour before midnight, although in Finland’s time zone it was already the following morning – the anniversary of his decisive strike against the Reds in the Finnish Civil War of 1918.

Public Lending Right

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A little later than usual, the Public Lending Right sent me last week a statement of the number of times that my books have been taken out of British libraries. As I explained last year, many civilised countries have a scheme like this, whereby authors are reimbursed by the state if libraries loan out their books. This year, my finances are enriched to the tune of 6.25 pence per loan.

Here are the JC top ten library loans for 2010:

  1. Confucius: A Biography (hardback and paperback combined).
  2. Beijing: The Biography of a City.
  3. Wu.
  4. Chinese Life.
  5. A Brief History of the Vikings.
  6. A Brief History of the Samurai.
  7. The First Emperor of China (hardback and paperback combined).
  8. Marco Polo.
  9. The Pirate King (in paperback as Coxinga).
  10. Darwin’s Notebook.

Regular readers will note that there is a new entry, straight in at the number 6 slot, for a book that was only published a couple of months before the year’s deadline – we can perhaps expect the samurai to go further up the charts next year. Meanwhile, all the manga translations have dropped out — does this mean that Bloomsbury’s Ironfist Chinmi books are finally succumbing to wear and tear after 15 years, or simply that this year’s sampled libraries didn’t have so many comics on their shelves to begin with?

Twelve years ago, I wrote a little children’s book under a pseudonym in a matter of days — I think it took me no more than a long weekend. It has since been reprinted several times, by three different English-language publishers, and translated into some very rare languages, including Moldovan and Malay. Ever since, it has consistently generated a full 25% of my annual library royalties. There’s no predicting what book will be the one that makes one’s fortune. Not that this book makes me a fortune, but it puts a smile on my face every year when I discover another legion of people have checked it out of their local library.

Salon Futura #5

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The latest issue of Salon Futura is up online with a lovely Judith Clute cover, and includes a large review-article from me about Ranpo Edogawa, the “Fiend with Twenty Faces” and the remake thereof, just released in the UK as K20: Legend of the Black Mask.

Also in this issue: Paul Cornell interviewed and Paolo Bacigalupi profiled, Judith Clute interviewed, Jon Courtnay Grimwood… interviewed; more interviews than you can shake a stick at.

Plus Sam Jordison on Venice, and editor Cheryl Morgan with a rant on “genre”.

The Italian Job

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Online now, an interview with me by Armando Rotondi of the Italian webzine Asia Express, in which we get into imitable violence, the Western canon of Eastern animation, and the threat, or lack thereof presented to Japanese animation by the nascent industries of Korea and China.

Also check out their reviews of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis (“un libro esplosivo”), The Anime Encyclopedia (“davvero mirabile in tutto”), and The Dorama Encyclopedia (“un testo essenziale”).

In other news, I discover that my second Vikings book is now available in Italian.

My Book of the Year

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My reading this year has been all over the place, from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet to a new book on Mannerheim, to a literary biography of Arthur Conan Doyle, and oodles of Japanese-language books about the animation business.

In the meantime, among the dozens of books I read this year, there have been a few stand-out successes. I began the year nose-deep in Massimo Soumaré’s Japan in Five Ancient Chinese Chronicles, a superb survey of the occurences of the term “Land of the Rising Sun” (and indeed “Hairy Dwarves of Wa”) in mainland dynastic chronicles. Jamie Bisher’s White Terror: Cossack Warlords of the Trans-Siberian, is a gripping documentary history of the last survivors of Tsarist Russia as they fought a losing battle across Asia, along the length of a railway line that terminated in Vladivostok. It may form part of a book I am supposed to be writing next year, so it was a wonderful resource. I can’t get enough of the White Russians, which added bonus excitement to my reading of Martin Booth’s Gweilo: Memories of a Hong Kong Childhood. I stumbled across Booth while Googling him as the original author of the George Clooney vehicle The American. But I stayed for Gweilo, in particular for its reminiscences of the “Queen of Kowloon”, a senile, opium-addled vagrant in 1950s Hong Kong, who seemed to have once been a beautiful Tsarist duchess. Meanwhile, an interest in blockade runners (don’t ask) led me to Eric Graham’s Clyde Built: Blockade Runners, Cruisers and Armored Rams of the American Civil War, which retells the North-South conflict from the point of view of the Scottish shipbuilders and profiteers whose tricked-out steamers were smuggling supplies into the South from Bermuda.

But my 2010 Book of the Year was another part of my Scottish haul from ten days at the Scotland Loves Anime film festival. It’s Scott-Land: The Man Who Invented a Nation by Stuart Kelly, a biography and “thanatography” of Sir Walter Scott. There are other books about Scott, but they all too often skirt around the issue that his books are unreadable. Kelly is a happily hostile witness to his subject, intrigued by the career and output of an author who was a global celebrity during his own lifetime, to the extent that his Edinburgh monument is still the largest memorial to an author anywhere in the world. And yet Scott today is largely unread, confined to the bargain bin of literary history, his works written off as risible whimsy, his style dismissed as florid and twee. That’s where the thanatography comes in, with Kelly charting the fame and fortune of Scott after his death, with his works forming fundamental building blocks of the Scottish national identity, and indeed that of America – did you know that “Hail to the Chief” began as a song from an unauthorised musical, based on a Scott book about Highland bandits?

Kelly’s book opens a fascinating window on the bestsellers of yesteryear, treating Scott as the tin-eared, ham-fisted, yet inexplicably popular Dan Brown of his day, as well as a cunning literary wheeler-dealer, whose ownership of his publisher’s printing company allowed him to double-dip from his books’ profits. Literary biography is fast becoming my favourite genre, as I unwind from writing my own books by reading about other people writing theirs. On which note, thanks to one publication being six months late, another being six months early, and a third being bang on time, I ended up publishing three books in the calendar year 2010: A Brief History of the Samurai, Admiral Togo: Nelson of the East, and A Brief History of Khubilai Khan. You’ll have to keep busy with those, because for the first time in a decade, I won’t be publishing a single book next calendar year. But there’s already something on the slate for 2012, and for 2013, too, which seems far off in the future, even though I am already working on it. Other projects may slot in in the interim. In fact, one of the things that kept me busy in 2010 was the writing of large-scale proposals for big book projects for publication in 2014. See, planning ahead: no news on those yet, but why should there be when publishers wouldn’t need delivery for another two years? If I were really smart, I would buy up 50% of a printing company, like Walter Scott.

Then again, Scott ended up losing his shirt. Maybe I should invest in print-on-demand instead…

2010: The Year in Anime Books

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After so many positive responses to the round-up of anime reading last year, I thought I would continue with a brief precis of some of the anime books I have encountered in the ensuing twelve months.

Largely overlooked in Anglophone anime studies was Hu Tze-yue’s Frames of Anime: Culture and Image-Building from Hong Kong University Press. For those who have read Hu’s essay on Hakujaden in the journal Animation, this is more of the same, extending her conclusions out of the Toei era and into the careers of Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata. Meanwhile, Toshie Takahashi made a valuable contribution to studies of TV in general with Audience Studies: A Japanese Perspective, which has given me some great ideas about the history of early anime on television. Andrew Osmond placed anime in an international context with his 100 Animated Feature Films for the British Film Insititute. Phaidon’s Manga Impact was actually a book about anime, which says it all.

There were two excellent articles on Grave of the Fireflies and Space Cruiser Yamato, to be found in Stahl and Williams’ Imag(in)ing the War in Japan: Representing and Responding to Trauma in Postwar Literature and Film. This year I also caught up with Ian Condry’s 2009 essay ‘Anime Creativity: Characters and Premises in the Quest for Cool Japan’ in Theory, Culture & Society, worth noting here because it seems to be a fragment of a book-length work in progress. The same issue included Marc Steinberg’s ‘Anytime, Anywhere: Tetsuwan Atomu Stickers and the Emergence of Character Merchandizing,’ continuing to ensure that the Astro Boy era is one of the best documented in anime studies. Mechademia put out another strong volume. Oh, and Schoolgirl Milky Crisis came out on the Kindle.

The 2006 Clements and McCarthy Anime Encyclopedia remains the largest and most comprehensive book in English about Japanese animation. However, if you can read Japanese, there is now an even bigger tome to bend your shelves, the 1000-page Stingray/Nichigai Associates Dictionary of Animation Works: the biggest book ever written on the subject. It’s an odd work with rather short entries, omitting running times, for example, and concentrating instead on the origins of the anime discussed. This makes it an indispensable resource for anyone documenting the source material from which anime is made, as it lists the Japanese editions of Moomin books, the Bible and obscure children’s classics. It also covers non-Japanese animation, with a total of over 6000 little entries. But I can’t help wishing that it spent more time discussing the anime themselves, rather than vast bibliographies of the books related to them — a massive multi-volume list, for example, of Richard Burton’s Arabian Nights translation, in order to point to the origins of Tezuka’s 1001 Nights. Still, very handy, even at the astronomical cover price of $175.

In Japan, this year has been quiet in terms of big new books on the anime industry, although Toshio Okada got in just under the wire with his new warts-and-all memoir, Testament. This year, I have instead been reading many older books on anime history, including memoirs by Shinichi Suzuki, Yasuo Otsuka, Ryuichi Yokoyama, Tadahito Mochinaga, and Yoshiyuki Tomino. Meatiest among them was Eiichi Yamamoto’s tell-all confessional, The Rise and Fall of Mushi Pro (1989). Written as Tezuka lay dying, it is a detailed analysis of the period from the early 1960s to the early 1970s, from the beginning of production on Tales from a Street Corner, up to the collapse of the studio in the wake of Tragedy of Belladonna. One wonders, perhaps, if now that Yoshinobu Nishizaki is dead, Yamamoto will write a sequel about the troubled 1970s in the anime world, during which he worked for Nishizaki on the Yamato series.

I also found much of interest in Nobuyuki Tsugata’s 2007 study Japan’s First Animation Creator: Kitayama Seitar?, a book which pieces together vital pieces of the anime puzzle from the 1920s and 1930s. Tsugata is the best author in the world on anime history matters, and this book is an amazing detective story. So little early animation survives that Tsugata has to piece together Kitayama’s career from old magazine articles, wall charts enhanced and enlarged from the background of staff photographs, and odd sources such as the proceedings of the Federation of Japanese Dentists.

In the interests of leaving better testimonials for the Tsugatas of the future, the Madhouse studio continues to preserve production details and interviews of its newest films in its own rather pricey series. The Plus Madhouse series of creator-specific books have proved to be a mixed bag. Some, such as the volume on Rintaro (Shigeyuki Hayashi), fill in vital historical and personal gaps in our knowledge of the industry. Others… don’t, and risk diluting the brand by becoming little more than puff pieces for someone’s latest film.

Thinking Like an Anime Writer

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Attendees at the Glasgow Youth Film Festival in February 2011 can expect to be harangued, tormented and cajoled at a morning workshop on the way that Japanese animation scripts are put together, and how Western cartoon companies try to copy them.

Why do they all have such big eyes? What’s with the hot spring episode… and could you do better..? Yes, it’s the return of the notorious Jonathan Clements storylining lab, as seen at Screen Academy Wales, the Irish Film Institute and various other dumbstruck venues.

If you are a teenager with nothing better to do in Glasgow on a Sunday, now’s your chance to sign up for the industry experience that has been likened to a rollercoaster ride through shattered dreams and management madness, variously described as “illuminating”, “life-changing” and “better than the guy we had last week.”

Jonathan Clements is the author of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade. Now also available on the Kindle.

Salon Futura #4

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The new issue of Salon Futura is up online, and features a chunky interview with Leiji Matsumoto, the creator of Captain Harlock, Queen Emeraldas and Space Battleship Yamato.

Also in this issue: an interview with Alistair Reynolds, stuff on fantasy and steampunk, and a review of Johanna Sinisalo’s Birdbrain.

Source Material

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Bit of housekeeping in this month’s Pulse column: I’d like to take the chance to knock another misconception on the head before a whole new generation start using it as gospel truth. Somewhere back in the mists of time, probably in a press release from the early 1990s, someone made the inadvisable claim that anime were all based on manga. I guess it was an attempt to inextricably link two buzz-words in a breathless twofer. Even though anyone with half a brain must surely realise that it can’t be true, I still regularly have to deal with journalists who think it is a fact. Sadly, this assumption has wormed its way into several academic publications as well. Of course, anime and manga will always enjoy a strong affinity, but the idea manga forms the foundation of the anime business has not been supported by the facts since the late 1960s.

So, for the record. In the early days of anime, many cartoons were indeed based on local comics. In 1963, the year of the broadcast of Astro Boy, 100% of anime were based on manga. But even by the year I was born, 1971, I estimate that only half of all the anime on TV were based on Japanese comics. The rest were ideas concocted in a hurry at boozy lunches, or ripped off from pre-existing works, such as the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen. Ten years later, amid a bunch of toy tie-ins and adaptations of famous children’s stories, the number had dropped still further, to something like a third.

These days, manga have enjoyed something of a resurgence. Last year, 46% of anime were based on manga. That’s by far the largest sector, against 19% based on novels, 17% based on computer games, and 15% created entirely out of nothing. That just leaves 3% of “other”, which could be anything. If Hollywood can base Pirates of the Caribbean on a theme park ride, then anime can be inspired by mascots, chocolate bars and political satire if it so desires.

Just because you know that there is a manga with the same title as your favourite anime, it doesn’t follow that the anime was based on it. Many manga are merely created to advertise a particular show, and to encourage younger readers to seek it out in the first place. Similarly, ever since the 1990s, many manga have been conceived purely as marketing tools, part of a “multi-media” spread designed to sell the comic. Yes, technically, Sailor Moon was “based on” a manga, but the Sailor Moon manga was steered and influenced heavily by shadowy figures preparing the franchise for broadcast, not for publication.

Needless to say, that still leaves lots of areas open to misunderstandings. One wonders, for example, how many of the “novels” that inspire anime productions are actually “light novels”, in other words, individually published novellas, often insanely dialogue heavy and seemingly intended less for textual printing than for reading on a mobile phone. (Many of them, in fact, appear to have been written on one, too).

You may be wondering what difference it all makes. I, for one, think it’s healthy to remember that Japanese animation has just as rich a field of inspiration as any culture’s cartoons. If the general public think that anime can only stem from comics, they will have greater trouble understanding its fancier inspirations: the works of Alexandre Dumas, for example, or the novels of Yasutaka Tsutsui, or, well… the Bible.

This article first appeared in NEO #78, 2010.