Category Archives: News

A Thorn in Their Sides

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It’s all been very quiet for a while over at Matt Thorn’s blog. Despite its presence in the links section at right, I’d given up checking to see if he’d done anything new. Then I’ve been busy for the last few months on a new book project and I simply haven’t had the time. Which is why I am late to the party over at his site about this article, in which Thorn puts the boot repeatedly into what passes for translation in the manga field.

This is, of course, a subject close to my heart, and I agree with everything he says. Those lucky individuals who already own a copy of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis will have already read the transcript of a lecture I gave on translation at the University of East Anglia, in which I approach many of the same issues, but with regard to the anime business. But I was speaking to an audience at the Department of Literary Translation, so I was able to ignore many of the basic issues. I was, in effect, already talking to professionals. Thorn’s frustration is born of the boggling number of *amateurs* in the manga field, who do not understand the basic principles of translation.

I’ll add no more to Thorn’s thoughts except to cut and paste an email I sent to him a couple of years ago, when we were bitching about this among ourselves:

“Last month I was offered a manga translation job for the first time in years. Apparently it required “special talents” (read: someone had to open a dictionary) and was expected to win awards and suchlike. I had apparently been on the slate for this one for three years, and now it was my Big Chance to earn what I estimated as $33 a day.

“The guy was very upfront. He showed me his sales projections and his budgets, and demonstrated that that was all he could afford to pay me. Yes, I said, but you are asking me to make your bad business decisions *my* problem. This is a one-month job, if I do it right. I will not rush it in a week just so that the money doesn’t feel like I am working at McDonalds.”

I find this topic interesting largely because it comes so fast on the heels of my comments about the continued success of Ironfist Chinmi. The money I was being offered for this project was roughly a third of what I was offered for Chinmi, and I am not sure there was any royalty element either. When I did Chinmi, I was 24-year-old graduate student and so, arguably, still young and stupid. But some modern entrants into the manga translation field are expected to accept fees that are only at 30% of 1995 rates. Are we surprised that even the good ones are over-worked, harassed and otherwise distracted?

Pay peanuts, get monkeys, as Confucius almost said.

Epiphanies

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Christmas comes late for authors in Britain, as 6th January is when we receive our statements from the Public Lending Right. This is a wonderful body that pays a royalty for books taken out of British libraries. For a sole author, that’s currently a payout of 6.29 pence every time someone checks me out (in the library sense, that is). The numbers are extrapolated from sampled data, so there’s always a bit of wiggle room — this year, for example, one of my books earned nothing at all when I was quite sure it was going to be in the top slot. Depends on which libraries are being asked.

For the last ten years, my highest-earning book has been an obscure work for children that I wrote using someone else’s name (no, I am not going to tell you what it is). This month’s statement ends that reign at last, with the hardback and paperback editions of my Confucius biography officially hitting the top spot.

Here’s the JC top ten loaners for 2009:

1: Confucius: A Biography (hardback and paperback combined)

2: A Brief History of the Vikings

3: Wu: The Chinese Empress Who Schemed Seduced and Murdered Her Way to Become a Living God. This would have easily been number one if it were also available in paperback. Something which I hope the History Press gets around to sooner rather than later.

4: Bejing: The Biography of a City. Which surprises me. But it was a cheap book, and presumably a lot of libraries bought it ahead of the 2008 Olympics, as we hoped they would.

5: The First Emperor of China (hardback and paperback). Surprised this isn’t higher, to be honest. The British Museum was shipping this by the crateful during their Terracotta Army exhibition, but then again, if more people are buying it for themselves, they don’t need to go looking for it in a library.

6: Ironfist Chinmi: Cutting Edge. Yes, even though as the translator I only receive 30% of the PLR fee, Takeshi Maekawa’s Ironfist Chinmi manga occupies the #6, #7, #8 and #10 slots on my earnings from libraries. Heartening to see that it’s still earning after fifteen years on sale, although odd that Cutting Edge, the last in the series, should be the highest ranked.

7: Ironfist Chinmi: Whirlwind Fist.

8: Ironfist Chinmi: Victory for the Spirit.

9: Marco Polo.

10: Ironfist Chinmi: Drunken Master.

You’ll notice that Schoolgirl Milky Crisis isn’t on the list. In fact, although it’s registered with the PLR, it was published in February 2009, and hence unlikely to make it into any library collections by the June cut-off point. Perhaps it will show up next year. Meanwhile, the Anime Encyclopedia, despite selling more copies than most of my other books combined, continues to be low earner for PLR — this is because most libraries don’t allow visitors to check it out at all, and insist that it remains on-site as a reference work. The powers that be in the authoring world are well aware that some books slip through the net, and are trying to come up with a new model that also includes reference works that are consulted but not borrowed. Whatever; I am just immensely glad that the PLR exists at all. It never fails to brighten my Januarys.

Rumspringa

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2000adcc103_thedevilsplayground_1417_cover_medium.jpgMy Judge Dredd: Devil’s Playground is in the shops. Herewith the words I wrote for the bit inside the sleeve that nobody ever reads.

—

My Judge Dredd: Solo was about the people who lived on the edges of Dredd’s world, in the no-man’s land of Alientown. Judge Dredd: 99 Code Red forced Dredd to confront situations more familiar from our own time – an old fashioned hospital. Trapped on Titan dealt with the rejects from Dredd’s world, a society largely comprising the perps that people like Dredd put away. When producer John Ainsworth announced that the next Dredd releases would be narrated by single individuals, I immediately volunteered to do another story from an outsider’s point of view – someone for whom simply crossing the street in Dredd’s world would be an episode of overwhelming culture shock.

The most surprising thing to me about the Amish people is not their self-imposed isolation from the American mainstream, nor even the consensual time warp that keeps them from adopting modern technologies – let’s call it 122 years in the past, the same distance that separates Dredd’s world from ours. What really surprises me is that they volunteer for it.

Today’s Amish send their teenagers out into our world for a year of self-education called “rumspringa”. They drink, they smoke, they wear jeans, they ride around in cars, and when their time is up, most of them happily leave it all behind, having learned that our modern existence is a hellish torment to be pitied rather than envied. You are already in the Devil’s Playground. Judge not…

Spending Spree

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The scoop of 2009 in the British anime world was a very simple piece of information that has been lurking unnoticed in the public domain for months. It was Andrew Partridge of Beez Entertainment who broke the story, when he began poking around for possible sources of funding for anime. Putting a film on in cinemas costs a lot of money, because the cost of an actual, physical print is much more than you think. But Partridge discovered that the UK Film Council, a National Lottery organisation, would happily help obscure films reach wider audiences by contributing to advertising and/or the cost of making extra copies. House of Flying Daggers, for example, was given a hundred grand. Lust/Caution had a helping hand to the tune of twice as much. And much to everyone’s surprise, anime had got a little financial aid behind the scenes as well.

I realise that many readers probably aren’t yet taxpayers, but if you aren’t already you will be soon enough. You don’t even need a job. You pay tax on beer and fags, you pay arbitrary levies on airline travel, and then you get to gripe about it when the government gives it to the Wrong Sort of People. But Lottery money isn’t like that. It’s a voluntary tariff. It’s a shard of blind hope in an unhappy world, paid for by coughing single mothers on council estates, and grim-faced old men with Zimmer frames. And you, for all I know. But if the money is spent on mad things like inflatable windmills or bungee jumping for the elderly, only a fool would complain, as that’s precisely what Lottery money is for. I, for one, am ecstatic to see it being spent on something I actually like – long may it continue, and hats off to the canny distributors who knew how to fill in the forms and tick the right boxes.

But this has surely become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Howl’s Moving Castle had a Film Council handout of a mind-boggling £150,000. That kind of money would have gone a long way to bringing the overlooked Millennium Actress or Tokyo Godfathers to the masses. And let’s put this in perspective: the £150,000 forked over for Howl’s Moving Castle would have been enough money for me to buy the rights to Momotaro’s Divine Sea Warriors, subtitle it, press and box ten thousand DVDs, wrap each one in a £10 note and then give them away in the street for free!

But how did Spirited Away, for example, gain from its £40,000 Film Council cash injection? The subtitles were American-made. The dub was American-made. The Film Council money was earmarked for extra prints, so you could catch it in Didsbury or Chipping Ongar, and on extra advertising, so that you knew you could catch it at all.

So you buy a lottery ticket. That money goes to the Film Council. The Film Council gives it to Optimum Releasing to subsidise Spirited Away. Optimum gives it to NEO to advertise Spirited Away, and the sales of advertising help subsidise NEO itself.

Your copy of NEO is that little bit cheaper than it would have otherwise been. Maybe you’ve saved a quid. So now you can buy another lottery ticket! It’s a win-win situation for absolutely everybody involved, and isn’t that a nice thing to hear once in a while?

(This article first appeared in NEO #66, 2009)

"I have not told the half of what I saw."

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Although they may be self-indulgent and self-regarding, I’ve really been enjoying everybody else’s round-ups of the ten years since the numbers rolled over from 19– to 20–. Herewith the last decade as it looks from here.

2000. In the first week of January, I discover that I am not going blind after all. Instead, the screen is dying on the laptop I have used since grad school. The purchase of a new desktop unit brings the internet into my home for the first time, and with it, an avalanche of Amazon parcels. Manga Max magazine is shut down in July, two days before I receive a Japan Festival Award for editing it. I write six episodes of Halcyon Sun, and briefly work on an IMAX movie project that falls at the first hurdle. Then, I’m hired to storyline and then co-script a console game that has been part-funded by a crazy arms manufacturer.

2001. The mad game is cancelled, apparently because of 9/11. By this time I am already working on another console project, writing three new “episodes” for a much-loved sci-fi franchise. It is only after the voices are all recorded, with the original cast, that the manufacturers decide to pull the plug. Something to do with the game being a stupid idea in the first place. All this gaming money gets funnelled into the Anime Encyclopedia, which eventually breaks even for me in 2007. I love working on that book so much that I look forward to getting out of bed every morning (a condition regularly repeated over the following years — I really do love my job). My first trip to America: Atlanta, for the book launch.

2002. Having superb fun working on the Dorama Encyclopedia. I am a presenter on the Sci Fi channel’s bizarre and mercifully forgotten Saiko Exciting, which first involves me reading the anime news, and later speed-translating and performing modern pop classics into Mandarin. I am offered the editorship of Newtype USA seven times, but decline because I have just got my dream job: a publisher has commissioned my obsession of many years, Pirate King. First DVD commentary, for Appleseed; I’ve since done many more for Manga Entertainment, Momentum Pictures, Artsmagic and ADV Films. Consultant on the first season of the TV series Japanorama. Film festivals in Italy and Norway.

2003. Working for a famous toy company on the “story” that will accompany their new line of toys. Fantastic fun, and very educational. Back to Japan for the first time in years, Kyoto and Tokyo; Dallas for another anime convention, and Turku, Finland. Writing the Highwaymen novelisation, and a whole rack of Big Finish scripts, including Judge Dredd, Strontium Dog, and Sympathy for the Devil. Start learning Finnish, because life’s not difficult enough.

2004. Sign a deal to write a book a year about China ahead of the Beijing Olympics. This year, Confucius: A Biography. Back to Atlanta for another anime convention. Buy half a flat in London.

2005. A Brief History of the Vikings presents a fantastic excuse to poke around old sagas for a few months. Present my History of Japanese Animation lecture series at the Worldcon in Scotland, and later sell it as a series of magazine articles. I also write a massive 12-part History of Manga for Neo magazine. Start writing the Manga Snapshot column, which is still running five years later. Publication, somewhat late, of my novel Ruthless.

2006. The First Emperor of China. Off to Xi’an and Beijing. A new edition of the Anime Encyclopedia. Consultant for The South Bank Show on anime, although I am largely ignored. Write the novella Cheating the Reaper.

2007. Got married — honeymoon in Estonia after Mrs Clements vetoed Georgia. Wu. Not a book title that is easy to bring up on search engines, although you can hear me doing a great interview about it here on Radio Four. Before it’s even published, there are excited feelers from a TV company, which hires me to work on the outline of a 16-episode drama series based on the early Tang dynasty. Nothing comes of it, although I do spend the money going to Japan to get materials for another book: Nagasaki and the Amakusa archipelago.

2008. Beijing: The Biography of a City is published. But my next book, Christ’s Samurai, is left in limbo when Sutton Publishing can no longer afford to pay for it. Luckily, Haus Publishing has decided it wants a massive multi-volume history of the Paris Peace Conference, and has me writing the biographies of the Chinese and Japanese representatives. Big Finish scripts for Highlander and Doctor Who. Titan Books ask me to start this blog.

2009. Switzerland for the Locarno Film Festival. Back to Japan for a month getting materials for three new book projects. Then Shanghai, Sydney, Melbourne, Honolulu, San Francisco, Vancouver and New York on the way home. Mannerheim: President, Soldier, Spy is a Christmas bestseller… in Finland, although it goes down a storm at the launch in London’s Finnish Institute. Big Finish scripts for Robin Hood, Judge Dredd and Doctor Who. My collected articles and speeches appear as Schoolgirl Milky Crisis. I am rendered poor as a church mouse by an exploding boiler.

2010. Next year, I am supposed to be going to Taiwan for the filming of Koxinga: Sailing Through History, a documentary for National Geographic. I have two big publications coming on Admiral Togo and A Brief History of the Samurai — although if it’s got more than 300 pages, can we really call it brief? I’ve got a deadline for another book in January, and after that, who knows…?

I don’t know about you, but that little list sure scares the hell out of me. This, I guess, is the flipside of those cheery little adverts in the broadsheet press, that trill “Why Not Be a Writer?” That’s why not. Because unless you love your job so much that you need to be dragged away from it, you will never put in the required hours. And yet, like Marco Polo, “I have not told the half of what I saw.”

Happy New Year.

My Book of the Year

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Since I do this for a living and have to keep my receipts, I know exactly how much I spend on books — about two thousand pounds a year. Huge stacks of my most recent acquisitions are still awaiting my attention, although things I have enjoyed this year include The Penguin History of Canada, far too many books about Chinese immigrants abroad (the harvestings of trips to about six different Chinatowns this year), and the cleverest of them all, Holder of the White Lotus, a biography of that immortal sage the Dalai Lama, told through all of his previous incarnations. Wish I had thought of it. Meanwhile, in one of those bizarre moments of alchemy, The Emergence of Japanese Kingship suddenly made sense to me, becoming relevant and gripping after two years gathering dust and ignored on the shelf.

I have also seen the inside of a lot of airports. Few things are more depressing to the professional author than travelling to eight different countries in a row and finding the same old shit on sale in the departure lounge. I understand, believe me, only a handful of people really want to read a biography of Paul Pelliot while wedged in between two Potterheads in coach class, but the economics are dispiriting. The average British book buyer buys one book a year, to read on the plane when they head off on their holidays. It’s usually a giant brick of a book written with someone’s predictive text function. But I have spent a lot of time in airports this year, and have gamely tried to interest myself in the kind of books that everybody else appears to read. Fiction drew a blank; but sometimes in the world of facts there was something that didn’t make me want to hurl. Stars of my airport-bought reading this year include the second volume of diaries by that nice Michael Palin, and Clive James’s surprisingly technical account of his years in television: The Blaze of Obscurity.

But the absolute star of my reading this year, the book that held my rapt attention from beginning to end, which I finished with a distinct desire to go back to the beginning and start all over again, was Invading Australia by Peter Stanley. As the name suggests, it’s a book about the Second World War, and the belief in Australia that the Japanese were poised, ready to come ashore and seize the entire land. But Stanley’s account goes much deeper, surveying the fictional history of the Yellow Peril, and analysing the power of previous works of fiction in which the Japanese invaded Australia. The result is a history book half taken up with a study of science fiction pre-1942, with blatantly racist tales of evil oriental invaders, and armchair generals’ analysis of how Australia might best be defended against a putative attack. Stanley goes on to analyse not only the facts of the Japanese threat, but also the rhetoric employed against it. As entertaining extracts from Stanley’s own hate mail make abundantly clear, this remains an emotive issue among Australians, who were encouraged to swallow a national myth of holding a particular line against an invasion that, argues Stanley, was fated never to come, at least not in the manner that the Australians were led to believe.

Science fiction, alternative histories, stirring tales of Far Eastern derring-do… with my reputation? I was bound to love it. And since it was published by Penguin Australia, I was lucky that I was in Melbourne this year and able to stumble across it, because I sure as hell wasn’t going to see it on sale at Heathrow.

But anyway, in 2010 I have an entire shelf of books on American First Nations to get through, before I start looking for what’s new. The first books of next year are already on the shelves. The Poison King is in shops already, but has a 2010 copyright date at the front, as if we are already shopping in the future. I shall be getting that sooner rather than later, I expect, because it is one of those rarest items, a book I wish I had written myself. This week, I have mainly looking for a good biography of Alexander Nevsky, and I can’t seem to find one. Always more books to read; always more books to write.

2009: The Year in Anime Books

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It has been a good year for worthy books on Japanese animation. Apart from my own Schoolgirl Milky Crisis, of course, there have been a couple of books I have yet to read but suspect I will like: Andrew Osmond’s Satoshi Kon: The Illusionist and Thomas Lamarre’s The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation. Surely the prize for best anime book of the year must go to Hayao Miyazaki’s Starting Point, lovingly translated by Frederik L. Schodt and Beth Cary, and treating the anime fans of the English-speaking world to an unparalleled glimpse inside the mind of the medium’s most famous director, warts and all. Miyazaki is surrounded at all times by a cloud of idle speculation and spin, and it’s great to see him speaking up in his own words. Not wholly about anime, but deeply illuminating about one of its best-publicised elements, was Lowenthal and Platt’s Voice-Over Voice Actor, also published this year.

Osamu Tezuka has enjoyed a revival, with two excellent English language studies of him arriving in swift succession, first from Natsu Onoda Powers in May, and then Helen McCarthy in October. Meanwhile, in Japanese, the “God of Manga” was the subject of the multi-authored The Osamu Tezuka That Nobody Knew, and Yuka Minakawa’s chunky, gossip-ridden tomes, The Rise and Fall of Japanese Animation: Osamu Tezuka School, 1: The Birth of TV Anime, and 2: Psychologist With an Abacus.

Japanese-language books on anime this year have offered some tantalising glimpses behind the scenes. Just before the end of 2008, the Association of Japanese Animations (sic) and Tokyo Bureau of Industrial and Labour Affairs published a new syllabus for trainee animators and those wishing to enter the business, which seemed to carefully airbrush out much of anime history before the millennium. You might argue that on a need-to-know basis, new animators don’t really need to know… but for those of us with a historical perspective, industry stories are vital for keeping a sense of institutional memory in a notoriously amnesiac business. Mitsuhisa Ishikawa, guiding light of Production IG, published The Animation Business and a Non-Conformist Producer’s On-the-Spot Revolution, and Masanobu Komaki published his memoirs from behind the scenes at magazine in My Time at Animec. Meanwhile, Mana Takemura published Magical Girl Days. And in 2008, although I did not acquire it until this year, Mamoru Oshii (yes, him) published a management guide called (deep breath) : Salvation Through Outside Help: Seven Powers for Work That Does Not Fail, which not only included some wonderful insights to the anime movie-making process, but some mental photographs.

Few of these works seemed to have troubled the reading lists of people who call themselves anime fans, or indeed who call themselves anime scholars. It irritates me that so much anime scholarship seems to revolve around the re-invention of the wheel, as hordes of newcomers blithely ignore what has already been published in the field. Enough respect, then, for Simon Richmond, whose Rough Guide to Anime, also published this year, took the trouble to acknowledge his predecessors. If you just like watching Japanese cartoons for fun, then this shouldn’t bother you in the slightest, but anime seems to be attracting a lot of self-styled experts these days, and it wouldn’t kill some of them to pick up a book every now and then. Starting with the Anime Encyclopedia, which really does have some very interesting essays in it, the contents of which I keep finding other people to have ‘discovered’ independently, which is frankly a waste of their time, and of mine!

Herald Angels

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15th February 2010 sees the UK premiere of the Gainax movie Evangelion 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance at the Glasgow Film Theatre. I shall be introducing it, although unlike the time I introduced Death and Rebirth in Oxford, I shall not be performing the finale solo using shadow puppetry and silly voices. There are all sorts of things going on the same day, as well, including a brief talk on anime censorship by a lady from the BBFC, and the UK premiere of the long-awaited Gentleman Broncos. Hopefully, the trains will be working by then.

Advancing

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As if by magic, the First Emperor of China rears his ugly head again only a few days later, with the word from my publishers that he’s finally earned out his advance. This is a cause for great celebration for an author — it means that a book is performing in a manner which the publisher is liable to find satisfactory, and is now, at least in theory, a little income-generating machine that can be left to perpetually whirr away in the corner and occasionally spurt out coins.

Opinions are divided about advances. One acquaintance of mine is always despondent when a book of his earns back its advance. He regards it as a sign that he wasn’t paid enough in the first place, and that he should have held out for more money. For my part, I regard an advance as a two-way contract, in which a publisher’s faith in a book’s potential is borne out by a sum paid over before the book has even started to earn any money… i.e. “an advance”. The clues are all there in the name… If it does well, everybody wins. If it doesn’t, well, someone overestimated the book’s (or the author’s) likely appeal.

The first edition of the Anime Encyclopedia, if I remember rightly, earned back its advance in a terrifyingly swift six weeks. For books that don’t quite fly off the shelves so fast, three or four years seems to be a reasonable time. My First Emperor book was published in 2006, so it’s done very nicely: with a hardback, a paperback, a dozen foreign editions, and as a cherry on the cake, an edition published in Chinese. My publishers, my agent, and I are entirely baffled why the Chinese would actually want to read what I have to say about him, but their money’s as good as anyone else’s.

The Terracotta Army exhibition helped, as did the opera in New York and the attention I got a year later from the Empress Wu, with some territories buying Wu and coming back for the First Emperor later on. But now, since the advance is all paid off, if there are any future sales of foreign editions (COME ON, NORWAY! WHAT’S KEEPING YOU?), then it’s all gravy. Now all I need is a hundred people to buy a copy, every day, for the rest of my life, and I can retire….

I said it was an income-generating machine; I didn’t say it was a *big* income.

Better Days

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Beijing’s policy towards Google is nothing new. The First Emperor of China‘s advisers rounded up all ‘unapproved’ books. Single copies were retained in the emperor’s own library, and all duplicates were destroyed. It was a criminal offence to possess a banned volume. When the Qin dynasty fell a few years later, the library of censured books was destroyed, along with uncountable, irretrievable works of classical Chinese.

The First Emperor’s censorship scheme removed books considered superstitious or useless, but also any account of history that differed from the one approved by the government.

It shouldn’t be much of a surprise that the First Emperor’s policies should sound familiar. His advisers were the first real career politicians, and one of his greatest admirers was Chairman Mao.

Other chilling features of the First Emperor’s time include:

  • a society under constant surveillance, in which people were encouraged to report on the activities of their neighbours.
  • a criminal justice system in which the interrogator delivered a verdict before questioning.
  • legalised bribery, in which the rich could buy off legal penalties, or send proxies to serve jail sentences in their place.

And some are simply impossible to imagine:

  • a campaign to make immigrants the scapegoats for all social ills.
  • an identity card system.
  • a military expedition launched against a rival nation, to retrieve magical artifacts that were later found not to exist.

So I hope you feel fortunate that you live in such enlightened times.