The Secret of the Sword

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“It seems that there were three generations of smiths signing their names Muramasa. As Muramasa’s work was considered unlucky for the Tokugawa family, the “mura” was sometimes obliterated and the character “mune” inscribed beneath the remaining character, thus transforming the remaining character into the far more palatable Masamune. It might have been this process which gave rise to the popular belief that Muramasa was a pupil of Masamune of Soshu, yet his earliest-known work is dated 1501, almost two centuries after Masamune’s time.” –  Harris and Ogasawara. Swords of the Samurai. London: British Museum Publications, 1990.
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The Selfish Germ

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Con crud is one of those conditions that has been around for years, but is starting to become a serious issue. When there was only one convention a year, someone might decide to risk coming along, even if they were feeling a little bit under the weather, if it was the only annual chance to see their pen pals. And if a few people picked up a bug, well… who was to know who was really to blame?
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Some Kind of Bonkers

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So while I was looking the other way, somebody loaned mortgage money to a chancer who was never going to pay it back, and then an investor offered to buy the debt off a banker, and someone loaned him money to do it, and somebody bought the debt off him… and suddenly, trillions of pounds are missing and we are apparently in a recession. Gordon Brown props up British banks by throwing money at them, and everyone starts telling me they’re cutting back. When were they not cutting back!?
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Pictures from the Sea of Death

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Last week, the blog rolled away on autopilot without me. This is what I was actually doing…

I was secretly hoping that Helsinki would be cool in summer, but it’s as warm as London, if not warmer with all the extra daylight. Today there is not a cloud in the sky and the Finnish girls are wearing little shorts. Because I can, I decide to take a route past the statue of Gustaf Mannerheim. I am, after all, in town to look at his photo albums.
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Summer Shivers

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It was the most scandalous media event of its day – rehearsals plagued by arguments, a big-name star determined to rewrite the script, and a story ripped from gory urban myths. Even the marketing provoked controversy, with a giant kite-shaped billboard, depicting a woman’s severed head, holding the edges of a kimono in its mouth. But audiences loved it, and it became the most famous story of its kind. It was remade eight times with different casts, then turned into over a dozen movies, several TV series, and, of course, an anime. This month, it is 179 years old.
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Fresh Air

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In science fiction and related fields, it was once possible to smell demographic changes. The old Forbidden Planet basement used to stink of wet dog, Wotsits and monosodium glutamate sweat. Suddenly, in the mid-1990s, it began to smell of peaches, lemons and vanilla. Had they finally fixed the air conditioning? Nope, but The X Files had brought in a sudden influx of female fans, and they… you know… washed.
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The Nolans System

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In the early 1980s, five sisters took Japan by storm. The Nolans sold 9 million records, and appeared on TV, singing in Japanese. Their biggest hit was “Dancing Sister,” which we know better as the Christmas party floor-filler “I’m in the Mood for Dancing”.

Anime producers fell in love. Some shows already had five-man teams modelled on Thunderbirds, but the video market favoured all-girl action. Soon the Nolans’ media-friendly archetypes, expressed in their costumes and made-up Japanese puff articles, were incorporated into the Five Ideal Anime Women…
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Any Old Irony

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In summer 2005, part-time academic Natsuki Matsumoto found a three-second scrap of hand-drawn animation in Kyoto. The tiny two-colour piece of film was less of a movie than a comic drawn onto celluloid, fifty frames in which a boy in a bright red cap dashed off the words “Moving Pictures” onto a black board, then took a bow. It was rudimentary and if screened, would jump all over the place.

Matsumoto (a respected figure in the anime history world, and a leading authority in pre-war anime) announced that the item could be “up to ten years older” than the oldest known cartoon in Japan. It probably isn’t. The oldest cartoon known in Japan is currently Oten Shimokawa’s Mukuzo Imokawa, and there’s plenty of scope for something to turn up that might be older. But ten years older?
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Snack Attack

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To Ikebukuro, where in a modest three-room apartment in a lively Tokyo suburb, an unemployed 36-year-old woman was ordered by her parents to clear a little space. It seems that Millie Manga, as we shall call her, had allowed her comics collection to take over her room, and the “spare” room vacated by her older sister.
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The Price is Wrong

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I was in the post office sending off a translated script, when the man behind the counter said: “We can’t just send it to America Small Packet Rate, we have to know how much it’s worth.”

“That depends,” I said. “The Writers’ Guild say it’s worth £18,000, the Institute of Translators and Interpreters say £12,000, in France it’s a thousand pounds a throw, and The Company That Shall Remain Nameless won’t pay for it at all because they’ve got someone who does it for 50p and a bunch of grapes.”
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