“A revelation on every page. Everyone should read this.” – Linda Jaivin, author of The Shortest History of China
“Rich with fascinating details, Jonathan Clements’ Rebel Island is an engaging introduction to the complicated and astonishing history of Taiwan.” – Shawna Yang Ryan, author of Green Island
“Taiwan has become a stresspoint of global geopolitics, and Jonathan Clements has done the world a favour with his indispensable account of its complex history. This illuminating and endlessly fascinating book can’t help but change the way we see the Taiwanese people and what they have built.” – Clive Hamilton, author of Hidden Hand
“Rebel Island narrates the long arc of Taiwan’s history in vivid prose and with admirable sensitivity to contemporary views regarding the island’s politically charged past. Clements provides an even-handed treatment of controversies old and new, while engaging readers with revealing anecdotes and his trademark wit.” – Paul D. Barclay, author of Kondo the Barbarian
Once dismissed by the Kangxi Emperor as nothing but a ‘ball of mud’, Taiwan has a modern GDP larger than that of Sweden, in a land area smaller than Indiana. It is the last surviving enclave of the Republic of China, a lost colony of Japan, and claimed by Beijing as a rogue province — merely the latest chapters in its long history as a refuge for pirates, rebels, settlers, and outcasts.
Jonathan Clements examines the unique conditions of Taiwan’s archaeology and indigenous history, and its days as a Dutch and Spanish trading post. He delves into its periods as an independent kingdom, Chinese province, and short-lived republic, and the transformations wrought by 50 years as part of the Japanese Empire. He examines the traumatic effects of its role as a lifeboat in 1949 for two million refugees from Communism, and the conflicts emerging after the suspension of four decades of martial law, as its people debate issues of self-determination, independence, and home rule.
On 15th May 2022, a sixty-eight-year-old man turned up late for a church service at the Geneva Presbyterian Church in Laguna Woods, California, and sat through the ceremony conspicuously reading a newspaper at the back. When the service ended, he chained and glued the doors shut. He then pulled out a gun and started shooting into the crowd of aging Taiwanese people, in the middle of a church luncheon. One man, Dr John Cheng, heroically charged the shooter, but was shot dead. Having run out of bullets, the gunman paused to reload, at which point pastor Billy Chang hit him with a chair. Several other attendees then piled onto him, holding him down while he was restrained with an extension cord.
The incident was swiftly over, with one death and five people with gunshot wounds. The shooter was subsequently indicted on 98 federal charges, including murder, attempted murder with intent, weapons charges, transporting explosives (he had brought a bunch of Molotov cocktails) and hate crime.
Media reporting on the incident was confused and multi-faceted. Some outlets justifiably termed it a “hate crime” – an act by an individual who had singled out a group of victims specifically on the basis of their ethnicity or beliefs. But the shooter was himself a “Taiwanese” man, David Chou – born in Taiwan to parents who were refugees from the mainland. He had a master’s degree from an American university, and a former career as a translator. In later life, he had suddenly become an outspoken critic of “Taiwanese people”, referring not to his own kind, who were simply born there, but specifically to those who rejected the notion of themselves as “Chinese”. Earlier that year in Las Vegas, he had unfurled a banner calling for “ERADICATION OF PRO-INDEPENDENCE DEMONS.” Before embarking upon his shooting spree in Orange County, he had posted a manifesto to a Chinese-language newspaper, titled Diary of the Independence-Slaying Angel.
The incident was a shocking example of the way that foreign politics can suddenly manifest overseas, the playing out of decades of East Asian history in what first appears to be yet another crazy guy with a gun on the American news. Chou was, indeed, yet another crazy guy with a gun – but saw himself as the tip of the spear for a struggle that has played out in Taiwan for the last seventy years. As Wendy Cheng argues in her book Island X, it was also nothing new. Since the 1950s, America has been a crucible and a cradle for Taiwanese politics, and a battleground between its factions.
The name “Island X” derives from the codename given to Taiwan in the wartime training programme run by George Kerr, preparing a group of Allied officers for the island’s invasion and takeover. Cheng employs it in a broader sense, discussing the way in which the Nationalist government on Taiwan was so beholden to America that its very education system fatefully funnelled its best students towards the American university system. “English was taught beginning in junior high,” she writes, “and students were taught to ‘specialise in skills needed in the American job market’.”
A 1949 report by the US National Security Council suggested that the “indigenous population has a strong sense of regional autonomy… The Formosans are anti-Chinese, as well as anti-Japanese, and would welcome independence under the protection of the United States or the UN.” However, it went on to point out that fifty years of suppression under the Japanese, as well as the savage purges of the Nationalist government in the late 1940s, has left any potential independence movement rudderless, leaderless and “politically inarticulate.” Intentionally or otherwise, the United States then spent a generation nurturing not only the future leaders of the Taiwanese establishment, but their future opposition.
It was the hope of the American advisers on Taiwan that sending students back to the States would inculcate them with liberal values and support for the Free West. In some cases, this is what happened. In others, a sojourn in the US exposed Taiwanese scholars not only to life in America, but America’s own political turmoil, and the right of Americans to freely speak up about their misgivings. Like many other political movements both within the US and overseas, they were inspired by the United States’ own origin story – as a revolutionary democracy, taking a stand on broad philosophical issues, and demanding release from the bonds of colonial or imperial rule. As one student put it, it gave her “opportunities [to] actually identify myself as Taiwanese.”
They also became painfully aware that the Nationalist government on Taiwan was entirely buttressed by the United States. “They reached the island aboard American transports,” she quotes George Katsiaficas, “and American arms and subsidies enabled them to stay.” Such observations led activists to question the degree to which Taiwan was anything but an American airstrip in the Cold War.
To describe things in cheekily Maoist terms, America itself was in a state of “permanent revolution”, ready to self-correct and self-criticise, amending its own Constitution to reflect changing attitudes, and with a populace not above taking to the streets to protest about civil rights or the war in Vietnam. Many Taiwanese students were caught up in such protests, what Cheng calls a “contradictory but fantastic thing,” only to discover that their involvement in left-wing activism would lead to their cards being marked back home. Cheng’s own father was one such student, told that there would be no professorial job for him when he returned to Taiwan. Effectively blacklisted, he chose to remain in the United States. Another student observed that it took just six to eight hours’ informed conversation after arriving in America for him to cast aside “twenty-four years of Chinese education,” and to become an ardent supporter of Taiwanese independence.
Such activism could take extreme forms on both sides. In 1970, the Taiwan-born PhD student Peter Huang attempted to assassinate Chiang Kai-shek’s son, Chiang Ching-kuo, at the lavish Plaza Hotel in New York. Shoved aside by a bodyguard, he succeeded only in shooting the hotel’s revolving doors, shouting: “LET ME STAND UP LIKE A TAIWANESE!” as he was dragged away.
Cheng’s book chronicles the aftermath of the White Terror on Taiwan, and the undeniable fact that the surveillance and control of Chinese citizens extended far beyond the island itself, under martial law from 1949-87, to the activities of Chinese people abroad, particularly in the United States of America. For if you were a Taiwanese exchange student at an American university in the third quarter of the twentieth century, you were subject to the unwelcome intrusions of a party cadre, not from the Red Book-waving People’s Republic, but from the “free” government of the Republic of China on Taiwan.
These paid informants or “professional students” were the strongmen (and women) of Taiwan’s “Rainbow” project, so named because the word for rainbow, caihong, is also a homonym for “destroy the Reds.” And by “Reds”, they did not merely mean the proportion of students who were taken in by the rhetoric of the PRC – some did indeed embrace the ideals of the mainland regime, even in the midst of the Cultural Revolution – but anyone challenging the one-party rule of the Kuomintang on Taiwan.
In 1971, the American hosts let down their Taiwanese guests in a spectacular fashion, by proposing to hand over the Diaoyu (Senkaku) islands off the coast of Taiwan to Japan. This has famously become one of the few issues that unites both Communist and Republican China, both of which regard the islands as Chinese. Such a betrayal was soon followed by Nixon’s famous visit to China, which set the United States on the path of recognising Beijing, not Taipei, as the rightful government of the country. And it was not merely the Americans who swung towards Beijing – the news propelled a bunch of Taiwanese students in America to give up on Taiwan as well.
Someone participating in the “Protect the Diaoyu Islands” movement, or Bao-Diao turned out to be super-triggering for the Nationalists, who instituted a new “blacker blacklist” that not only barred people from certain jobs or positions in Taiwan, but rendered them stateless. In several case studies, Cheng chronicles the persecution of students on trumped-up charges, their arrests on returning home for having merely participated in a discussion on Taiwanese independence, the removal of their civil rights and the harassment of their families. She also notes a “rash of bombings” in 1979-80 by WUFI, the World United Formosans for Independence, which led to WUFI being added to the State Department’s list of terrorist organisations.
The Taiwanese authorities fought back, also on American soil. In the most infamous incident in 1984, Henry Liu, a naturalised American journalist who had published a biography critical of Chiang Ching-kuo, was murdered in his own driveway in Daly City, California. He was shot by members of the Bamboo Union Triad, who had been working under orders from Taiwanese military intelligence – a fantastic jackpot of dodgy deals, which, as Stephen Solarz noted, amounted to “frightening examples of the long arm of Taiwanese martial law tearing at the fabric of American democracy.”
Cheng’s book is a fascinating exercise in, as she puts it, “locating Taiwanese-Americans in global history”, and reclaiming the lost stories of a generation of activists and students before it fades away and takes it memories with it. One would be forgiven for thinking that the lifting of martial law on Taiwan, and the subsequent swift rise of the Democratic Progressive Party, moved much of the action back to its homeland, but as the murderous act of David Chou demonstrates, there is no “over there” for Americans of Taiwanese origin if they are not safe in their own churches. The tensions in the Taiwan Strait, over whether Taiwan is part of China or a sovereign island, reach far beyond the local, and indeed, still threaten to engulf us all.
Peter Huang’s words as he was dragged out of the Plaza Hotel would become a touchstone of Taiwanese independence activism. Their most conspicuous appearance is in “Supreme Pain for the Tyrant”, by the death metal band Chthonic, which ends with the words “Let me stand up as a Taiwanese” repeated several times, like a mantra of resistance.
Two months after this column (NEO #232) covered the lack of marketing material for Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron, suddenly we are overwhelmed with press images.
I am not a fly on the wall of US meetings, but I can well imagine that GKIDS went to Ghibli and said “Okay lads, you’ve had your fun, but the American press is going to get super-tired with only having one publicity image. You’d better give us something sharpish, or we’re not going to have any publicity at all.”
Ghibli have come back with pictures that are fated to become iconic anime posters, with titles like Girl Buttering Toast, Old Ladies Looking at Tins, Man with Giant Moustache and Bunch of Happy Blob Things.
No harm done. Boy and the Heron is a box office success in Japan, and some coverage is even (gasp!) revealing its plot, which I think should be a new game of trying to explain a Miyazaki film badly. “It’s Back to the Future retold with a castle full of man-eating parakeets.” Or “it’s about a man inside a heron, but not in a dodgy way.” And in turn, this makes it possible to do Art books and illustrated chapters, and film guides and so on.
Magazines like NEO have some pictures they can hang their Boy and the Heron puff-pieces on for now. But Ghibli-level obstructionism is increasingly being felt behind the scenes, on the collectors’ editions that risk becoming a lot less collectable. Some readers may already know that many years ago, Ghibli refused to allow Optimum to put a commentary track on Spirited Away because they don’t care for third-party opinions (in this case, mine) on official releases. That’s fair enough, and is their right, but experiences over the last year or so have suggested that other extras are getting increasingly hard to approve.
I don’t just mean in the anime world. Last month, a licensor refused to allow an article to be added a manga volume explaining some of the intricate folkloric references it contained. This was, apparently, because the contract specified that the work had to appear in English exactly as it had been in Japan, with no extra material, even though it would make no sense to non-Japanese people.
I sense that a lot of these proclamations are coming from licensors who are trying to make their own lives easier, like the person who refused to allow me to write a book-length freebie for a well-known anime because she didn’t want to have to read it all.
She asked if I could write less. Be less extra. Which means you get less extras.
Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article first appeared in NEO #234, 2023.
“Ran is a ‘Child of Impurity’, a warrior with the power to exorcise monsters, but only by taking on their curses himself. As a result, he is a toxic figure, shunned by the villagers he defends, doomed to a short life-span when the accumulated poisons eventually overwhelm him. And he has acquired a travelling companion, the perky young bard Torue, who sees in Ran the perfect material for a song cycle. Bereft of inspiration, she hopes to follow him around until a ‘story’ presents itself.” Shelley Pallis, All the Anime.
A nice review up early for Yusuke Osawa’s Poetry of Ran, out today from Titan Manga, and translated by Motoko Tamamuro and me.
Frances has egg in her pants. It turns out that the one our producer took from the pile near the toaster in the hotel was not hard-boiled at all, a fact she only realised when she put it in her pocket and then accidentally sat on it 20 minutes later. She’s washed her clothes in a bucket and is hanging them out to dry in the van. Now we look like a proper Chinese film crew, with laundry drying on the equipment.
Today we are in Linyi, a town I have never heard of, where there is apparently a standing film set. I was looking forward to doing a walking shot in a traditional Chinese town, only to walk around a corner to reveal that all the buildings are two-dimensional flats, and to reveal the whole crew standing there with their boom mikes and fags. But we have been warned that the film set is infested with professional spanners, who make it their life’s work to wander into shot and then demand reimbursement to leave. So instead we are sticking to the main plan, which is to film Luqin opera.
None of us are all that clear about what Luqin opera is. It is something specific to Shandong, but nobody was sober enough last night to Google it. Liu Lili is the perky actress who will explain it all to us, but she doesn’t have a whole lot to say about it, and any goodwill is soon squandered by the crew. I ask her if she has any experience with filming rather than stage acting, and she claims to know the score, but she becomes plainly frustrated when her 90-minute make-up regime is constantly interrupted by lighting changes and backtracks. Nor is she all that keen on putting make-up on me, for that is the sort of job they give to the interns, not the star of the show.
Her dresser arrives at 11 in the morning, striding into the backstage area and asking: “Have you finished yet?” We have barely started, and Miss Liu is already in a strop. I try to draw her out about the pieces of hair she sets on her head, her adornments and her make-up, but she has already retreated into snappy monosyllables.
There has been a distinct lack of communication all round. The theatre band arrives ready to play along with Wedding at a Funeral, only to discover that she plans to sing an aria from Meeting My Mother-in-Law. So we have to resort to her miming to a backing track of her own voice as she jauntily rides an imaginary donkey to the tune of an off-key rendition of Knees Up Mother Brown. Then she stuffs me into a bright scarlet scholar’s robe, gets the lippy girl to put on almost all of my make-up, and deigns to be on camera for ten seconds at the end putting the finishing touches to my rouge.
Filming in theatres always seems to go wrong. I blame the clash of two entirely different production regimes in a confined space. The opera troupe have just got back yesterday from a four-province tour, and they are all exhausted. I ask Miss Liu if provincial audiences are well behaved, hoping to hear a diatribe about twats with mobiles, but all I get is an affirmative grunt.
She gives me a line to sing: “Young lady / Thank you for your hospitality / Tiying is a gentleman / Please give him your consent” or something like that. I am able to memorise the line itself and the tune very fast, but once the band get involved there is a whole set of alien meters and pauses that interfere. Sometimes a line begins on the beat. Sometimes it begins half a beat behind it, seemingly at random. The band’s job in Chinese opera is to follow the singers, not the other way around, so a gaggle of musicians with pained expressions struggle to work out where I am going with my lyrics. I keep my eyes fixed on the lady who smacks the little harpy thing with hammers, because she is mouthing along with the words, and I can take a few cues from her.
It’s enough. We get something in the can, which we can stretch with a sarcastic voice-over. I am fighting impossible conditions, done up like Julian Clary in a pair of bathroom curtains, wailing what appears to be two different tunes at once, in Chinese, while two cameramen circle around me and a bunch of musicians make a noise like a piano falling down some stairs.
We chat to the band and Miss Liu introduces the musicians, including the man who plays the Luqin, a supposedly unique instrument in Shandong that looks like a cross between a lute and a mandolin. He hands it to me to twang, and I say to the camera. “I can’t actually play any instruments. You might as well give a computer to a monkey.”
And cut. That’s my last shot of the production. Although the crew are filming tomorrow morning at the Jinan fish market, I am done. Tomorrow, I can put on a clean, non-continuity shirt for the first time in two weeks, and wait for the evening train to Beijing.
There is no soap in the bathroom. I get as much of the make-up off as I can, but it’s difficult around the eyes.
“You’re less Julian Clary now,” says the director. “More Gary Numan.”
After the police raid her workplace for selling contraband goods, secretary Jutta Laakso (Birgit Konström) walks out on her feckless boss and into the street, where she runs into her friend Erkka (Kullervo Kalske), a journalist on his way to a party. Tagging along, Jutta manages to convince the rich party-goers of the Suurmetso family that she is a cultured noblewoman, and snags a job at their company.
But Jutta is actually the child of a theatrical family, whose attention-hungry mother and siblings are soon descending on the Suurmetso home, causing utter chaos, and leading to a series of misunderstandings and coincidences that lead to the ambassador’s orchestra performing for a party in the wrong building, and a government inspector locked in the bathroom after he threatens to confiscate the actors’ “borrowed” set materials. The kind-hearted Mr Suurmetso (Tauno Majuri) takes pity on his wayward secretary, and helps her family set up a new ballet production, The Emperor’s New Points, which riffs on the old Hans Christian Andersen tale in a setting of wartime rationing.
By the end, Jutta and Erkka have realised they have feelings for each other, and Mr Suurmetso has fallen for Jutta’s stepsister, the singer Sointu (Tuire Orri), in a light-hearted riff on Frank Capra’s You Can’t Take it With You (1938), that also rips a page from the playbook of the previous year’s SF Parade (1940), cramming in so much song and dance that the play-within-a-play takes up a quarter of the whole film.
The Finnish press was forgiving of a movie that existed purely as a hanger to hold up a series of song and dance numbers, noting that whatever it was that Poretta thought it was doing, it was doing it well. Even when Kullervo Kalske is asking Birgit Konström what time it is, they are doing it as a song, although this is very much Konström’s film, while Kalske’s stellar good looks are somewhat crammed into the shadows, hidden behind a moustache and framed repeatedly as if he just some guy who has wandered in, and not the Most Handsome Man in Finland.
If you happen to come from a family of actors (and don’t get me started…), then many of the moments in Poretta will be familiar torments – none of the cast can walk past a piano, or a parrot, or a silly hat without diving in and turning it into a performance. The script, credited to Elsa Soini and Seere Salminen of The Suominen Family (1941), along with director Ilmari Unho, is sweetly indulgent of thespians, portraying them as much needed carnival sorts, driving through everyday life like a clown-car of holy fools, brightening the days of normal people with all their singing, dancing and folksy wisdom.
There were vague complaints from the critics that the final performance went on for a bit too long, but then again, 1941 audiences were somewhat dazzled by the closing “under the sea” dance number, filmed with a graphic overlay of bubbles and passing goldfish to add a sense of submarine fun. Everybody seems to be trying a little too hard to enjoy themselves in a pastiche of Busby Berkeley musicals, but that was the inter-war tension that got Poretta into production in the first place, and it seems churlish to criticise it for trying to have a moment of joy in troubled times.
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Short History of Finland. He is watching all the Finnish films, so you don’t have to.
“The evidence slowly builds, through plane crashes, car accidents, and a series of odd wild animal migrations, that America is suffering a nationwide breakdown of digital communications, which may or may not be the act of a malicious invader.”
Over at the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, I write up Sam Esmail’s movie Leave the World Behind, in a spoiler-ridden entry that only mentions one of several Easter eggs that link it to his earlier Mr. Robot.
Just back from a trip to Hong Kong, Guangzhou [and now Shanghai], where I tested out digital apps and payment systems. In Hong Kong, I only needed cash money on my way home, for the taxi to the Kowloon airport express station and the strangely traditional left luggage office there. The rest of the time I used Apple Pay, my credit cards, and the wonderful Octopus for Visitors, which is a top-uppable travel card that also functions as a payment app in a number of handy situations.
China was the big test, as I hadn’t been for several years, and post-Covid, the country has gone almost entirely cashless. Mercifully, Alipay worked right out of the box, happily beeping at the 7-11 counter at Guangzhou station as I bought myself a coffee on arrival. However, the vast majority of retailers and services favoured WeChat Pay, which also worked straight away. I’d only installed it as an afterthought, but it turned out to be much more useful for me in Guangzhou. Up north in Shanghai, it was Alipay for almost everything. You can find both these apps in the Apple Store or Google Play, and while they won’t work until you are in China, it’s best to get them early just to familiarise yourself where stuff like the Scan QR Code button actually is.
The big disappointment was my Bank of Shanghai virtual debit card, on which I had pinned huge hopes, but which embarked upon a Maoist self-criticism session and suspended itself the moment I tried to use it, claiming to have detected “suspicious behaviour.” This turned out to be “buying a ticket on the metro”, and I couldn’t really afford the day’s wait for an appeal, or indeed work out how to appeal when standing in front of a ticket machine in Guangzhou, so I gave up on it. I had been expecting it to be my default payment method in China, but I ended up not using it at all and getting a full refund. Your mileage may vary, but don’t rely on it.
My Alipay/WeChat digital payment apps worked as local interfaces for several non-Chinese Visa and Mastercards, as well as debit cards, although in one store they failed me and I had to resort to cash, while a crowd huddled around to look at the strange pieces of paper that once bought things, but were now more like museum pieces.
The thing that really did prove vital was my eSIM — a virtual SIM card that could be loaded onto my phone and activated when needed. It allowed me to keep my usual phone number, but to use the internet without breaking the bank. I bought one for Hong Kong and one for China, and they allowed me to save money on data roaming and internet access. I spent just $10 on two gigabytes of data in two countries, whereas my mobile phone provider would have charged me $40 for the same, and data roaming would have gone off the charts. None of the digipay apps work without efficient access so I do recommend it. The company I used was a Canadian outfit called aloSIM, and if you want to give them a go, you and I both get a $3 discount if you use my sign-up code: M74D4V9. I’ve bought eSIMs for Europe as well, and I’ll get myself one for America next time I go.
My top ten do’s and don’ts for for travellers in China in 2024 using digital payments are:
(1) Get Alipay and WeChat on your phone, before you travel. Some of the set-up requires real-name verification, such as an uploaded ID page from your passport, and you don’t want to be doing that in an Arrivals concourse while a line backs up behind you at Pacific Coffee. Likewise for your credit cards and debit cards, some of which will require verification from your provider before they can be installed. When they work, they work just like Apple Pay.
(2) Take some spare old-fashioned money for emergencies. Nobody will have change, but they will have to go and find some if all your apps suddenly fail you for some reason. In Shanghai supermarkets, it was possible to pay in cash at the customer service desk, but since that usually was staffed by a lone human pig-piled by pensioners waving banknotes, you were better off using the digipay-only roboterminals if you could.
(3) Install an eSIM on your phone. If you are travelling to more than one Asian country, I recommend aloSIM’s regional package, which will cover you in 14 countries and save you the bother of toggling your data provider at each border. It will save you a fortune in roaming costs, and is sure to be cheaper than the deal you are offered by your phone provider.
(4) If you want to use Google Maps, Gmail, Facebook, or various other pernicious agents of the capitalist west, they will be blocked in China. You will need to put a Virtual Private Network on your phone that allows you to tunnel around the Great Firewall. I couldn’t possibly comment, but if you want to use ExpressVPN, this link will give you (and me) a free month. But remember to turn it off when you are using the digital payments, otherwise your phone will tell your bank that you are in Singapore while you are buying a jacket in Xi’an, and it will immediately assume foul play.
(5) Make sure your phone is up to date. I clung for years to an iPhone 7 that was perfectly good for my everyday needs, but a lot of these new apps require iPhone X or above. If you are going to China, in particular, you may want to double-check that your old phone is capable of handling some of the new services, and if necessary, do what I did and reluctantly embrace the 2020s with a phone upgrade. I presume there is a similar technology event horizon with older Android phones.
(6) In Hong Kong, it’s much less hassle because Apple Pay and credit cards work normally, as indeed does old-fashioned cash. But the real joy of Hong Kong travelling is the Octopus card, the tourist version of which can be installed on your phone as a handy key to open access to buses, trains, and ferries, and also used to pay in convenience stores and many other retailers. Get it before you arrive, and you can march straight onto the Airport Express without pausing.
(7) When travelling in China, and in many other countries, I swear by Trip.com. I’ve been using it since back when it was called cTrip, and it has a very handy English-language user interface. Make sure your passport details are uploaded beforehand, and you will be able to book train tickets and hotels on the fly. Trip allowed me to reserve a first-class ticket on the high-speed rail to Guangzhou before ticket sales opened; it booked the ticket for me using the ID details it had on file, which meant my passport was my ticket.
(8) Try to use your card providers’ facilities to notify them in advance you will be in China. Mastercard, Aktia, Nordea and Natwest took it all in their stride, but MBNA, despite assurances that everything would be fine, froze my card in a panic while I was trying to buy a cup of tea. All was resolved in a single phone call, but since I was kept on hold for over an hour at a premium rate and long-distance, it was a phone call that cost me £187! In future, I shall just ignore it until I get home, but that’s why you need more than one card linked to your app.
(9) Alipay’s Travel feature allows you to connect directly to the metro services in certain cities, removing the need for, say, a separate Shanghai travel card. I’ll miss my little wallet of different metro cards, but I won’t miss wasting money when tail-end amounts expire: I’m pretty sure that I’m sitting on three Beijing Yikatongs that have gone past their three-year use-by date, forfeiting the cash left on them.
(10) And while this may sound like a statement of the blindingly obvious, do make sure that you are travelling with adequate charging facilities — cables and a power bank for a top-up on the move. If your phone runs out of juice, you’ve effectively lost your wallet, so you can’t afford to be cavalier with the power bars.
After a giant kaiju threaten to destroy Japan, the guardian spirits of the nation, known as ‘Yokai’ appear before the young boy Kei… They tell him he is the descendant of the legendary monster slayer Watanabe no Tsuna, and may be the only person who can stop the catastrophe. Great Yokai War Guardians is the epic manga adaptation of the hit movie!
Out today from Titan Manga, the first volume of Yusuke Watanabe and Sanami Suzuki’s manga based on the film, The Great Yokai War. The English script was translated by Motoko Tamamuro and I wrote a translator’s afterword in the hope of explaining some of the weirdness, but it was not included in the book, so here it is instead below:
A “night parade of one hundred demons” is a popular theme in Japanese folklore. There is a belief that supernatural beings march through the street at night and anyone who encounters them will perish if they do not have religious protection. Often, these beings are referred to as yokai, a name deriving ultimately from the first and last characters of the Chinese yao-mo-gui-guai (“phantoms-monsters-ghosts-apparitions”) – a catch-all title first used in the middle ages to refer to supernatural creatures.
There are two major schools of thoughts regarding the yokai. One is that they are all gods and those that have lost their respect and status have become regarded as demons. Another is that both yokai and gods have existed from the dawn of time, but that those that gain worshippers are upgraded as gods.
The centrepiece of the first volume of Sanami Suzuki’s manga Great Yokai War: Guardians is not a scene of apocalyptic urban destruction, but a grand conference of all the world’s apparitions, spirits and supernatural beings, playfully and punningly named with a combination of the terms yami (shadow) and summit – a Yammit. At this Shadow Council, we see a who’s-who of monsters, including a Gorgon, Dracula and Cyclops, familiar to Western readers.
But who is Backbeard? Is he some sort of piratic misprint? An eye in the middle of a dark circle, from which a bunch of tentacle-like limbs branch out, he is, in fact, a Japanese creation, first appearing in a 1965 manga by Yukihiko Kitagawa and Yoshio Okazaki. By 1966, he had been co-opted by Shigeru Mizuki’s Spooky Ooky Kitaro in Shonen Magazine, now introduced as the commander-in-chief of all American monsters. Often an adversary – he makes several attempts to invade Japan in the course of Mizuki’s stories – he appears here as a craven foreign dignitary, trying to make a swift buck on the back of Japan’s latest media obsession with the supernatural.
Backbeard in fact, was supposedly killed off in an early issue of the Kitaro manga, but kept returning because Mizuki found his unique appearance so compelling. He is immortalised today in one of the bronze plaques that decorate Mizuki’s home town of Sakaiminato, a permanent addition to Japan’s own mythology of monsters.
Shigeru Mizuki (1922-2015) is a crucial figure in the history of Japanese ghosts and monsters, not only cataloguing folktales from all around Japan, but inventing many of them himself. His works have become so ingrained in the Japanese psyche that one often has to go to his own publications, such as the magisterial Compendium of Japanese Yokai (1994) to work out which ones are his, and which ones belong to the nation.
It’s through the works of Mizuki that Japanese children often first encounter Nurarihyon, the old man who invites himself into your home and takes charge; Yuki-onna, the temptress who waits in the snows to entice passing travellers; the one-eyed, one-legged Ippon-datara that trample-hops onto people on one day of the year; or the zashiki-warashi urchins that haunt storage spaces. Here, we see them all banding together at a peace summit… sorry, yammit, in order to discuss a terrible tectonic event.
The silly humans think it’s just a natural disaster, but it’s really a mass haunting, of all the sea creatures who died during the forming of Japan millions of years ago. In the wake of the Tohoku earthquake of 2011, it is one of many media allusions to Japan’s modern traumas, leavened with a grand monster party, and a pre-teen hero who can save the day.
In an early scene, we see the young boys getting a fortune from a temple kiosk. Omikuji or fortune telling is common in Japanese temples and shrines. Worshippers draw a stick with a number on it and then open a drawer to find the paper with that number on it. In this manga, they draw a stick with the unlikely number 8 million (八百万). Traditionally the Japanese believe a god resides in everything and the expression ‘8 million gods’ means a myriad of various gods that exist in this world. What it signifies in this scene is that the protagonist ‘wins’ all the gods, but as far as he is concerned, all he is getting is the short end of the stick.
Grand Yokai War: Guardians ran in Shonen Ace magazine in December 2020, a few months ahead of the 2021 release of the film of the same name, itself a sequel to a 2005 movie that was based on a novel by Hiroshi Aramata, itself inspired by the multiple monster works of the 1960s. By this point, it is impossible to work out who came up with what, although the Daiei-Kadokawa conglomerate did its best by roping in as many creators as possible as producers. Sanami Suzuki’s manga retains the central motif of a young Japanese boy who discovers that he is the distant descendant of Watanabe no Tsuna (953-1025), the medieval samurai who wielded a sword with the ominous name Onikirimaru (the Demon Slayer).
The manga alludes to a popular legend that modern-day Watanabe family members do not take part in the Setsubun cleansing festival, in which each February Japanese households cast beans into the air to banish demons. Watanabes, it is said, have no fear of demons entering their houses, and need not bother, although tellingly, this story appears only to have arisen in the last few years. Could this, too, be a modern media myth, already sinking into the common ownership of Japanese folklore…?
“I can make you look taller,” says Tarzan. “I can make you look thinner.”
“Can you make me look more fun?” I ask.
“Almost certainly,” he says, pretending not to notice my Marks & Spencer’s trousers.
He is already leafing through samples of cloth discarding the plaids and herring-bones that would create a distracting moiré effect on camera. He sketches out a plan for a three-piece suit, with peak collars to draw the eye, and a ticket pocket to… keep a ticket in. When I can’t make up my mind between cufflinks and buttons on the shirt, he offers to do both, like I have become an international plug adapter for wrists.
“You can have a little JC monogram,” he adds, “and I think some cream edging on the buttonholes. Thick buttons. Do you want thick buttons?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Do I?”
“Yes,” says Tarzan. “Now what about the lining?”
“Something Chinesey would be nice,” I say.
“You mean like dragons or something?”
“Yes. Can you do that?”
“I can do anything you want. You’re in charge.” He hands me a scrapbook of wacky silk linings, including the Bitcoin logo, skulls and crossbones, the poster for The Godfather, and some dragons.
“Oh yes,” I say. “Those.”
“You like them now,” says Tarzan. “But will you still feel that way in a few weeks?”
He’s right, the dragons are a bit naff. I keep poking around in the book until I see a pattern called “Queen of Dragons”, which is actually a series of repeating phoenix designs, gold on black.
“Thatsh the one,” I say, slurring a bit, because Sam’s Tailor, on Hong Kong’s Nathan Road, also make their own signature beer, and it’s a terrifying imperial IPA with 8.8% ABV. I’ve had three cans while Tarzan is talking through the design, and now I can’t feel my legs.
The first-generation founder, Sam Melwani, arrived in Hong Kong in 1952, and worked for another tailor before going it alone in 1957. By the end of the decade, his son Sham tells me, he had cornered the lucrative market in uniforms for the servicemen of the colonial administration. Which explains why the form I am filling in includes a space for my rank. Sham and his brother Manu can still be found lurking on the premises – it’s Manu who hands me what might have been my fourth beer, but by that point I had lost the ability to count. But it’s Manu’s son Roshan who is the modern face of the family business, rocking a waistcoat design that Tarzan has already sold me as “boss-style” (I realise now that he meant his boss), and with a clash of vibrant patterns on a shirt that has elbow patches just to show off.
“We get staff discounts on fabrics,” says Tarzan with a shrug. “We try stuff out.”
“Covid was a disaster for us,” says Roshan. “It used to be there was a queue going out the door. We were so busy. But then we had month after month where nobody was coming.”
I ask about the regulars. Because one of the delights of Sam’s is that they now have all my details on file, and I can literally send a WhatsApp message asking for a two-piece safari suit in Marimekko camo pattern with a purple paisley party shirt, and they will post it to me three days later, possibly just before they call the fashion police.
“Yeah,” says Roshan thoughtfully. “But everybody spent a year indoors. Nobody needed a suit.” Even so, he pursued them on social media. One of the reasons I can reach out to Roshan at seven thousand miles distance is that he has spent the last couple of years perfecting online consultations. If I do ask for that Marimekko safari suit next week, he’ll be there on a digicam trying to discreetly talk me out of it and save me from myself. But if I insist, he will do what I want and let me endure the ridicule.
And business hasn’t picked up?
“Maybe only twenty, thirty per cent of what it was,” says Sham.
Which makes me wonder what chaos there must have been pre-Covid, because when I come back a mere five hours later for my first fitting, the shop is heaving. There’s a picky Frenchman who isn’t sure he wants a suit at all (testing even Roshan’s patience), and a thick-necked man with a crew-cut who seems likely to be a holdover from the military days; a repeat customer dropping in to pick up something new and he’s arrived with three friends of his who all want suits of their own. They’ve never had a tailor before. I’m a bit surprised I got through the first five decades of my life without one myself.
In the last five hours, a Nanjing-born tailor called Mr Zhang has run up the first draft of my suit, and now he wants to stick pins in me to make sure that the cuffs show just enough shirt.
“Can you tell him to stand up straighter,” he mumbles at Manu.
“Tell him yourself,” laughs Manu in perfect Cantonese, “he speaks Mandarin.”
“No, he doesn’t,” says Mr Zhang.
“Yes, I blimmin’ do,” I say in Chinese, and we’re off, with Mr Zhang interrogating me thorough a mouthful of pins about how I could have possibly ended up in Xi’an, and what kind of temperatures I had at home, as that was going to affect the way the suit was built.
“I doubt very much,” I say, “I will ever have a chance to wear this suit at home. It’s probably only going to get outings in Scotland and on telly.”
“Ah yes,” says Tarzan. “The other shirts!” He is intrigued about the mechanics of shooting a television series, and his eyes light up at the thought of a schedule so punishing that I need up to five duplicate shirts for continuity purposes. One on; one off; one in the wash; one supposed to be in the wash but actually held hostage by a chamber maid in Gansu; and one irredeemably spattered with mud from a tribal fish-throwing ritual. I learned my lesson after my first big National Geographic job, where the shirt I wore on day one had to be worn again on days two, three and four, and never quite recovered. And on the Confucius shoot in Shandong, my biggest problem was our sound-man’s lavalier microphone glue, which ruined several mercifully cheap shirts as well as a few sizeable clumps of my chest hair.
I bring Tarzan one of my current crop of shooting shirts, and he sets about it with professional precision, tutting at the sleeves and scowling at the edging, and telling me that a shirt worn tucked out needs to have a certain kind of pointy thing. Tarzan knows his stuff, and if I let him steer me, it will look like I do, and that is surely the nature of good tailoring.
I walked into Sam’s on Wednesday morning. My suit is ready by the Saturday. When I walk back into the office, there is a small crowd admiring it as if it is a painting on the wall.
“I love the gauntlet cuffs,” says one man to me. I mutter something about not knowing what they are but… ooh, that’s what they are. Tarzan insists on putting the waistcoat and jacket on me himself, in order to demonstrate his dual cufflink/buttoned cuffs, the secret band that holds the suit in place, and the way to adjust the waistcoat shape.
The finished item comes complete with carefully stitched piping, a little pen pocket, and the Queen of Dragons motif repeated throughout. The shirts have my initials on the cuffs, and the act of putting them on feels strangely familiar… as if they had been made for me… which they were.
I am similarly happy with the sample shirt for on-camera appearances, and approve two more duplicates on the spot. Tarzan asks Tony the shirt-maker if he can turn them around before I leave tomorrow, and Tony tells him it’s too much of a faff — so they will just send them to me at home. Now I know I can just ask for whatever I want, and they can just make it happen, I fear they may have created a monster.
What if, I ask Tarzan, I come back with my wife? Can they fit her out with whatever she wants?
“Yes, we can,” says Tarzan. “But we can’t turn it around as fast as your suit. Women’s clothes can take one to two weeks. There’s more…. variables.”
The Official Schoolgirl Milky Crisis Blog 