“What we actually know about him could be written on the back of a beer mat.”
There’s been some kind of hooha in the gaming world regarding the appearance of Yasuke, the “African samurai” in the new Assassin’s Creed. Five years ago, on the All the Anime blog, I wrote up the work of historical reconstruction that was likely to have inspired his appearance.
Just around the corner from the tourist-magnet Longhua Temple is one Shanghai’s most exciting museums – a facility dedicated to framing the story of China’s Revolution in terms of its relationship to Shanghai itself, where so many of the fights, protests and strikes that defined it took place.
The Longhua Martyrs Cemetery makes fantastic use of its space and location, built over the site of the former prison and execution ground where so many Communist martyrs were created. The site has, at some point, been both a holding area for the Nationalist Kuomintang government and a detention centre for the Japanese invaders in World War Two. Twin walls, carved with the names of victims of the Kuomintang, snake around the gardens, leading off from the main entranceway, which is dominated by chunky statues not of individual revolutionaries, but of the spirit of Revolution itself, represented not only by soldiers, but by nurses and mothers, students and musicians.
The museum itself tracks the rise of the People’s Republic of China through its early stops and starts, including relative obscurities such as the Rebellion of the Small Swords Society, in which part of Shanghai turned into a Triad enclave, mysteriously joined by European supporters, or the activities of the Su Bao (Jiangsu Daily), a newspaper shut down by the imperial authorities in 1903 for daring to question the rule of the Emperor. The story of the Su Bao is told through the life of its star writer Zou Rong, whose pamphlet The Revolutionary Army was the cause of the newspaper’s downfall. Zou himself died in prison in 1905 and was awarded a posthumous general’s rank by Sun Yat-sen. He is depicted here in a lush oil painting, as a “Soldier of the Revolutionary Army”, wielding a pen instead of a sword.
Zou’s story is only the first of dozens of vignettes that anchor the stories of China’s revolutionaries in context and commemoration. There are dioramas and relics, photographs and statues, video-on-demand testimony and even a looped ballet video, each telling the story of a particular individual’s role in lifting China out of its “Century of Humiliation.” It was a humbling and immersive experience, easily one of the best museums I have visited in China, on a par with Changchun’s Museum of the War of Chinese People’s Resistance Against Japanese Aggression.
I soon ran into the exhibit on Zhang Tailei, whose statue so struck me in the pantheon of revolutionaries outside Guangzhou Martyr’s Park last December, but also many other similar incidents in which “failed” protests helped China’s revolutionary movements gain momentum and popular support. One absolutely massive widescreen oil painting celebrates the May 30th Movement, a series of protests and strikes in Shanghai that led to the “Shanghai Massacre” of 1925, in which nine protestors on Nanjing Road were shot and killed by members of the Municipal Police.
I was particularly taken with the works of the artist Chen Jian, who has supplied a series of tableaux for the museum, some of them about specified individual subjects, others about more general themes. Chen’s work includes a moody, cramped depiction of Communists studying in their prison cell, and the beautifully modernist “The Arrestee”, in which two plainclothes police officers lead an unrepentant Communist to a prison van. The picture is suffused with an unsettling physicality, as one of the officers seems to be leaning into his task, as if he is having to bodily drag a prisoner who stands confident with the gravity of being on the right side of history.
Other artists tackle the problematic history of the Longhua Cemetery as the location of White Terror firing squads, such as Wang Shaolun’s “On the Execution Field”, in which a diverse collection of Chinese subjects wait glumly for their imminent deaths.
In one of the most moving exhibits, the museum relates the story of Cai Bozhen and Wu Zhongwen, who were married in the prison van that took them to their deaths, a soaringly romantic revolutionary story that has already been immortalised in a movie, for which extra drama was piled on with “The Internationale” substituting for the Wedding March.
Revolution, for the museum, is a state of grace towards which China groped during its Century of Humiliation, and then fought to maintain in the years that followed. There would be scope here, in a truly comprehensive installation, for an entire extra gallery about the Chinese who lost their lives in some of wrong-turns of the subsequent Chinese state, like the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, but such discussions are characteristically muted.
Instead, it favours the idea of revolutionary spirit as something that burned in the hearts of the characters whose stories are told in the exhibits, and should be nurtured and encouraged in everyone. Pointing out that it presumably also flourished in at least some of the millions of people who were starved, beaten or executed during Maoist purges and social experiments in the 1950s and 1960s would ruin the brilliantly told story of a past that marches ever onwards towards a utopian present.
Nor does the museum have much time or space for those revolutionaries who were inconveniently Nationalist. The Nationalist authorities, with whom the Communists themselves fought from 1911 to 1949 (and technically still fight today on Taiwan), might equally lay claim to be the inheritors of the Small Swords Society or the Su Bao, but their contribution is downplayed here. That, perhaps, is only to be expected in Shanghai of all places, where Chiang Kai-shek authorised vicious putsches against Communists, many victims of which died on these very premises.
Instead, the museum’s narrative of the martyrs of the Revolution continues into the 1950s and beyond, with tales of derring-do on numerous Cold War battlefields, and selfless sacrifices by soldiers, firemen and other public servants.
The visitor is guided out past one final giant oil painting, “The Vision” by Li Peng, which looks down on the contemporary Pudong cityscape from a vantage point somewhere high above the Bund. This, it seems to say, is what you now have, because of their sacrifices.
As the visitor heads towards the exit, past the classrooms and library, there is one final exhibit. The museum doesn’t have anything so gauche as a gift shop, but it does have a wall of free bookmarks, filed chronologically. Each bears the image and description of a Martyr of the Revolution, encouraging the visitor to take a piece of Revolution home with them. I couldn’t find any of my newfound favourites on the day, so I settled for Qiu Jin.
The Longhua Martyrs Cemetery and its attendant museum are gold-star examples of the new “Red Tourism”, and an absolutely fascinating example of “the story people tell themselves about themselves.” It is easily the most interesting place I have visited in Shanghai, not least because it finds a way to put Shanghai itself front and centre in the story of the birth of modern China.
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China.
Minding its own business on the eastern side of Kowloon Park is Hong Kong’s Avenue of Comic Stars – a parade of statues of iconic figures from the local comics scene, winningly presented along with plaques detailing their backstories, their creators’ biographies, and QR codes where the interested passer-by can find out more. It is palpably more fun and informative than the much more famous Avenue of [Movie] Stars on the Tsim Sha Tsui waterfront, which is much less forgiving of anyone who needs reminding who people are.
So there’s characters I immediately recognize, like Ma Wing-shing’s Cloud (from the story usually referred to today by the title of its film adaptation, Storm Riders), along with one’s I don’t, like James Khoo’s Dragonlord, and ones I really should, like the slightly cartoony version of Bruce Lee as drawn by the comics artist Vincent Kwong.
The statues range from the hyper-real anime-influenced heroes of many a game tie-in, to the more cartoonish local figures like Wang Xiao Hu from Tiger & Dragon Heroes, and the buck-toothed spinster Sau Nga Chun. A long mural nearby includes a slew of other artists’ work, including Wong shui-pan’s comics adaptation of John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow, complete with a cartoon Chow Yun-fat, and Mark Tin-kit’s Tao Zero.
The entire installation is a fantastic introduction to the world of Cantonese comics, although I was not quite superheroic enough to withstand the June sunshine for long enough to take it all in. I’ll be going back when there are more clouds over Cloud.
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China.
We were supposed to be in Kunming for lunch time, but a rockslide in the mountains caused us to take a four-hour detour, and we didn’t reach our hotel until 20:00. So, no chance for my plans to see the Flying Tigers Museum in town. Our final stop on the road trip was a ramshackle yellow hut, stuck behind a new shopping mall. Its paint was peeling and its plaster falling off, it was being used as a shed, but it is one of a handful of surviving French station-houses from a century ago.
My PTC (piece to camera) went as follows: “The French didn’t have a toehold in the Chinese hinterland, but they did have a colony in what is now Vietnam, and built this railroad from there to the capital of Yunnan, to exploit the local resources. This is one of only a handful of surviving station-houses, but it’s practically inaccessible, and largely forgotten.” I had three chances to say it, although one was blown by the arrival of a train. The director has two cuts to work with – hopefully the light is right on one of them, and there is no noise pollution.
I earn my money not by saying these words, but through the hundreds of little arguments I have with the director about the order the words come in. Each PTC is written on the spot, but I have to fight over tiny nuances of meaning, so that we don’t get into trouble with Standards & Practices for saying something unverifiable, or waste our footage by saying something on camera that turns out to be wrong.
So I’m there saying we have to say “Chinese hinterland”, because the French did have a toehold in Fujian and Shanghai. We have to say “what is now Vietnam” because Vietnam did not exist as a political entity at the time, and if we say Indochine, some viewers won’t know what that is. We have to say “capital of Yunnan” because nobody has heard of Kunming, but we will have already explained where Yunnan is in the episode. We have to say “the local resources” because we can’t remember what they are, except for tin, and we know there was more than tin. We say a “handful” because we only have one source that names them as three stations, and S&P insist on two sources or we can’t state any facts at all.
And we say “largely forgotten” because the Chinese will moan if we tell the truth, which is that they have left it entirely derelict because the achievements of the colonial era mean nothing to them, even as they reinvent the wheel, with a new railway line running parallel to the one that has already been there for a hundred years. Maybe I earn my money after all, because I had less than five minutes to thrash all of the above out, and less than five more to get it on camera before we were back in the bus.
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. These events appeared in Route Awakening S02E01 (2016).
No, you probably weren’t expecting a picture from Dune to grace the inner pages of NEO magazine. But it’s been on my mind a lot recently, because of the backstory, largely obscured in Denis Villeneuve’s version, of the Butlerian Jihad, an ancient war against artificial intelligences, inspired by the quote in the Dune universe’s pimped-up bible: “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of the human mind.”
Artificial intelligence, or to be more correct, machine learning, is already seeping into many aspects of our lives, including anime. In this very magazine, (NEO #227), we reported on Yuhei Sakuragi’s reliance on “human fallback” to prompt his crowd animations into better realism, and on the developments at Mantra (NEO #231) to create an automated manga translator. Japanese animators are testing A.I. to replace inbetweeners, Midjourney has already drawn a whole comic for ROOTPORT, and now streamers are “testing” A.I. subtitling.
The thing is, the streaming world is already knee-deep in machine translation, whether the streamers admit it (or know it) or not. Time and again, watching mainstream telly, I’ve winced at auto-generated subs from English, that mishear dialogue and have gone uncorrected. Someone, no doubt, is being paid to edit such errors, but they, like the now-replaced human translators who have been ditched, isn’t being paid enough to give things more than a cursory glance. When even YouTube and Subtitle Edit have auto-translation options, who can blame a media corporation from wondering whether this will help them cut even more corners? As this column predicted in NEO #215, the expansion of streaming threatened to overwhelm human translators, making robot assistance an inevitability.
I remain resolutely analogue for now… until the day that my translation clients stop paying me a living wage, and I resort to robot minions.
Now, you might think this all sounds a little paranoid. It seems churlish to complain about robot labour when so many aspects of our lives are already delegated to machines. If you met your spouse through a match on Bumble; if you bought an anime Blu-ray that was recommended to you by an Amazon algorithm; if your last holiday was booked and steered by a travel app like Trip, then machines are already helping out in your daily life. Yesterday in the supermarket, I realised I didn’t know the local word for sourdough bread, and pulled out my phone to ask Siri.
“I don’t speak Finnish,” said Siri, apologetically. Which makes Finland the ideal place for humanity’s last stand.
Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article appeared in NEO #240, 2024.
We are now in Xizhou, near Dali, in an area that is largely Bai, and which has somehow embraced heritage in a way entirely unlike the rest of China – I have not seen a skyscraper for two days. Closer to the coast, “heritage” seems to mean that everywhere gets a shopping mall and a car park, and a bunch of hawkers selling plastic machine-guns. But out here, it means that the old architecture is retained, with acre upon acre of quaint pointy-gabled houses, temples and taverns.
Green foothills loom above us on all sides – they will eventually merge into the Himalayas. This is the locus of the old Tea-Horse Route, a lesser-known trade network that sent tea into Tibet to buy ponies for the Chinese market. Salt, tea and trinkets would cross over the mountains into Burma, often carried by porters lugging their own weight or more, singing a song that went:
Six steps up and rest
Seven steps down and rest
Eleven steps flat and rest
You’re stupid if you don’t rest.
I’ve heard that someone would bang a gong at the end of each verse, signalling the next brief stop. Two hours’ drive into the mountains bring us to Shaxi, once the centre of the Tea-Horse network, now a slightly-touristed heritage town, selling wood carvings and Yunnan coffee. The place is plainly on the backpacker trail, and boasts an untold number of boutique cafes, tea houses and restaurants. Lunch is dry-fried beef in crisped mint leaves, Yunnan ham in tofu and goji berries, and tasteless mushroom fronds harvested with a sickle from the nearby canal.
My job is to walk around town reiterating what I’ve just told you, until two Bai dressed like Marlboro Men trot past on ponies. A price is swiftly agreed, and I am hoisted up onto Zhitu (Red Rabbit), an uncomplaining little horse supposedly descended from the pack animals of the old trading routes, so that I can continue my explanation while riding along. I look ridiculous, like a gorilla perched on a sausage dog. I am taught how to say whoah in Bai, which turns out to be waah, something I would probably end up saying anyway if Red Rabbit were to bolt. But we walk through three iterations – a wide-shot, a close-up and a safety, and he doesn’t throw me, and I clamber down and tell him he is a good little horse before I kiss him goodbye.
“Why did you do that!?” asks the aghast director.
“I’m British,” I explain. “We only show affection to dogs and horses.”
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. These events appeared in Route Awakening S02E01 (2016).
Culinary student Takeru’s life takes a sudden turn when he crosses paths with Jo, an ace sharpshooter, and the kind-hearted Meg. The dynamic duo run a ‘Jack of all trades’ service, which sees them thwart criminals, recover stolen treasures, and battle formidable opponents to pay the bills. Takeru is inspired by his new friends and finds courage in the face of adversity, proving that overcoming fears can lead to unexpected heroism.
Out tomorrow, according to the trades at least, the first volume of Minoru Murao’s manga adaptation of the fan-favourite anime Burst Angel. Motoko Tamamuro and I worked on the translation of the English script.
A bunch of old college friends assemble in Helsinki on the thirtieth anniversary of their graduation, revealing many of them to have gone down different paths from the one they expected. United by their “least” successful classmate Joonas (Urho Somersalmi, later the only prominent Finn in Sampo), it turns out that Esko the investor (Yrjö Tuominen) has been diddled out of his savings by a corrupt agent; doctor Risto (Hugo Hytönen) and judge Paavo (Ture Ara) have had a falling-out, unaware that their children have fallen in love with one another. Meanwhile, Paavo’s wife Agnes (Elsa Turakainen) is considering leaving him for the poet Seppo (Pentti Viljanen), a shady sort who is unaware that the father of the woman he has just impregnated is on his way to Helsinki to deliver some rough justice.
Despite supposedly never having made much of himself, it’s Joonas the everyman who fixes everyone’s problems, arranging a “courtroom” only partly in jest to adjudicate the dispute between his friends, making sure that Agnes is aware of Seppo’s craven nature, and badgering Esko’s swindler to return the money that he took in bad faith. At a celebratory party, Joonas sings of love and friendship, and the menfolk pile off home in a semi-drunken state, whereupon their taxi driver reveals that they still owe him for the fare thirty years ago, when they were also too busy singing the praises of their classmate Maj-Lis (Ruth Snellman) to remember to pay.
Maj-Lis is a bit of an afterthought, as is the seventh classmate Berta (Aino Lohikoski), because they are merely the wives of the guys, and this college reunion fable is really about how the menfolk have done for themselves. Setting aside that sexist implication, entirely understandable for the time, Oi, aika vanha, kultainen is an intriguing forerunner of the sort of Hollywood movies of latter years like Return of the Secaucus Seven and The Big Chill, which similarly revisit youthful dreams in middle age, and ask what went wrong… or right.
For a film that celebrates student days, it is strangely anti-intellectual, focussing on Joonas the rural gentleman, and the common ground of ylioppilas, which is to say, high school graduation, rather than the more rarefied air of university, to which several of the characters plainly went on to. But such a low-level achievement remains a sweetly egalitarian feature of modern Finnish society. Almost everyone can say they finished high school, which is why the nation still chooses on Mayday to invite everyone to put on their white graduation gaps and be smug about it together, as if the entire population was running through the streets wearing T-shirts that bragged they had once sat for some A-levels or a City & Guild in woodwork.
Adapted by Nisse Hirn from a Mätti Hälli novel that was still in galleys at the time, and would limp out some time after the movie that was based on it, Those Golden Days of Yore was regarded by director Orvo Saarikivi as his best work. Shot in the summer and autumn of 1941, but delayed in post-production by the outbreak of the Continuation War, it juxtaposes the youth of today with what would have been the youth of 1912, which is to say, the generation tthat had to live through the Revolution and Civil War. Hirn’s rumination on what had changed, and what hasn’t, hence has a melancholy turn to it, as one generation forged in war is forced to watch its children face it all over again. That, in fact, may even have been a factor in the production, allowing a middle-aged cast to dominate while the studio’s younger leads were presumably off making an entirely different film, possibly the same year’s The Wheel of Chance.
The anonymous reviewer in Ajan Suuta saw in it another aim, which was to educate rural audiences about the life and traditions of urban Helsinki, such as the vivid Mayday celebrations, captured here on location, and the student culture of compulsory bier keller sing-alongs, which I have always found unsettlingly regimented and Germanic. Much as such songs are inflicted on diners in Finnish restaurants by exuberant graduates, they similarly lurch unwelcome into the film here.
There is also footage of such new-fangled devices as a phone booth, the likes of which presumably had not been seen before out in the sticks. Amid the staged scenes of the cast’s celebration there also appears to be actual location work, snatched on the run, of such events as the traditional crowning of Havis Amanda, the naked statue on the Esplanade, with a student’s hat. Many critics were clearly in the sweet spot for such nostalgia, and grew misty-eyed at the restaging of songs from their own student days. The reviewer from Uusi Suomi, however, was having none of it, and observed: “Everything that is interesting in the story, ends already at the beginning, and usually it seems as if the whole production only happened in order to stage a few vocal performances.”
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Short History of Finland. He is watching all the Finnish films, so you don’t have to.
Tantor Media is releasing an audiobook version of my First Emperor of China, read by the wonderful Kathleen Li.
In 1974, Chinese peasants made the discovery of the century . . . Thousands of terracotta soldiers guarding the tomb of a tyrant.
Ying Zheng was born to rule the world, claiming descent from gods, crowned king while still a child. He was the product of a heartless, brutal regime devoted to domination, groomed from an early age to become the First Emperor of China after a century of scheming by his ancestors.
He faked a foreign threat to justify an invasion. He ruled a nation under twenty-four-hour surveillance. He ordered his interrogators to torture suspects. He boiled his critics alive. He buried dissenting scholars. He declared war on death itself.
Jonathan Clements uses modern archaeology and ancient texts to outline the First Emperor’s career and the grand schemes that followed unification: the Great Wall that guarded his frontiers and the famous Terracotta Army that watches over his tomb.
This revised edition includes updates from a further decade of publications, archaeology and fictional adaptations, plus the author’s encounter with Yang Zhifa, the man who discovered the Terracotta Army.
Ayumu Mashiro has given up on his dream of being a hero and settled down into the mundane life of a police officer… until one day he transforms into the legendary villain known as Zero! Now a mysterious voice is guiding him as he’s thrown into the battle between good and evil!
Out today, I believe, from Titan Comics, the first volume of Kentaro Harada and Mikumo Seto’s Villain Actor, a very Japanese take on superheroes and conspiracies. Motoko Tamamuro and I worked on the English script.
The Official Schoolgirl Milky Crisis Blog 