Up on the Manga UK blog today, Rory Doona supplies the picture, and I supply the words, with the full text of the infamous Christmas poem as broadcast on the year-end podcast.
Season's Greetings
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Category Archives: News
2012: The Year in Anime Books
Possibly for the last time, we return to my annual round-up of books I have read about the animation industry in Japan. This year I have published several extensive reviews of some of my anime reading, including Marc Steinberg’s Anime’s Media Mix, Nobuyuki Tsugata’s Before the Dawn of TV Anime, Liliane Lurcat’s Alone With Goldorak, and Tobin’s book on the Pokemon phenomenon.
Behind the scenes, I have also been wading away through Japanese-language works on the subject, including two accounts of anime in China, Tomoyuki Aosaka’s Contents Business in China: Fluctuating Markets, Emerging Industry, and Homare Endo’s The New Breed of Chinese ‘Dongman’: Japanese Cartoons and Comics Animate China. Both authors must write in a tense environment, with evidence pointing to a strong potential market for Japanese animation and comics in China, but also to a strong anti-Japanese feeling all over China. It’s a fascinating dichotomy, where there is minimal evidence of anime and manga in Chinese stores, but anecdotal evidence everywhere you look that illegal downloaders and torrenters form a significant silent population. Meanwhile, even though only 35 foreign films are permitted in Chinese cinemas each year, you can guarantee that two of the slots otherwise reserved for Tom Cruise, or James Cameron, or Pixar, or whoever will go to the year’s Conan the Boy Detective film and the year’s One Piece movie. Anime and manga in China are not only on a critical cusp, but have been teetering there for the last decade and could still fall either way.
There was also an account of the life and work of Osamu Dezaki, and another about the achievements of Akiyuki Shinbo, adding welcome detail to the public profiles of two prolific directors. 
At the edge of the anime field, Yasuo Nagayama published an interesting “occasionalist” history of science fiction in Japan, concentrating not on the texts themselves but on the events that surrounded them. In the wrong hands, this could have all too easily turned into a tedious account of things that happened at conventions, but Nagayama keeps closely to his methodology, discussing not only the fan politics of the Japanese con scene, but also the effects of media fads and scares, and the public performances of popularity every time certain anime break box office records.
A few books disappointed me. A new work that purported to offer an insiders’ view of Sazae-san had nowhere near the detail I was hoping for, and Mitsuhisa Ishikawa’s 
account of his “revolution” at Production IG lacked the kind of nitty-gritty details that I personally go for. Much more fun was to be had in a series of books about the Japanese animation business, particularly the wonderful Otaku Marketing by the Nomura Research Institute, which offers hard data about the various types of otaku to be found in numerous consumer sectors, and how best to sell them stuff. Another book on the industry, This is the Anime Business, by Makoto Tada offered a run-down of the ten secret “Rules of the Devil” recited at the Dentsu corporation by its loyal minions. They are, apparently, a secret handbook to understanding the way the best animation studios work, too:
Rule 1: Work is something you should create not something that should be given.
Rule 2: Work is something where you take initiative and not something you do passively.
Rule 3: Tackle an important job. A small job will make you small.
Rule 4: Target a difficult job. You can progress by accomplishing it.
Rule 5: Once you tackle, don’t let it go. Hold on like grim death, until you achieve the target.
Rule 6: Drag the people around you. It will be worlds apart between the one who drags and who is dragged in a long term.
Rule 7: Plan. If you have a long-term plan, patience, devices, correct effort and hope will be born.
Rule 8: Have confidence. Without confidence, your work does not have punch or tenacity or even depth.
Rule 9: Use your brain in full all the time. Be always on the alert. Don’t slip your guard. That is what service is.
Rule 10: Don’t be afraid of friction. Friction is the mother of progress and manure of drive. Otherwise you will be obsequious and irresolute.
If it seems like I am reading less anime books than usual this year, it’s because this year saw me come to the end of the long writing process on my doctorate. I handed it in back in July, and the prospect of reading it so terrified my superviser that he ran away to China. As a result, it’s still languishing at the faculty waiting for the committee to get its act together; I didn’t help matters by running for China myself for four months this year, making it a little difficult to turn up for my viva; I shall have to sort out all of that in the new year, or else I shall never be Dr Clements. Meanwhile, the book version, some 60,000 words longer (in fact, as one wag commented, a whole other PhD worth of stuff) makes its way through the peer review process at the British Film Institute. I am just about to deliver the second draft of that, and with any luck you should see the published result – ANIME: A History of the Japanese Animation Industry, published in late 2013. As the name implies it is a massive chronicle of animation in Japan since the year 1909 (yes, 1909, you will have to read it to find out why), based almost entirely on the Japanese-language testimonials of the actual creators, rather than the speculations of foreign pundits. If you are the kind of person who has read this far on this blog, then I think you will like it very much.
65 Degrees
Finnish online magazine 65 Degrees North publishes a review of my Mannerheim book, now available in paperback and on the Kindle, that calls it an “absorbing, superbly detailed, powerfully written biography.” I don’t actually remember writing that German was the lingua franca in St Petersburg, though… surely it was French?
Mannerheim Kindle
At long last, my biography of Mannerheim is out on the Kindle. Leading a charge on horseback against Japanese cannons in Manchuria? Two years undercover, spying on the Chinese, while disguised as a Swedish anthropologist? Standing up to a gang of Bolsheviks clad in nothing but a pink bathrobe and a pair of cavalry boots? Accidentally becoming the president of Finland? You wouldn’t believe it… but every word is true.
Write and Wrong
This month [i.e. August — JC], the Studio Ghibli twitter feed excitably trills that the recording of the English language version of From Up On Poppy Hill has been completed, and that the “writers” are Karey Kirkpatrick and Patrick Mullen – thereby perpetuating one of the most irritating pretensions to afflict the anime localisation industry.
No, Kirkpatrick and Mullen did not “write” From Up On Poppy Hill. As I am pretty sure the studio is aware, it was written by a guy called Hayao Miyazaki and a woman called Keiko Niwa. Nor do I believe for a moment that Kirkpatrick and Mullen would be so gauche, so pompous or so plain dumb as to claim that they were the “writers” of someone else’s film, or so devious as to offer the semantic sophistry that they sort-of-kind-of “wrote” the English language version, as if that involved a similar degree of effort. Instead, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt, and assume that they are innocents in all this, bigged up without their knowledge by a marketing department desperately clawing for a story to release and for gaijin faces to shove in front of the media, instead of all those pesky Japanese people who cost more in air-fare and inconveniently fail to speak English on press junkets.
For the last twenty years, there have been unscrupulous individuals in the anime business who have tried to accentuate the role of individuals whose function would, at best, be described elsewhere in the creative arts as merely editorial. I spent a large part of the late 1990s crossly correcting people who claimed that Neil Gaiman “translated” Princess Mononoke – another innocent victim, I am sure, caught up in a marketing machine that pushed him and Miyazaki for a Nebula Award, without actually acknowledging the translators who had done the real heavy lifting – in that case, probably Ian McWilliam and/or Steve Alpert. Claiming that someone who spends a day or two polishing dialogue is the “writer” of a script is an insult not only to the people who spent significantly longer wrestling meaning out of one of the world’s most difficult languages, but also to the people who wrote the script in the first place.
Jonathan Clements is the author of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade. This article first appeared in NEO #104, 2012.
Chinese Science Fiction
In October, after many months of work, the “China” entry in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction was updated for the third edition. This reflects the fact that almost all the cross-references within the entry are now live, pointing readers in turn at my newly written entries about authors such as Chi Shuchang, Gu Junzheng, Wang Jinkang and Ye Yonglie. It all amounts to a book-length work inside the Encyclopedia, dedicated to an entire culture of often-overlooked authors, not only in the People’s Republic, but also on Taiwan, in Hong Kong and elsewhere in the Chinese diaspora.
It’s been fascinating reading through a century of Chinese stories and biographies, and I’ve uncovered some really interesting creators and works. Moving on now to the “Japan” entries, which I also have to knock into shape. You can see how far I’ve come, and how far there is to go, by looking at the Seiun Awards entry.
Japan Crazy
When the future Admiral Togo was a young cadet in Britain, he spent several months in the company of a homestay family. His arrival caused great disappointment to the youngest boy in the Capel family, who had assumed that if Togo came from Japan, he must surely be an acrobat? Certainly, he must have been a friend of the most famous Japanese man among British youth, a circus performer known as Little All Right? The stoic Togo, already a veteran of the Japanese civil war, gruffly denied any association with jugglers or plate-spinners, and that was that.
But who were the Japanese Imperial Troupe? There was, indeed, such a group, although if either the Shogun or Emperor had ever heard them described as “Imperial”, they would have had conniptions. The Troupe’s impresario, “Professor” Richard Risley Carlisle, was a hard-up strongman who introduced the Japanese to Western circus traditions in 1864. Realising that the newly opened land of Japan had its own performers and trickery, Risley pulled all the strings he could in order to bring a platoon of Japanese entertainers to the West, getting a motley crew of itinerants to sign away their lives for him in a contract that would take them literally around the world. The first-ever civilian passports granted by the Japanese government were given to Risley’s performers, a fractious, occasionally drunken and regularly licentious bunch of rascals who back-flipped, juggled and caroused their way throughout Europe and America.
Frederik L. Schodt’s account of this landmark event, Professor Risley and the Imperial Japanese Troupe, argues for it as the first flowering of japonisme, in which these unlikely blue-collar ambassadors from the mysterious land of Japan brought a highly unrepresentative and oft-misunderstood series of performances to a cluster of industrial towns, from the mills of Wakefield to the mines of Wales. Pursued by creditors, scandal and intrigue, the Imperial Japanese Troupe became many Europeans’ first-ever encounter with things Japanese; they sang old Kyoto songs in the Wild West, and got into bar-room brawls in Piccadilly…. Schodt mines the Troupe’s own diaries, contemporary newspapers, theatre reviews and even court reports in order to unearth a truly globe-trotting adventure, which prods the underbelly of Victorian society, and whispers the first strains of The Mikado, Madame Butterfly and other Western obsessions with the east. He presents the Imperial Japanese Troupe as the first true Japan craze, but does so with an incredible sense of place and time, dragging the reader into a narrative of carnival barkers and gasping crowds, spectacular entertainments and forgotten celebrities. An amazing work of scholarship, and an incredible feat of literary plate-spinning. Roll up, roll up…
Jonathan Clements is the author of Admiral Togo: Nelson of the East.
Steampunk
Out today, Brian Robb’s new book Steampunk: Victorian Visionaries, Scientific Romances and Fantastic Fictions, notable among a slew of lesser works on the sub-genre by devoting a whole chapter to its Japanese manifestations, which include Japan-only spin-offs from the John Carter series, Rhett Butler running guns to the Shogun, Emily Bronte in a time machine, and a novel called simply Steampunk! which has trains in it. And dinosaurs. Another possibility for your Christmas stocking, perhaps…?
Quoth the blurb: “Simultaneously a literary movement, ultra-hip subculture and burgeoning cottage industry, Steampunk is the most influential and arresting new genre to emerge from the late twentieth century. Spinning tales populated with clockwork Leviathans, cannon-shots to the moon and coal-fired robots, it charts alternative histories in which the British Empire never fell or where the atom remained unsplit. A term first coined in 1987 by science fiction author K.W.Jeter, Steampunk was born of myriad influences: the classic scientific romances of Jules Verne, H.G. Wells and Mary Shelley, a growing nostalgia for Victoriana and an ironic reaction to the dystopian futurescapes of Cyberpunk. Today it has grown to become a global aesthetic, making its mark on art, architecture, fashion and even music. This wide-ranging, beautifully-illustrated and much needed history explores the genre’s many intricate expressions, tracing its development in fiction, cinema, television, comics, videogames and beyond. From the futuristic visions of Fritz Lang and the otherworldly imaginings of Alan Moore and Hayao Miyazaki, to Doctor Who’s adventures in time and space and the dark fantasies of China Miéville, Brian J. Robb sets the key works of Steampunk squarely under the lens of his brass monocle, examining their ideas and themes in forensic detail.”
Bait & Switch
This month’s fun anime news – the removal of the Japanese language track from the American release of Persona 4. The reason can be found by anyone if they start poking around the sales figures for Japanese animation in its home market. The first episode of Persona 4 sold over 40,000 copies in Japan, but after that, sales settled down. Reading between the statistics, Persona 4 has about 6,000 Japanese fans who bought the whole set on DVD, and another 10,000 fans who bought it on Blu-ray. But owning the complete Japanese set of the first season would set you back £420 in Japan. That makes the English-language release about 80% cheaper, and puts the producers in deep fear of reverse-importing.
So far, there has been no indicator that the British release of Persona 4 will be similarly affected. Territorial lockout, once a bugbear for British fans, might turn out to be a saviour on this occasion, as UK Blu-rays are no longer in the same region as Japanese ones. However, if this becomes a general trend, the Japanese animation business risks shooting itself repeatedly in the foot.
There are several possible answers to this problem, none of which you are going to like. One would be to make everybody pay Japanese prices, which would kill off the UK Blu-ray business. Another would be to bring Japanese prices down to foreign levels, which would kill off many niche-interest anime serials. Leaving the Japanese language track off the foreign release, however, is not a solution, either. A sizeable chunk of foreign fandom likes anime because it is Japanese. For ten years, the dual audio tracks of DVDs have largely obscured this subset of fandom, but I, for one, have never bought a dubbed anime, except when the dub comes attached to a DVD I’m buying anyway.
Removing the Japanese-ness from a foreign anime release will scare off many buyers, but surely the Japanese already know this? Which leads me to suspect that foreign rights, in general, for some companies have become little more than a bait-and-switch con, designed not to sell the product, but to keep a studio’s “foreign rights” department looking busy. Japanese producers: say it isn’t so!
Jonathan Clements is the author of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade. This article first appeared in NEO #103, 2012.
Looper
“I’m from the future. Go to China.”
The Official Schoolgirl Milky Crisis Blog 