The “location hunt” is the greatest boondoggle in the anime world. These tax-deductible research trips have sent animators all over the world to soak up local colour and amass materials to add a note of realism to their works. For Katsuhiro Otomo’s Steam Boy, photographers clambered over London and Manchester, snapping Victorian-era buildings. For Laputa, Hayao Miyazaki cut a strange dash as the lone Japanese tourist in the Welsh valleys. For Macross Plus, Ichiro Itano and Shoji Kawamori duelled in the air in surplus US military jets. For Gunsmith Cats, the entire crew appears to have gone mad in Chicago at shooting ranges and strip clubs. It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it.

The oddest location hunt known has to have been be the one experienced by Tadahito Mochinaga in 1944, when he was commissioned to make the propaganda cartoon Fuku-chan’s Submarine. His brief was no weirder than that of many modern anime producers: a fun little singsong kids’ film, that also promoted the Japanese Navy. Because the Navy was paying for it, he was sent off to the navy base at Kure to see a real submarine up close.

Unknown to Mochinaga, he’d been booked into the Iwata Inn, a frequent haunt of kamikaze pilots on their last night of freedom. Mochinaga presumably kept quiet about his cartoon mission, but the waitresses misinterpreted this as a sign of shyness or patriotic reticence. That night, the happily married Mochinaga found two of them snuggling under his duvet for a patriotic send-off, and had to shoo them away.

The following day, he and his production crew were taken down to the docks and aboard submarine I-157, where they were plied with whisky in the captain’s cabin, and treated as officers by the trainee crew. They squeezed through the narrow hatches, and experienced the claustrophobic, stuffy longeurs of a dive.

Fuku-chan’s Submarine, like many other wartime anime, mixed cartoonish antics with oddly exacting replications of life in the military. A scene in which the crew snatch up flying fish from the deck and grill them for dinner was based on Mochinaga’s own observations when I-157 surfaced in the Inland Sea. The fish are incorporated into a prolonged kitchen scene, which proved to be the most popular moment of the movie, not for its peppy accompanying tune, but for the simple presence of provisions onscreen. Wartime Japan was already suffering from severe shortages – even as he made Fuku-chan’s Submarine, Mochinaga lost his morning taxi because there was no longer any petrol, and several staff members were conscripted. Food was running low; grocery stores stocked nothing but tea and curry powder, and Mochinaga was subsisting on a single bowl of porridge a day. He poured his personal longing for a sumptuous banquet into the submarine kitchen scene, and his audiences devoured it hungrily.

I say that Mochinaga had the weirdest trip, although I only know about it because he wrote about it in his memoirs. But his colleague Mitsuyo Seo, who would make the legendary Momotaro’s Divine Sea Warriors the following year, seemed to have an awfully good understanding of what was involved in jumping out of a plane. Did Seo actually grab some sky with Japanese paratroopers in 1945, all for the sake of his art…? Sadly, Seo never wrote an autobiography, so perhaps we’ll never know.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade. This article first appeared in NEO #82, 2011.

It’s been twenty years since Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira changed the way the UK watched Japanese cartoons. After 1991, a Japanese origin became something to be trumpeted: a selling point. But could that all be about to change again?

My usual haunts aren’t there any more; old-fashioned browsing is becoming a thing of the past. Tower Records has gone. The Virgin megastores have gone. The HMV-Waterstones-Fopp conglomerate is now practically a UK monopoly, and still struggling. Fearing the worst, some video companies are losing the art of finding out what their audience wants. Or rather, they still have an audience. But it isn’t me any more.

Perhaps we have passed a tipping point. Some of the new blurbs can’t be bothered to tell me about directors I might like, or actors I follow. Far better, it seems, to come up with a new, zappy title, hide the word “subtitled”, and hope it shifts from the bargain shelves in Sainsbury’s. Bang Rajan 2 has been retitled Blood of Warriors: Sacred Ground, because that way it doesn’t sound like a Thai sequel. Pacific Battleship Yamato has sneaked out in the UK with the “Yamato” part rendered in smaller type, as if afraid of scaring people off. R-Point has just been re-released as Ghosts of War, with its Korean origins carefully shunted into the shadows. It seems that it really is more profitable to take a DVD downmarket to appeal to impulse buyers in the supermarkets.

This brutally realist approach essentially gives up on specialist audiences. Terrifyingly, it even seems to make sound business sense. The sales figures for these films compare very favourably with those for bespoke, arty editions targeted at “fans”. The number of customers who will actively seek out a Kong Su-chang film, or ask for R-Point by name is greatly outweighed by the number of passing shoppers who will say: “Cool! Zombie Soldiers!” (Even if there aren’t any zombies in R-Point). The nature of the sales pitch has been reframed from cognoscenti to ignoramuses: less marketing, more downmarketing.

Japanese animation has been here before. Anime pre-Akira endured thirty years with rewritten soundtracks, altered storylines and dumbed-down titles. That was the age of the Hidden Imports, when you could see anime on TV, but only shoved unceremoniously in the kiddie cartoon slots. If companies stop caring about consumers who care, then they stop advertising in specialist magazines. If they start categorising not by directors and stars, but by nothing but broad genres (“WAR!”, “GHOSTS!”), we could lose the kind of tagging data that makes it possible for Amazon to know you might like a particular movie. They could give up on DVD extras, because the new audience won’t want a commentary or a making-of.

Look to live-action for a scary glimpse of anime’s possible future. Are we on the brink of a new Dark Age? Back to the bargain bins…?

My article on Mamoru Hosoda’s Summer Wars is now being hosted over at the Manga UK blog.

At the beginning of the 1990s, Shinichi Suzuki got an offer he couldn’t refuse. Suzuki had been a Zelig-like figure in the history of anime and manga. He was one of the 1950s flatmates at the Tokiwa-so dormitory who ended up forming the nucleus of postwar manga, but he never really became a big-name manga artist. Instead, while his fellow creators dabbled in anime and largely retreated from it, Suzuki jumped in feet first, as an animator on Japan’s first anime TV series for Otogi Pro, and then as one of the main men at Studio Zero.

But Zero closed down in 1971, and Suzuki drifted from job to job, doing opening animations for kids’ shows, or the animated bits on commercials for household appliances. As he faced retirement, it looked likely that his claim to fame would be as the inspiration for a ramen-loving character in Obake Q-taro, a series that nobody had heard of any more.

And then, out of nowhere, UNESCO came calling. Or rather, the Asia/Pacific Culture Centre for UNESCO, an educational body that needed a cartoon. Suzuki was thrown in a room with the Malaysian comic artist Mohammed Nor Khalid, a.k.a. Lat, and ordered to come up with a book that promoted literacy among adults. They needed to make it fun, and they needed to make it transnational, and the result was the illustrated book Mina Smiles, a very simple story comprising colour images with comic-style word balloons placed outside the text.

An eight-minute cartoon soon followed. It was paid for by a Tokyo insurance company, and involved Suzuki heading off to Kuala Lumpur to direct. He was shocked at the abilities of the Malay animation industry: already using computers in 1993. The story of the dark-haired dusky-skinned Mina, a married mother of five, was translated into a succession of languages in order to take its message to illiterate adults all over the third world, initially on VHS. When the DVD of Mina Smiles eventually came out in 2007, it contained a whopping 37 language tracks, including Mongol, Uzbek, Kiswahili, Wolof and Lao, not to mention Portuguese (for Mozambique) and Spanish (for everywhere else).

Mina soon returned in other books designed to teach remote communities about ecological issues: Mina’s Village and Waste Management, Mina’s Village and the Forest, and the later, longer animation productions: Mina’s Village and the River and Mina’s Village and Fire Prevention. The simple Mina comic has reached an audience of millions, and the cartoon that accompanied it might be, for some, the only cartoon they have ever seen. Mina is an international star to rival Pikachu, recognised in classrooms over half the planet, but unless you work for UNESCO or learned to read in the Vietnamese jungle, you have probably never heard of her.

Shinichi Suzuki came back to Japan to enjoy an active retirement as the curator of the Suginami Animation Museum, but when he sat down to write his memoirs, he didn’t begin with his star-studded celebrity encounters with Tezuka or Mizoguchi. He started with Mina, who taught people how to read.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade. This article first appeared in NEO #81, 2011.

I’m intrigued by the latest book from Toshio Okada, self styled king of the otaku and undeniable media studies guru. Sadly, only known in English for the persuasive fanboy diet book Sayonara Mr Fatty, although anime fans will be well aware of his immense contribution to the medium, both as a producer and critic. His Introduction to Otakuology remains a vital book for understanding the growth of the fan market in Japan in the 20th century; his Testament is a densely-packed info-dump of anime industry gossip. And now, Amazon Japan wastes no time in letting me know that he’s brought out yet another book on a fascinating subject: The Valuation Economic Society — I’m still wrestling with the correct translation for Hyouka Keizai Shakai, because “hyouka” is valuation, but also criticism and even review.

The book blurb explains it better: “Moving from a ‘Money’ Society to a ‘Value’ Society”… okay, well maybe the other book blurb explains it better: “If you’ve got a million followers on Twitter, it’s easy to make a hundred million yen. But if all you’ve got is a hundred million yen, it’s hard to get a million followers on Twitter.”

When we meet, it’s at a place of his choosing, one of those odious, pokey little Roppongi bars where women pretend to like you for a fee. Saotome smirks in the corner by a bottle of whisky that literally has his name on it – they keep it behind the counter for him – and with a girl in a slinky red dress who oohs and aahs at his every word.

The Japanese like to present themselves as benevolent creatives who sit around all day thinking of cool stuff. They love fans, of course, although not for the reasons you would think. The love fans because they’ll buy any old crap.

“I bet you think I was part of the Cel Cemetery Scandal?” he says, an eyebrow raised in suspicion.

I confess that, yes, I’d figured that one had his fingerprints all over it. It’s a story that everyone in the anime business tries to forget. Back in the 1990s, when anime were still assembled on acetate cels, new environmental laws forced Tokyo studios to pay extra money for ecologically sound disposal. Old cels had a high chemical content; they needed special treatment, and that meant paying extra fees to the garbage men.

One well-known studio decided to save some money, even at the expense of not saving the world. They waited until nobody was looking, dug a pit in their backyard, and buried all the cels. Piles after pile of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis images, shovelled underground and forgotten.

“Now,” says Saotome. “You tell me. How do you know that wasn’t me?”

I gingerly admit I still thought it was him.

“That case only came to light for one reason,” he says. “It was the damn fans. Police caught fans breaking into the studio and digging up the back yard so they could steal the cels! They were collectors! They could wipe the dirt off and sell them for a few bucks. If I’d been in charge, I’d have been sending the interns down to conventions with truckloads of the damn things. I wouldn’t hide them! I’d sell them!”

“And then,” he admits after a sip of his whisky. “The ones I couldn’t sell, maybe I’d throw those in a landfill somewhere.”

Saotome is always working the angles. He’s an asshole, but he is still an anime classic. He’s a legend.

“Saotome’s my friend,” one producer told me. “He’s always been there for me when I needed him. But when you shake his hand in business, count your fingers afterwards.”

Saotome came into the anime world through contracts and legal – he was renowned for knowing his way around corporate law. Most infamous was the way he handled himself at the collapse of a well-known studio. Just a few signatures, your name here, and here, and… here, and he’d managed to get a famous creator to sign over the copyright in three of his latest ideas.

When Saotome saw the writing was on the wall, he sent in his minions to grab anything that wasn’t nailed down. Before the bailiffs could arrive to shut down the studio, Saotome was backing up a truck. He took the filing cabinets, he took the post-its, he took anything that wasn’t nailed down. And two streets over, he opened up a new studio. His studio.

He’d already set up a new company under a different name, and planned on selling cartoons based on the intellectual property he’d just stolen. Nor did things stop at the titles themselves. Those shows were drawn with pencils, inked with acrylics, and shot on a rostrum camera stolen from Saotome’s former workplace.

“Don’t look at me like that,” smirks Saotome over his whisky. “You kids who play everything by the book, you know what would have happened?”

I shrug.

“Nothing!” he shouts, banging his hand on the table and attracting scowls from fellow drinkers. “The law suit over that dead studio lasted for twelve years. Anything that wasn’t stolen was locked up till then while the lawyers argued. You think a marker pen’s good after 12 years? You think the paints were still useable? We liberated that stuff, my friend. We liberated it.”

Saotome doesn’t see himself as a burglar. He sees himself as the man who got three shows made that might never have happened. In his own little world, he’s a hero, and perhaps he’s right. He’s made a lot of blunders in his life, but he’s always been ready to get to his feet and try again.

Look on the credit lists of some of the most famous shows, and you’ll see Saotome’s name. He was there in the sci-fi boom, when Star Wars made space popular again. The same company, its name changed, was at the forefront of the tits-and-tentacles fad. In the 1990s, he’d been going through the old paperwork when he realised that the wording in an old contract implied he had part ownership of a famous sci-fi franchise. He didn’t hang around – he commissioned a remake and dared the real creator to sue.

To some people, Saotome is a role model, even – there are half a dozen producers who are reading this now and wondering if it is about them. There are animators who owe their livelihoods to him. Saotome sees himself as an optimist. That’s what management does, it optimises. It thinks of what’s possible and goes for it. But Saotome has a respect for the Law. It’s what he trained in.

“I’ve never committed a crime,” he says. “People call me a criminal, but all I did was look for loopholes in things that were already there.”

His pretty companion whispers something in his ear.

“Oh, right,” he says. “I didn’t commit any crimes in the animation world. Obviously, that thing with the guns and the cannabis, that was different.”

Jonathan Clements is the author of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade. This article first appeared in PiQ magazine #2, May 2008.