Chinese Whispers

Posted on March 21, 2013 by ixarette

Science fiction is not as easy to find in China as one might think. I never saw a massive “SCI-FI” section in Chinese bookshops, although there were often entire bays dedicated to internet novels and how-to-draw manga books; SF is more often than not still lumped in with children’s fiction. It’s a long story.

I pestered numerous newsstand vendors in four or five Chinese cities for the latest issue of Kehuan Shijie (“SF World”, pictured), but only struck gold outside the gates of the Beijing University of Astronautics and Aeronautics, where the passing traffic might be reasonably expected to be interested in all that Buck Rogers stuff. Otherwise, science fiction in China, with a readership in the tens of thousands, is still something of a minority interest in the People’s Republic.

Which makes it all the more ironic that I should get back to my office and find in my in-tray two publications that massively increase the footprint of Chinese science fiction abroad. A double-issue of Renditions, published by the Chinese University of Hong Kong, is packed with translations of Chinese SF, including stories by Liu Cixin, Han Song, La La, Zhao Haihong, Chi Hui and Xia Jia. There’s also some intriguing proto-sf such as a piece from 1912 by Xu Zhuodai, as well as an incredible exercise in academic recursion: a translation into English of Lu Xun’s translation into Chinese of a Japanese translation of a story by Anna Louise Strong, showing to what degree Chinese whispers might be reasonably said to have set in.

Fei Dao, another author in Renditions, also shows up in the latest issue of Science Fiction Studies under his real name of Jia Liyuan, with a different hat on as a doctoral candidate in Chinese literature. The new SFS is a China special issue, and includes articles about utopias in Chinese fiction, Chinese SF movies, alien contact and the role played by translation in the spread of the medium, as well as non-fiction essays by Liu Cixin, Han Song and Wu Yan. In my role as a contributing editor to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, I was asked to be a peer reviewer on several of the papers in this issue, and I was very impressed with the level of achievement. It’s certainly very salutary, albeit rather odd, to see the amount of work on Chinese SF in English increasingly so exponentially, almost overnight.

Kardok és hamvak

Posted on March 16, 2013 by ixarette

My Spartacus: Swords and Ashes is now available in Hungarian, and has received an enthusiastic and perceptive review that singles out the character interaction between the leads, the prophecies of later events, the cameo by Cicero and the use of Latin. Also man-on-man action in its historical context, so that’s nice.

New Podcast

Posted on March 14, 2013 by ixarette

Your vertically-enhanced host, Jeremy Graves, is joined by the newly-healed, disease-free Jerome Mazandarani, Andrew Hewson and Jonathan Clements for another rip-snorting, fan-baiting, Jerome-bashing podcast, featuring questions from you, yes you, answered by us, yes us.

00:00 JC on the costs of living in China, and the prospects of a Chinese middle class. Singing the praises of Western Phoenix booze. How on earth does that relate to anime? No worries, here’s a picture of Karen Allen impersonating Jonathan Clements.

05:00 Pricing and quality in China.

09:00 parallel importing.

13:00 Why are people still asking about One Piece? The behind-the-scenes panic last month that led to our hasty previous podcast (thanks, Amazon!). JC sleeps like a baby while Andrew and Jeremy run around in ever-decreasing circles. Mark Smith and his human minions. The problems of coordinating announcements and products.

16:00 On which note, announced on Amazon and exclusive to Amazon right now: Supernatural the Anime, about which we are instant experts, thanks to Wikipedia. Check out our article about Warner Brothers and the anime world.
28: 00 Recent releases – what’s out this week and coming soon. Including discussion of the unlikely connection between Oblivion Island and Skyfall.

33:00 Disney’s announcement (or lack thereof) of no new 2D animated films coming, and what people feel about that. Is it really the end of an era, or did “the era” really end some time ago? The controversy over Rhythm & Hues filing for bankruptcy despite Oscar attention.

40:00 Outsourcing in the film business, and the devious actions of accountants who can chase the money around the world. Bob the Builder is now made in Poland… make your own jokes. How can a film about Space Nazis, shot in Germany and Australia be called “Finnish”? And Revolver Entertainment gets shown the revolving door.

47:00 The history of the PlayStation, and what effect it’s had on modern media.

50:00 It’s brand spanking new news. Manga UK new release announcements: Deadman Wonderland and Steins; Gate.

57: 00 The MCM Expo is now the MCM Comicon.

60: 00 The death of Toren Smith and matters arising, including the top five Toren accomplishments. And in his memory, a rehash of the old Oh! My Goddess argument, just for old time’s sake.

75:00 Ask Manga UK. Almost an hour of your questions, yes yours, answered, dodged or otherwise belittled. The fate of Lupin III; the possible return of UK-based dubs and a tangent about looking for work as a voice actor. What links Naruto to Hawaii Five-0, at least next week? A plug for the book Voice-Over Voice-Actor by Yuri Lowenthal and Tara Platt, and for the scheme to raise money for Peter Doyle.

87:00 Happy memories of Saiko Exciting, and the likelihood of there ever being anything like it again. The recent ratings for Summer Wars on Sky, and how those ratings are reflected in Japan.

94:00 The return of fifteening? A release date for Aria: The Scarlet Ammo? Would you rather have the Japanese market or the UK market? The possibilities for the Macross franchise in the UK.

101:00 Possibilities for Blu-ray releases of things thus far only released on DVD. The possibilities of UK Blu-ray only release. The mechanics of an Irish release, and why we don’t do many. The nature of the subtitles currently used.

110:00 Fate/Zero’s dub; what’s wrong with lending DVDs to friends (nothing). Chihayafuru’s chances of getting licensed. The perils of letting people know when a licence is about to run out. And the plans to have a live recording of the *next* podcast at the Birmingham Comicon. And we’re out!

The Podcast is available to download now HERE, or find it and an archive of previous shows at our iTunes page. For a detailed contents listing of previous podcasts, check out our Podcasts page.

Toren Smith 1960-2013

Posted on March 7, 2013 by ixarette

My obituary of Toren Smith (left), prime mover in the American manga business, is up now on the Manga UK blog.

Hot Dam

Posted on March 1, 2013 by ixarette

In 2009, the Chinese government decided it was time to protect its netizens from the dangers of the internet, by bundling a new piece of software with all new PCs. Green Dam Youth Escort was designed to keep life harmonious (and “green”) by filtering out any images with too many pink pixels (including pictures of pigs), and blocking a list of proscribed sites. It was notoriously buggy, and, well, annoying.

The Chinese internet community was swift to protest in an oddly creative way, knocking up images of a manga-style heroine called Lu Ba Niang (the Green Dam Girl). Clad in a quasi-military uniform with an ironically short skirt, Lu Ba Niang patrolled the interwebs with a paintbrush for censoring, and a red armband that read “Discipline.” Her perky little hat was sometimes depicted with a little crab insignia, since a “river crab” in Chinese is hexie, a homonym for “harmonisation”.

What’s interesting about the Lu Ba Niang protests is what they reveal about Japanese pop culture among the Chinese. The amateur artists and satirists co-opted the modes of Japanese artwork with apparent ease. It’s not just the moe look of Lu Ba Niang, but a dozen little touches, including Vocaloid censorship anthems and hentai spin-offs in which she inspects the bottoms of embarrassed anime girls. The tone and content of much of the protests seemed very much informed by hentai fandom, with some images even in imitation of erotic visual novels, with text that includes Japanese characters. One even calls the character Lubako, as if she were a Japanese girl.

Download statistics and piracy complaints suggest that Japanese works have an “informal” following in China. The size and scope of the Green Dam protests suggest that there is a sizeable community of Chinese “otaku”, even today when Japanese material has supposedly fallen out of favour in the wake of ongoing territorial spats over the Senkaku Islands. Meanwhile, Green Dam never really took off; it became “voluntary”, and then lost its government funding when it was found to contain programming code plagiarised from an American software company. Oops.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade. This article first appeared in NEO #107, 2013.

Bubble Fictions

Posted on February 6, 2013 by ixarette

It is a scene straight out of Evangelion. At the offices of a secret government project, a stern-faced leader informs a reluctant young protagonist that the world is about to end. A clock on the wall counts down the seconds until disaster, unless… unless someone climbs into a dangerous, untested prototype machine, and does battle with the fates themselves.

But Japan is not under attack from avenging angels. The countdown clock is financial, ticking away the moments until Japan’s debts spiral completely out of control, and the country comes crashing down – collapsing banks, armies of starving ex-workers, and considerably less anime in the stores.

2007’s big Japanese sci-fi movie was the satirical Bubble Fiction, in which Ryoko Hirosue is catapulted back to the boom year of 1990 in a last-ditch attempt to save the Japanese economy. The effect is not unlike Back to the Future as written by accountants – Japan’s modern woes are tracked back to a tiny loophole in a proclamation by the Finance Ministry, and high jinks inevitably ensue.

Inevitably, there are sly digs at the fashions of yesteryear, and cameos from whichever future stars the producers could persuade to play their younger selves. Most notably, Ai Iijima, the future author of Time Traveller Ai, can be found dancing at a discotheque. Phones are the size of bricks, shoulder pads the size of helipads, tight ruffled dresses on body-conscious Tokyo ladies and men wear suits two sizes too big for them. Written by Bayside Shakedown’s Ryoichi Kimizuka, Bubble Fiction presents a fantasy view of the 1990s, in which people literally give money away in the streets, taxis need to be hailed with a ten thousand yen note, and champagne flows freely among the party set.

But there is also a sense of impending doom. It’s here, as Tokyo land prices soared to silly heights, that the seeds were sown of economic collapse. The Bubble, warned some pundits, was sure to burst, bringing disaster on the hedonistic Japanese.

Creatively, the Bubble years have a lot to answer for. Outside Japan, the economic might of Japan led Hollywood to make Black Rain and Rising Sun. The great growth in wealth among the Japanese turned them into the owners of video players, and hence helped drive the modern anime industry. The idea of a future economic implosion even gave us the name of a famous anime, Bubblegum Crisis. Deep pockets nurtured the garage kit and figurine industries. The largest disposable income of all turned out to be in the hands of the charmingly named “parasite singles”, twenty-something women living rent-free with their parents, hence a similar emphasis on bespoke cute. Hello Kitty might have been around long before the Bubble, but she certainly achieved megastar status with the help of all those yen with nowhere else to go.

But let us also remember the indirect effects of the crash. With profit margins constricting in Japan itself, producers and publishers became more amenable to foreign sales. Anime and manga abroad, particularly in America, are another side-effect of the boom and bust, and a generation on, the fact that the American market plays such a great part in Japanese business decisions is, at least in part, a result of deals done in the Bubble period.

But what if the American economy starts to slump…? Who’s going to pay for anime then? Sub-prime days ahead, my friends?

This article first appeared in Newtype USA in 2007, and was reprinted in the book Schoolgirl Milky Crisis. Bubble Fiction is screening at several UK cinemas as part of the Japan Foundation’s touring film season.

Geass is the Word

Posted on February 4, 2013 by ixarette

For those that didn’t see last week, the new Manga UK podcast is up.

And we’re back for another podcast, with Jeremy Graves, Jerome Mazandarani, Andrew Hewson and Jonathan Clements, ranging over everything from the disgraced Chinese politician Bo “Selecter” Xilai, to the care of the elderly in Japan, the world of dog poo, advice for avoiding earthquakes, and a little bit about Japanese animation every now and then.

00:00 Jonathan Clements reports on the weather in Xi’an and Beijing smog – dust storms from the desert, and the best job in China.

04:30 Former Japanese prime minister Taro Aso and his assault on “tube people” – a welcome return of anime and manga’s greatest political ally. But with friends like these… Increases in Japanese VAT and what that might mean for anime. See, everything is connected. It’s like Cloud Atlas, here, but with more swearing.

10:20 The politics of hard subtitles and grey importing.

13:00 And so we begin… with Brand Spanking New News, starting with Panty and Stocking on Blu-ray. The reasons behind combined DVD/Blu-ray releases. Reasons to shop at Shopmanga.co.uk.

22:00 Drifters of the Dead packaged with Highschool of the Dead and the mixed response online. Some plans to keep everybody happy.

27:00 The original Hellsing, on its way to you from Manga UK, along with Kenichi the Mightiest Disciple. The first season of Last Exile (but why…!?). Lupin III: A Woman Named Fujiko Mine. K-on the movie… which leads us onto a discussion of dog poo.

37:00 January and February releases: Shiki, DBZ, Bleach, Code Geass (not Code Geese, and certainly not Code Gay Ass), some side notes on the silent equals sign in Loups=Garoux, Journey to Agartha (not Agatha), Tiger and Bunny, Baka and Test 2, Eden of the East the Definitive Collection.

44:30 Ask Manga UK. Your questions answered, or occasionally dodged. Black Rock Shooter’s chances on Blu-ray (not much); the criteria for Blu-ray makeover; the sad story of the Perfect Blue rights; the precedent set in the 1990s by Studio Ghibli’s high rights prices; the changing attitude of the Japanese studios towards foreign investment.

51:40 Manga UK’s New Year resolutions, and a very brief discussion of changes at HMV and Play.

55:00 The chances for digital downloads in the future. Ghost in the Shell Arise, and matters… arising.

61:00 The possibilities and pitfalls of titles released with English-audio only. The “strategic error” of Afro Samurai.

66:00 What does Kaze actually do? And several questions dodged for now because we have to go away and look up the figures. And we’re done.

Available to download now, or find it and an archive of previous shows at our iTunes page. For a detailed contents listing of previous podcasts, check out our Podcasts page.

Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down

Posted on January 28, 2013 by ixarette

When advertisers and sponsors first became involved in the anime business, it was tentative and haphazard. Masaki Tsuji reports phone early calls arriving at TV Asahi from pencil manufacturers and card companies, who wanted to stick some of the earliest 1960s characters on their merchandise. When he picked up the phone, he realised that, quite by accident, the TV channel completely owned the relevant rights in Eightman. By the time of Sailor Moon, interests in tie-ins had ballooned to such an extent that one beleaguered Bandai official complained he had “literally no time to go to the toilet” when the phone was ringing. Literally…?

But how can sponsors get returns on their investment, apart from advertising in the commercial breaks? There is, of course, simple product placement, where cans of soft drink, storefronts and even blatant advertising billboards are placed in-shot. This is mostly harmless, although if you have a fantasy film like Berserk, it’s difficult to have the cast setting aside their roast dolphin for a Happy Meal. In such cases, extra artwork is often generated, such as the Lotteria tie-up campaign, which featured the powerful mercenary Guts and albino general Griffith tucking into a hamburger and a milkshake. The androgynous Griffith was also depicted with a shopping bag over his shoulder, looking like a Lady Who Lunches, in a campaign for a department store.

But some anime go beyond product placement into context integration – imagine a hypothetical anime movie, let’s call it Schoolgirl Milky Crisis Goes to London, where five minutes are set aside for characters to travel on a well-known airline, and then get mixed up trying to locate their hotel, causing them to repeat its name a dozen times. But this has been going on in anime for decades, most notably with the Gundam series, for which a company wanted its toys to be part of the story. Yoshiyuki Sadamoto once called Yoshiyuki Tomino the “pro’s pro”, for being able to take such behind-the-scenes demands and to fashion them into a story that still entertained the viewers. It’s being able to still be creative, amid such immovable limitations, that contributes to the unique look and style of anime.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade. This article first appeared in NEO #106, 2012.

The Lady in Red

Posted on January 21, 2013 by ixarette

One of the odd obsessions that has occupied me for the last decade is Mazu, the Chinese marine goddess, patron deity of all those in peril on the sea. She began life as a real person, Lin Moniang, a quiet, contemplative Song dynasty girl who used to legendarily stand on Fujian clifftops in thunderstorms, wearing a bright red dress to serve as a human lighthouse to her father and brothers in their fishing boats. Lin Moniang, so the story goes, walked into the sea, sacrificing herself so that her father’s ship could return safely, becoming in the process a personification of the sea itself. Deified by later emperors, her red-clad image can be found everywhere Chinese sailors drop anchor. There are statues to Mazu in China and Malaysia, and two temples to her in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Her most famous devotee was Coxinga, the pirate king of Taiwan, whose life is bracketed by portents of her favour and blessing, and whose island enclave was conquered a generation later by a one-eyed admiral who claimed to see Mazu with his blind eye, standing waist deep in the waters of the Taiwan Strait, and fighting for the Manchus.

In 2010, I stood in the shadow of a massive statue of Mazu in Tainan, as a lone monk chanted an endless sutra, and a replica of Coxinga’s ship was launched from the dockside. In 2009, I climbed a hill in Nagasaki to the temple maintained by Coxinga’s Japanese relatives, where a squat statue of Mazu glowered in the central hall. I keep meaning to write something, when I get the chance, about the Mazu cartoon film, as yet unavailable in English. But I’ve been prompted to mention her today because of the series on Chinese television at the moment, which dives headfirst into Mazu mythology with flying demons, heated debates among the immortals, and sea devils rising from the Taiwan Strait. Oh, to be a commissioning editor at the BBC with a mind to recreate the Monkey madness of years gone by… because Mazu is the series that might just do it.

Public Lending Right 2013

Posted on January 15, 2013 by ixarette

The public-lending right results are in, totting up my royalties from British library loans this year, with no real surprises to regular followers of this column. My samurai history is at number one, but the Spartacus novel goes straight into the charts at a respectable number four, with only six months to earn that level.

1. A Brief History of the Samurai
2. Confucius: A Biography
3. A Brief History of the Vikings
4. Spartacus: Swords and Ashes
5. A Brief History of Khubilai Khan
6. Darwin’s Notebook
7. The First Emperor of China
8. Mannerheim: President, Soldier, Spy
9. Wu
10. Beijing: The Biography of a City

As ever, this is the list of books with my name on them. My top-earning book, for the tenth year in a row, is actually an obscure children’s work I wrote under a pseudonym in a long weekend. You never know what’s going to bring in the cash.