“I remember cryptic asides at the occasional Manga Entertainment pub lunch, about ‘that guy with the money in the brown paper envelopes,’ an unnamed figure who somehow diddled Terasawa and several investors out of a fortune. Terasawa himself was crushed and dejected by the experience, having spent six months labouring over storyboards, and now with nothing to show for it.”
Over at All the Anime, I write an obituary for the manga artist Buichi Terasawa.
“One day, in the future, you or your cyborg descendant is going to walk into your home after a hard day doing space things and say: ‘I want to see The Seven Samurai, but I want them all to be badgers working for Nicole Kidman.’ And Siri will ask you: ‘Do you want to press the anime filter?'”
Over at the Anime News Network, Andrew Osmond interviews me about the last ten years in anime history.
“I have counted through the images in this sequence, and there are no more than 50 of them. If you were running them through a camera as limited animation, in the style of Astro Boy, then they would take about six seconds, but here they have been judiciously stretched over almost a minute. And these are not cheap little sketches, they are beautifully detailed drawings, and the subject matter is exploding worlds, to the extent that they’re almost saying the human eye can’t really comprehend this, so we are going crude.”
Over at All the Anime, I write about just some of the Easter eggs in the final episode of Gunbuster.
I am driving He Yuling to the dig site, because it gives us the chance to put the car in shot for a few seconds.
“Any problems with grave robbers?” I ask, idly using my term of the week, daomu.
“Oh yes, lots,” he says. “And they’re usually local. Sometimes I wonder with this lot if we’re paying them to dig up something they’ve already worked over on their own time, if you know what I mean.”
The dig site is a pit in a field somewhere on the edge of town. Dr He’s team have been digging it up in sections each year, working through the spring and summer when the earth is soft, and packing up each winter when it hardens. Each year, they pick an area the size of a couple of tennis courts, dig it down ten feet or so to the Shang era, and see what they can find.
In section T0442, where they are working today, they have found a Song-era grave, which they are obliged to carefully tag, catalogue and investigate before they can poke any deeper in search of anything from the previous three thousand years.
“Archaeology was so much easier thirty years ago,” sighs Dr He. “These days, there’s so much diversification – forensic archaeology, environmental archaeology, social archaeology, animal archaeology… but the one that’s become such a growth area is rescue archaeology. China today has so many new roads, new railway lines, new shopping centres, so of course they are going to run into a grave or a temple or something underground. It’s not like the Terracotta Army site, where they build a museum over it. Most of the time you just have a set amount of time to sift what you can, and then it’s a Starbuck’s.”
T0442 is in the middle of farmland, so the soil will be backfilled once they’re done, and the following year it will be growing cabbages again. The farmers don’t mind because there’s digging work for them on the site.
Dr He is such an easy interviewee. We just rattle through the questions, and his answers usually turn into five-minute rants, usually with a chance for me to interject something so it all seems natural and conversational. We joke about the likelihood of Tang dynasty archaeologists complaining that the Shang dynasty archaeologists are ruining their patch by digging right through it to the earlier strata. He talks about soil colours and Luoyang shovels, and we are done before lunch.
“You can see the level of topsoil,” he says. “The first half metre or so is modern. You find iPhones, computer chips, lots of shihui.”
“Shihui?” I look over at Michelle, the assistant producer from Singapore.
“Semen,” she declares.
“I don’t think that’s likely…” I begin gingerly.
“CEMENT!” shouts the director. “Speak properly, Michelle!”
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. These events featured in Route Awakening S05E02 (2019).
Twenty years after leaving for America to seek his fortune, Sami Nenonen (Joel Rinne) returns to Finland to brag about his good luck. Now exotically calling himself “Sam Nelson”, he looks up his old buddy Väinö Suominen (Yrjö Tuominen) and persuades him that the shares he has to offer are a licence to print money. Although Väinö has a change of heart, Sami has already invested 100,000 marks, and after a tense interval, the Suominen family starts to earn dividends.
Daughter Elina (Sirkka Sipilä) graduates from high school and starts courting a young suitor, much to her father’s annoyance. As the money continues to roll in, the household gains disruptive modern conveniences and distractions, and the maid, Hilda (Siiri Angerkoski) struggles to cope with having a maid of her own – Angerkoski, incidentally, steals the opening scene for me by making pancakes like a boss. The traditional Thursday night austerity dinner of pea soup and pancakes is replaced with newfangled consommé, leading some family members to question what they are really gaining. It is Väinö’s wife Aino (Elsa Turakainen) who really puts her finger on it, when she is poured into an uncomfortably expensive dress and subjected to a night out with Sami and his wife, whom she finds to be cynical and brittle.
This leads to a subtle dig at haters of Finnish cinema. At the Nelsons’ snooty soiree, Aino innocently asks a guest if he has seen “the last [latest] Finnish film.”
“I haven’t seen the first one!” he scoffs. “Smart people don’t bother with them.” Such metatextual japes extend to a scene in which a film director tries to persuade Elina to become an actress, in which Arvo Kuusla, in the innest of in-jokes, impersonates the director Nyrki Tapiovaara, whom members of the film community alone would recognise as the director of the previous year’s One Man’s Fate (Miehen tie) for the rival studio Eloseppa.
One of the film’s most strikingly self-aware moments is where Aino persuades Elina to stick to her previous career choice of becoming a nurse, rather than giving it all up to become a singer-actress. It strikes an oddly discordant note, in which a bunch of actors earnestly hector their audience about how careers in the arts are for the privileged few, and it is far more noble to have a useful job. But Aino is fighting a one-woman front against Mammon, sternly informing her family that “money isn’t everything”, and for once, not winking at the audience that it still really helps – see for example, the grasping money-mindedness of Rich Girl (1939) or The Vagabond’s Waltz (1941). Instead, she is practically overjoyed at the news that Väinö’s investments have failed, and that henceforth the family is back to normal, scrimping and saving and meeting every Thursday for a hearty, happy dinner – compare, here, to the similar make-do-and-mend austerity of the same season’s If Only I Had the Power (1941).
Suomisen perhe began life in 1938 as a radio show, and would go on to chronicle Finnish middle-class life for the next twenty years. Only a handful of the 400 broadcast episodes survive today, along with half a dozen movie adaptations, of which this is the first – four more were made before the end of 1945, and a finale arrived in 1959 after the radio show came to an end. With a peak audience share of 52%, it functions today as a fascinating barometer into the way that Finns saw, or hoped to see themselves in the good old days: Dad with a safe job as a civil servant, mum and three kids in the family home, and a merry housemaid performing all the tasks that would be taken over by machines in the post-war era. One can still find Finnish homes from the 1940s that have a small bedroom oddly en-suite to the kitchen – such architecture is a hold-over from the days when a live-in housemaid was common.
The series moved with the times, often in step with government policy – during the war, the family gained two evacuated children in order to normalise such issues with the general population. This first movie adaptation introduces “Sam Nelson” as a handy catalyst to suddenly transform the lives of the family, only to bring them crashing back to normality by the end in a handy reset. The combination of an American visitor and good Finnish people was also catnip to expat audiences – at least one print of the film would surface in America among the cinema screenings of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and other areas with strong Finnish emigrant populations.
The Finnish press enjoyed the movie’s celebration of normal life, particularly its look back to the simple days of the pre-war era, with Uusi Suomi praising its appeal to “Finnish hearts both young and old”, and enjoying its “gentle jibes at human frailties.” Olli Ohtomies in the Ilta Sanomat was similarly touched by its celebration of the little highs and little lows of everyday life, and “a silent hymn of praise to a peaceful and warm home, happy parents and their healthy children.” Paula Talaskivi in the Helsingin Sanomat also loved it, but offered insightful comments about the degree to which it owed its look, feel and presentation to the Hardy family movies beginning with A Family Affair (1937), which made a star of Mickey Rooney. She was bang on the money – in fact, director Toivo Särkkä at Suomen Filmiteollisuus had made the young Lasse Pöysti watch a number of the Hardy films, of which ten were already in existence by 1941, and to imitate Rooney as best he could in his own performance as Olli, the young son of the family. He did so in the expectation that as the years went on, if the Suominen films became a series of their own, Olli would age into the role of the young lead, as indeed he did with Olli Suominen’s Stunt (1942).
Pöysti and his fellow child-actor were new for the movie – their radio originals were played by actors in their thirties, who could never have got away with it on camera. Among the Suominen children, Maire Suvanto’s career struggled to escape from being identified as Pipsa – her sole role as an adult actress was as the older Pipsa in The Suominen Family is Here Again (1959). In adulthood, she found a new career as a teacher, firstly of drama, and latterly of deportment to the sales-clerks at the Stockmann department store in Helsinki. Lasse Pöysti, on the other hand, stayed in the limelight, becoming an accomplished actor on stage and screen, and the manager of several well-known theatres.
The Suominen films themselves did not age well, written off by Tapani Maskula in the Turun Sanomat as little more than “stiff theatre” when they were rebroadcast on television in the 1990s. Still, he conceded, “the merits of the work are more historical than artistic. It offers an excellent sample of the lifestyle of the Finnish middle class in exactly the decent and innocent form in which it wanted to be marketed at the time.”
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Short History of Finland. He is watching all the Finnish films, so you don’t have to.
Somewhat to my surprise, the eBook edition of Anime: A History (Second Edition) has sneaked out into stores two weeks ahead of the paper version’s 7th September street date.
For all those of you who were disappointed that my Gunbuster commentary track was not included on the recent Blu-ray collectors’ edition, Justin Sevakis has uploaded the whole thing up onto YouTube. So you can sync it up at your leisure and hear me wittering for nearly three hours about my favourite anime.
Sancai is the spinach-and-egg colouring to be found in a lot of Tang dynasty pottery. Or at least, it is today. In fact, although sancai as a technique spread as far as Italy in the late Middle Ages, it was over-written in China by later porcelain firing methods with higher temperatures and different glazes. It was practically forgotten in modern China until 1905, when workmen digging railway cuttings near Luoyang started uncovering buckets of the stuff in old tombs.
Archaeologists took it to the nearby village of Nanshishan, where they asked local tilers to come up with ways to restore it, leading to a transformation of their lifestyle. Nanshishan is now a centre for modern sancai production, practically an entire village of over a thousand people, devoted to making pottery.
I’ve never liked sancai. Five years coming and going to Xi’an and I have never once been tempted to buy any of it. Horses are a speciality, but I have never thought of getting a sancai horse for my horse-crazy mother. Nor have I ever been all that tempted by a sancai camel or a sancai fat girl (the ideal body shape in the Tang dynasty). Eric the director of photography is not a fan, either.
“I hate it,” he says. “It’s evil. It’s all for dead people. I would NEVER have it in my house.”
Gao Shuiwang, a relative of the original Gao who became the first restorer, has a swish workshop where they make the sancai. He has a sonorous 40-cigarettes-a-day voice, and is witty and chatty when discussing the question in advance. When he asks what the questions will be, the director jabs me in the ribs, and I say: “The first one, I guess, is what kind of relationship the people of Nanshishan have to the discovery of sancai.” (Wo renwei diyige shi Nanshishan cunmin dui sancai de faxian you shenme guanxi?) He’s ignored me until this point, assuming I am some kind of puppet, and his eyes pop out on stalks when he hears Mandarin coming out of my mouth. After that, things speed up a whole lot, and we are all laughing and joking about the story of sancai since 1905, the problems the villagers had experimenting with glazes and firing temperatures, the health and safety restrictions on wood-burning furnaces, and the difference made by cobalt, newly arrived in the Tang dynasty from Persian merchants along the Silk Road, and vital in the composition of new blues and blacks.
Gŭ – cobalt. A word I learned at six this morning while revising the vocabulary that was likely to come up, lest anyone think this is easy.
Filming time comes, and suddenly Mr Gao clams up. He assumes a rigid, upright position and starts declaiming at me as if addressing an assembly hall. He thinks that interviews have to be staid and staged, and the director pleads with him to go back to the chatty, smiling, witty man he was only minutes earlier. It takes a while to drag him back out of his shell, and convincing that, yes, it’s okay to have fun. Eventually, we drag it back out of him, I signal for Clarissa the fixer to stand behind me so he has a prettier face to look at while he answers, and before long we are back to normal.
As soon as the interview is declared over, he is back to his previous, bounding self, and the director keeps the camera running in secret while I get him to show me around his favourite exhibits in the gallery, all the better to hear his enthusiasm come through. He then takes me down to his lab, where we see the plain white horses painted with three different kinds of red – all the glazes are oxides, and only change from reddish colours when they are fired in the kiln. Until that point, they all look almost the same.
“It’s a right bugger telling them apart,” says Mr Gao. “You wouldn’t believe the number of times I’ve had a brush for red-which-turns-into-green and gone and put it into the red-which-turns-into-white bowl by mistake.”
Mr Gao is effusive with praise for us for giving him such a good time and a good laugh, and is dismayed we can’t come to dinner. He stops us at the door to announce that he wants to give us a little present. A real sancai horse, like something you’d want in your tomb.
“Eric!” I shout. “Mr Gao has a present for you.”
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. These events featured in Route Awakening S05E01 (2019).
It was at the Reform Club in London, from which Phileas Fogg once legendarily set out on a journey around the world. That night, I was addressing a tuxedo’d audience, discussing the many sights and sounds of Xinjiang province, that vital link in international trade routes that, to me, was the essence of the so-called “Silk Road”. I spoke about the ruined cities to be found in the Sea of Death; the bright-eyed angel paintings in desert shrines; the whirling storms of black sand that wreathed the jade mines in the foothills.
Ilse Gertrud Ingeborg Schwepcke (née Haus) insisted on sitting next to me at dinner. She wanted to hear more about the breakaway Muslim realm of Kashgaria (oddly celebrated in street names in East London), the red-haired, mummified “Beauty of Loulan”, the secrets of silk and the fate of the Nestorian Christians. I revealed that I would shortly be heading off with a National Geographic film crew to see it all up close, in season two of Route Awakening.
Ilse seized my hand.
“I wish,” she said. “I wish I could go with you.”
I often bore that in mind as I struggled to eat a newly slaughtered goat in a dusty barnyard, or as I was showered with ordure in the middle of a tribal mud-fight. I imagined her charming the local villagers with a joke delivered half in French, or suggesting that Chicken Kiev might make a better dinner than a cow’s grass-filled intestines.
But we both knew it was impossible. At the time, she was already in her late eighties, a director at Haus Publishing, the company set up by her daughter Barbara, with her mother’s maiden name in the title and Ilse herself as a director. Not long after the company started operating, Ilse became the curator of a quirky list of travel books, in the course of which she would sign me up to write about Finland, Tokyo, Beijing and, of course, the Silk Road.
In an age when so many travel books seem like checklists for pointless selfies, Ilse’s commissions resolutely reflected a love of travel itself, a fascination with the remote and the strange, a refusal to pander to the mainstream. So few modern tourists “travel” at all, but Ilse’s books invited us all to voyage far beyond the sunset, even if we never leave our armchairs.
She shepherded and curated much work of enduring quality, although I am sure she would agree, her best production was probably her daughter Barbara. Or possibly that book about Istanbul. No. Definitely Barbara.
“If a background is really good, it’s taken for granted —viewers can ignore it and just immerse themselves in the world of the movie,” he said. “If it’s bad, they can’t help noticing it, and lose their concentration. When we remember the good times in our lives, we always remember the background as beautiful, even if we didn’t pay much attention to it at the time. That is the kind of realistic beauty that I want to depict.”
Over at All the Anime, my obituary for the scenic artist Nizo Yamamoto.
The Official Schoolgirl Milky Crisis Blog 