Ancient Black Ops: The 47 Ronin, a 2014 documentary in which I appeared discussing samurai matters, is also now available on Youtube. And if you are so inclined, you can also have the questionable pleasure of watching me dubbed in Spanish.
Posted on the BBC website on April Fool’s Day, and hence not attracting any attention until it turned out to be serious, was the news that China’s State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television had declared war on “borderline pornographic” Japanese cartoons such as Blood C, Highschool of the Dead, and Terror in Resonance. SAPPRFT promises to draw up a blacklist of proscribed Japanese cartoons, all the more to save Chinese streaming sites the trouble of licensing them.
Even in China, the news was greeted with a degree of hilarity. SAPPRFT, after all, was the same body that tried to ban time travel (fortunately only on TV, my time machine is still legal). But as the Qianzhen news site in south China pointed out, SAPPRFT was making the perennial error that has dogged anime all over the world for the last 30 years, confusing cartoons for adults with cartoons for children, and then making the false assumption that children would be watching them.
It’s Japan that’s really in SAPPRFT’s sights. Anime was dragged off-air in China in 2006, where it was proving far too popular. Anime continued to sneak in on video, since apparently Ghibli films didn’t count as evil cartoons. Then, a survey in 2008 concluded that 75% of Chinese undergraduates were watching anime on their computers. Television might have been stamped out, but anime continued to find an audience in pirate editions and on streaming sites. And consider that percentage for a moment: China generates seven million graduates every year – that’s a big audience.
Streaming sites didn’t count as television, so now they are on the hit list, not the least because of the titles listed in the SAPPRFT press release, only Terror in Resonance appears to have any legal presence in the People’s Republic – it’s got bombs going off in Tokyo, sure to entertain the kids. As for Blood C and Highschool of the Dead, both were released in Hong Kong and Taiwan – in other words, they are sneaking in across the border, unhelpfully subtitled in Chinese by the running dogs of capitalism. Long-term readers may remember a similarly absurd situation a few years ago, when Death Note was “banned” in northeast China, despite not actually being legally available there in the first place.
What’s going to happen? Nothing. Servers at Chinese universities will continue to host terabytes of torrented foreign media. Chinese fans will continue to watch anime on their computers, just now without paying a penny to Japan. And distributors everywhere are doing cartwheels at the thought of being able to say that their anime titles are now “banned in China.” Nothing will bump up audiences more than the idea that the cartoon they’re watching can excite such ire.
One wonders, however, if SAPPRFT has bothered to check the credits on Highschool of the Dead and Blood C, which feature listings for companies such as Xuyang and Xing Yue Animation, both based in Jiangsu province. That’s right: the horrible foreign cartoons that SAPPRFT is targeting were partly made in China.
Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History (UK/US). This article first appeared in NEO #137, 2015.
[Time travel footnote: and here’s me in the LA Times, explaining why Attack on Titan qualifies as “pornographic”]
I have long been a fan of the Harvard History of Imperial China collection, but series editor Timothy Brook has presented a star turn in awarding himself the Yuan and Ming dynasties. With deliberate and playful provocation, he lumps these two later periods together, instead of following in the footsteps of most other researchers, who usually cover the Mongol century of the Yuan as an addendum to the fore-running Song dynasty.
His reason for this is climatic – Brook identifies nine distinct periods of drought, flood, pestilence and famine, each of which constitutes a “slough” in fortune that sorely tests the imperial regime’s ability to manage its state. In fact, he collates the Yuan and Ming because, between them, they span the period that we now know to have constituted the Little Ice Age.
But Brook also displays winning originality in his choice of sources. He begins and ends with gripping accounts of sightings of “dragons”, triangulating this catch-all term for water-spouts, comets, tornadoes and earthquakes with his new-found data on climate change and natural disaster. He also maintains this thread throughout the book, returning to insightful new views of big data, such as the fluctuating number of Ming-era paintings that depicted snowy scenes.
One might be forgiven for thinking that the Yuan and Ming dynasties had been well and truly picked over. With strong grounding in untranslated sources, and intriguing new uses for old materials (do you know the 16th-century Chinese word for a sailor’s gay husband? “Rice-paddy” over “woman” if you ever need it.), Brook excellently demonstrates that history remains an ongoing and evolving practice, and that there is always something new to say.
Jonathan Clements is the author of Coxinga and the Fall of the Ming Dynasty, and biographies of Marco Polo and Khubilai Khan.
It was the best of times, it was the Wurst of times. We’re back for the game of the year, the Eurovision Song Contest hosted in 2015 by Austria, the country that gave us The Sound of Music, Mozart, Falco and Hitler. It’s the Year of the Cloak, so dust off those shouting muscles.
We’ve already had to say goodbye to Moldova’s fetish cops and Finland’s awful punks. Categories still resting this year include readily identifiable mullet dresses, our popular dubstep dance-off, and the much-missed Buddha Jazz Hands. In what is one of the dullest Eurovisions in recent memory, your correspondent has a soft spot for Georgia, and is pleased to see Inga Arshakyan back for Armenia.
Step One: you will probably need to be quite drunk. Step Two: The following sights will be seen during this Saturday’s Eurovision Song Contest. Can you see them first? Remember to shout it out. Party hosts will need to keep score of who gets what first, or otherwise dish out the forfeits to those that aren’t quick enough. As ever, there is more than one key change, and plenty of orbital cleavage. Keep your eyes (or ears) open for any of the following. And when you notice it, SHOUT IT OUT!
In no particular order, in Saturday’s final you should look out for:
(*swaying one’s head from side to side in a snakey fashion.).
(**ostentatious cleavage sufficient to see from a satellite in orbit, which, according to Eurovision bra consultant Tom Clancy, requires a minimum of C-cup).
This year, Australia is sending an entry, although they have failed to send anything suitably Rolf Harris, Aboriginal or Mad Maxy. Poor show, Australia. You’re taking this far too seriously. If you’d sent a blind mutant rock guitarist on the back of a truck with a flamethrower, you might have been in with a chance.
Apologies to American readers, who will have to just imagine what the world’s biggest, gayest song contest is like. Just imagine, for one day every year, Europe gets to behave the way that Japan does all the time.
If you are using this I-Spy list this year, please do let me know in the comments so I can see how far it travels.
[Not hard enough for you? This game is also available in Finnish.]
Now up in the online Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, my justifiably massive entry on the Japanese author Yoshiki Tanaka. Despite being a familiar name to anime fans and manga readers, this is the first time anyone has published an overview of his work, and even this 2500-word behemoth misses out a lot of his detective fiction and Sinology publications.
However, there’s plenty there on The Legend of the Galactic Heroes and the Heroic Legend of Arslan, as well as his lesser-known works like the Victorian Horror Adventures and Red Hot Dragoon.
My article on the strange case of Hokusai’s daughter, an artist in her own right who has been largely airburshed from the historical record, partly with her own collusion, is now up on the Anime Ltd website. It’s a fascinating story of art and attribution, with strong resonances in the modern anime business.
The idea of rekishi-gyaru (history girls) has come up before in a few Manga Snapshot columns – a supposed market sector of young, educated women who are as nerdy about historical drama as Naruto fans are about ninja. The latest anime from Production I.G seems squarely aimed at them, as well as a whole world of overseas anime lovers and Japanophiles.
9th May sees the Japanese premiere of Miss Hokusai, which charts the life and times of Oei, the artist who laboured tirelessly as an assistant and sometime replacement for her famous father. Hokusai père was the printmaker who created the iconic Great Wave Off Kanagawa as well as the tentacular picture usually known as The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife (now gracing Peggy’s office in the final episodes of Mad Men), and the sketchbooks or doodlings that eventually lent their name to the entire medium we now call manga.
Based on an obscure 1980s comic by Hinako Sugiura, Miss Hokusai looms in on “her-story”, that ever-growing genre that highlights forgotten ladies. The question always remains just how much of Hokusai’s work was actually done by his daughter – letters remain extant in which he states his pricing policy, and notes that clients can have him for one fee, or Oei at a discount… not unlike the way that late-period Studio Ghibli started choosing its directors!
But Miss Hokusai is also a clear entry in the new scramble for superiority left by the shuttering of that very same Ghibli. With Hayao Miyazaki retired (again) and Isao Takahata unlikely to ever make another film, the race is on for the anime high ground. Take my word for it, all around the world there are distributors who have made a tidy profit on Ghibli movies for the last decade, who have suddenly seen their cash cow put out to pasture. Where are they going to find their once-a-year classy film to draw in the twittering classes and pad out film festivals with something quirky and Japanese? Where’s their annual dip into the fan market and mainstream cross-over?
For those who thought the whole thing was a two-horse race between the consistently excellent Mamoru Hosoda and the randomly brilliant Makoto Shinkai, Miss Hokusai’s director Keiichi Hara has turned out to be a surprise contender – leaping out of journeyman work on Crayon Shin-chan with the acclaimed Colourful, and now this considered, self-consciously classy evocation of Tokugawa period glamour. Worthy and classy, Miss Hokusai is a dream come true for distributors and exhibitors, and hopefully for audiences, too. But this is going to be a long contest before the winner is declared.
Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article first appeared in NEO #136, 2015.
It’s not abundantly clear from the cover, but the hardback, gilt-edged Collector’s Library edition of Sun Tzu’s Art of War is a new edition of my earlier paperback translation. It’s a very portable pocket size, and does look very posh, particularly after you throw away the horrible dust jacket. See here for details of why the world needs another version of Sun Tzu, and here for my thoughts on performance.
Last month’s column discussed the ongoing drift of manga into digital publishing. In the weeks since, new statistics have come to light about just how pervasive digital publishing has become. A recent report by Yano Research revealed that digital manga publishing in the fiscal year ending in spring 2014 raked in an incredible 65 billion yen (£363 million), accounting for a whopping 80% of the entire digital book market in Japan.
Digital publishing continues to rise all over the world. Many of you will actually be reading this article on a digital edition of NEO, so well done all you early adopters, you. But there are other knock-on effects. Manga are going to become less visible in the real world, as e-publishing initiatives slowly strip them from shelves in corner shops and bookstores. I predict the almost total disappearance of erotica from public view, as furtive consumers squirt it all directly onto their tablets without having to slide it under their raincoats. Teen stuff will be next, and their older cousins in mature manga will lag behind. Before long, there will just be a few legacy titles in the Luddite pensioner market, and smaller print-runs for coffee-shop and noodle-bar browsers.
There is also talk of “enhanced” publishing. Once a creative work is “digitally ingested”, you can fiddle with it and add whistles and bells. Manga publishers are talking of sound effects and read-along audio, maybe even flash-animated panels. This is being billed as some form of higher-level augmentation of manga, which leads me to sound a note of doubt.
Will it really mean better manga? Or will it end up meaning really low-rent, stripped-back, bare-bones anime? Just as marketers put a polite spin on cheapo, minimal-choice adventure games by calling them “virtual novels,” will we find anime companies in the future tempted to rebrand themselves as “enhanced manga publishers” in order to get away with the cheapest animation possible?
Of course, it might be a fad. Paper might come back in, like flares. This was all reported in a magazine called Nikkei Computer, which obviously had an interest in bigging up the digital future. Maybe it’s only the magazines that are going digital, while consumers will still want those bespoke reprint volumes in print. But how will all the enhancements work then…? Pop-ups?
[Time travel footnote – Since this article was published, the University of Hertfordshire has revealed that it is transitioning its 2D Animation course into a Digital Comics and Concept Art course… the first sign of the changes to come?]
Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History, and the co-author of The Anime Encyclopedia: A Century of Japanese Animation. This article first appeared in NEO 135, 2015.
Mere hours before April Fools’ Day, and hence confusing a bunch of foreign pundits, the Japanese contents conglomerate Bandai-Namco announced that it was “opening up” the rights to a number of its classic games titles. From here on, anyone wanting to make a cellphone variant of Pacman, or a sequel to Dig Dug, is welcome to get stuck in, without any of the miseries of, you know, paying for a licence, or dealing with licensors.
Although Bandai-Namco is promising not to subject anyone to the extensive colonic investigation that is “licensing”, it still expects everyone to register for a perfunctory rubber stamp of approval. It promises to wave everything through unless it’s dodgy, so no chance of Pacman Porno. It also expects a rake-off of a few percent from any revenue generated, and a percentage of any ad-buys. This offer currently only applies to creators in Japan – foreigners can’t be trusted yet. What on Earth is Bandai-Namco playing at?
This new announcement is an intriguing, and seemingly rather business-savvy extension of the pre-existing rights market, where intellectual property owners expect to cream off around 5% from any licensed merchandise. That Nigerian Astro Boy remake? 5% to Tezuka Pro. That Indian version of Star of the Giants? 5% to TMS. That Overfiend plushie? Go away, that’s my idea.
With a bunch of forgotten titles, like Tower of Druaga and Sky Kid, Bandai-Namco is opening the have-a-go floodgates. Let a hundred flowers bloom! Want to make an animated series based on Galaxian? Be their guest! A Battle City-inspired line of clothing? Go right ahead. After all, what’s the risk? These are corporate-owned titles that the company plainly couldn’t give away for the last 20 years… so now they are literally giving them away. As long as you fill in the correct paperwork and give them their cut, they won’t sue you.
And if a project fails, Bandai-Namco has lost nothing. Just as Amazon will carry almost any self-published Kindle book, on the understanding that even if it only sells 100 copies (which is, believe it or not, the average), the company hasn’t had to work for that money and still gets a cut. Or look at another way. Bandai-Namco has just solicited every company in the creative sector to work for it, for free, while it creams off a stipend. Everybody else will be watching this one very closely. The moment there’s a success story, expect to be pig-piled by imitators.
Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History, and the co-author of The Anime Encyclopedia: A Century of Japanese Animation.
