Over at the Pieces of Eighth podcast I talk to Kenny Smith about my Doctor Who radio play Immortal Beloved (2007), in a convoluted back story that includes Goodness Gracious Me, Roger Zelazny and the mystery of the ether trumpet.
I must be getting good at this. Driving back to the Wastes of Yin, I know more about the site than the crew, because I already shot here once before. So I can direct the car and the van to the right institute, and point out Dr He, because I’ve met him before, and I can tell them that the meeting room is not the ideal place, because there is a warehouse upstairs full of relics that is more photogenic. I can also point out that if they want to get the lens really close to an oracle bone, Dr He has a bunch in a box that he will literally hold up to the camera.
Dr He remembers me from the Chinese chariot shoot a couple of years ago, and so he is immediately at ease and merry. When it comes to the interview, in front of boxes marked HUMAN TEETH, DOG BONES, HUMAN BONES, COW HORNS etc., we rattle through in a single long take. I quiz Dr He about the problems of reassembling oracle bones, and the fun he had tunnelling through a Sui dynasty tomb and a Han dynasty tomb in order to get to the Shang stuff two metres down. He tells me that the size of the turtle plastrons used in divination usually suggest that they came from the river, but some of them were so big that they were liable to be sea turtles, thereby suggesting that the Shang dynasty had trade links as far away as Malaysia.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that there was some Malaysian Marco Polo who travelled all the way to Anyang. These things might have taken decades to drift from village to village until they ended up in the Shang capital. Dr He rattles on non-stop for 45 minutes, which delivers us 90 minutes of footage on two cameras. Time for the pick-ups and then we are out, as if we knew what we were doing.
Turtles are important, says Dr He, because they lived so long, but also as Sarah Allan has argued in The Shape of the Turtle, because they may have signified the shape of the cosmos to the ancient Chinese – a north, south, east and west around a central plain, and in the sky, a big dome overhead.
The Shang people were a bloodthirsty bunch. The Shang dynasty is the most popular topic among Chinese heavy metal groups, because after you hear about all the incest, human sacrifice and torture of the Shang kings, biting the head off a bat looks a bit everyday and soft. The on-site museum has trouble skirting around the fact that their royal graves are full of dead children, chucked in to keep them company in the afterlife, along with dismembered dogs and the usual dead horses, and a special ceremonial axe used for beheading enemies. I’ve read the oracle bones, so I know already about the boiled heads, burned slave-girls and other atrocities littering their tombs.
We finish up in the tomb of Lady Fuhao, the female general who led the armies of the late Shang, wife, or possibly sister, or possibly both to the king Wuding, who entirely by chance turns out to be the guy we know most about because Anyang was the site of oracle bone pits dating from his era. Fuhao’s tomb was miraculously undisturbed; she was buried not only with her signature C-shaped dragon rings and a gaggle of dead slaves, but a collection of bronzes that were already quite ancient when they went into the ground. Some of Fuhao’s bronzes were specifically cast as grave goods (we know this, because they included her posthumous title), but others were seemingly part of what today we would have to call her antique collection.
I felt today that I was really earning my money, and that the crew were really on top form snatching footage, sometimes, when the drone was up, with three cameras running at the same time. What with all the shooting on 4K resolution, as future-proofing against TV channels that might insist on higher quality film in future, we are generating two or three terabytes of data every week. Michelle the assistant producer has to stay up each night uploading it to a server in Hong Kong so the editors can get to work.
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. These events featured in Route Awakening, SO5E02.
“Toren ended up living in a ‘room’ that was actually a walk-in closet that they had put a bed into. And during the time that he was there, the people of Gainax were working on Gunbuster, and decided that they needed a handsome love interest.”
Over at All the Anime, I explain the genesis of Gunbuster‘s love-interest, Smith Toren.
The Bradford Literature Festival has uploaded the audio from my 2022 speech on the life and impact of Confucius.
Often quoted but rarely understood, the thoughts of Confucius has shaped 2,500 years of history.
Author Jonathan Clements outlines the life and times of China’s greatest philosopher, concentrating on sides rarely seen – the younger years of Confucius, his interaction with his pupils, his feuds with his enemies and even his sarcastic wit.
He also examines the fluctuating fortunes of the sage after his death: how his work was almost lost entirely to posterity, before becoming the centre of centuries of Chinese government, and subject yet again to purges in the troubled 20th century.
Jonathan Clements is the author of many books on East Asia, including Confucius: A Biography, The Emperor’s Feast: A History of China in Twelve Meals, and an acclaimed translation of Sun Tzu’s Art of War. For the National Geographic channel, he has presented the documentary Shandong: Land of Confucius, as well as three seasons of Route Awakening, a TV series on Chinese cultural icons.
“A split-second shot of Japan from orbit, seen in the opening credits, actually shows the locations of all today’s nuclear power plants underwater, as if the nation has suffered a series of atomic disasters. When Okada mentioned this in a TV interview, it was mysteriously dropped from the eventual broadcast.”
Over at All the Anime, I reveal just some of the behind-the-scenes shenanigans on Gunbuster: Aim for the Top.
The National Museum of Chinese Writing looks like a newly landed alien spaceship, decked out with golden animal totems shining in the sun, and supported by striking red columns, the fabled taotie mythical beast that shows up on so many Shang-era cauldrons. The museum is in Anyang, of course, because Anyang was where archaeologists uncovered vast pits of broken turtle shells, inscribed with questions to the gods for the Shang dynasty rulers – a peek inside their archaic Google history, if you like.
It’s also closed today, so we technically have the place to ourselves, although a bunch of surly cleaners and key-jangling security guards seem keen to ruin any quiet moments that we might have. The director films me walking among the oracle bones, and I manage a couple of relatively long pieces to camera about the story of the discovery of the Wastes of Yin, and how Chinese history got 600 years added to itself practically overnight in 1928 after the discoveries in Anyang proved that the ancient stories were actual history and not a myth.
Ms Han is a happy lady who seems very animated and passionate about oracle bones, and subjects us to a 45-minute salvo of words about the meaning of the 150 most easily identifiable characters. She doesn’t seem to have been interviewed on camera before, and is fretful about “saying the right thing.” We have to explain to her what an interview is, which is to say that I will ask her questions, which she will answer. She seems to think that we will want her to give a one-hour lecture to the camera about her work. No, we insist, I will just ask her about stuff.
On several occasions, Clarissa the fixer has to practically walk her through the answer that we expect before she will deliver it, even though she just delivered it, word-perfect, off camera. Like a lot of Chinese academic interviewees, she has trouble understanding that we are supposed to be having a conversation, and it becomes easier to just mike her up, not tell her the camera is running, and let her talk away without the chance to get nervous. By the end, the director just wants us to walk through the museum gallery talking, but we keep stopping at displays to talk about the origin of the various characters, and the director shouts at us to keep bloody walking instead of finding out about things.
“Jonathan, stop being interested!” she yells from the other end of the gallery.
But I think Ms Han is enjoying herself. After previously saying that she could only fit us in on Monday afternoon, she has suddenly freed up all of tomorrow morning to invite us over to her college to sit in on a class, so I think she is starting to feel like a bit of a celebrity.
Ms Han’s faculty at Anyang Normal University is built around another museum of Chinese writing, which is far more immersive and engaging than yesterday’s. It’s got all sorts of fun art installations, including a four-wall display of animated characters that can be filmed playing across my face and surrounding me like a veritable sea of words. There are even life-sized statues based on ancient Chinese writing, such as the stick figure holding two oxtails that was the origin of the Chinese word for “dance”.
The Sea of Words, for those not part of the Chinese community, is the name of a famous dictionary of Chinese characters. I have a copy that used to belong to “Uncle” Don Rimmington of the Leeds University Department of East Asian Studies, although I am not sure he knows it ended up with me.
The university also have a little area where students can carve their own oracle bones, leading me to have a nice half-hour with a guy called Zhang, who patiently talks me through the process. He is very excited to see that I am deliberately getting things wrong so that he can correct the way I hold my chisel and the way I hold the bone. Unlike his teacher, Ms Han, he comes to realise that I am doing it to make him look smarter, and not that I am just irredeemably stupid.
Ms Han talks me through the simplest of characters from the Shang dynasty, the most basic 150 of which are simply pictograms.
“The Shang people tried to tag the simple points of difference between similar objects,” she explains. “So what is it that makes a cow different..?”
This is a difficult question to answer in Chinese when I don’t know the word for udders.
“The… nipples?” I suggest.
“No, you stupid boy. Everything has nipples. Cows have horns and a long face. Not like the goat, which has different horns, but still has nipples.”
All right, then. And the horse has a mane and a tail, and a tiger has a stripe. I get her giggling about some of my weirder guesses, and she gets so excited that she starts shouting “NO!” in English every time I get something wrong.
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. These events featured in Route Awakening, S05E02.
Toshio Suzuki has spent the last 20 years carefully steering late-era Studio Ghibli, a company that arguably cannot really function without the input of its three greats – Hayao Miyazaki, the late Isao Takahata, and Suzuki himself. In 2008, Suzuki appointed Disney Japan’s Koji Hoshino to take over as company president – a smart move, finding a man with world-class knowledge of running a cartoon company’s legacy.
But now Hoshino has resigned, claiming that the completion of Miyazaki’s How Do You Live?, is a good time to go, particularly since Hoshino’s going to be 67 in May. An alternative version of the story in the Japanese tabloids has Hoshino leaving under a cloud because his predecessor needed to “properly separate his public and private life.” Suzuki might have stepped down as president in 2008, but never quite went away, functioning instead as a general manager, whatever that means.
Suzuki, whose memoir of working at Ghibli carried the winning title Mixing Work with Pleasure, has been dishing out jobs to his Thai girlfriend Kanyada “May” Phatan. The two have allegedly been an item since she sold him some roadside chicken wings in 2013, after which Suzuki invested in her spa and restaurant. When those businesses went under, Suzuki steered Ghibli itself into authorising a Totoro café in Bangkok in 2018, May’s Garden House Restaurant, which shut down the following year just ahead of COVID.
Not to be deterred, Kanyada resurfaced as the mononymic photographer for The Ghibli Museum Story (2020), and for a book the same year of Toshio Suzuki quotations. She also writes a monthly poem for the Ghibli in-house magazine Neppu, and last month was feted at an Iwate exhibition of her photography, to tie in with a new, rather thin, compilation book.
In the era of Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, this barely moves the needle on the scandalometer. Some Ghibli staffers might bristle at the whiff of privilege, but it’s not like Suzuki hasn’t got form. He literally put a landscape gardener in charge of Tales from Earthsea because the guy was Hayao Miyazaki’s son. And nor is it all that unusual for people to get hired on the basis of personal connections, like that guy Roy Disney at Hoshino’s old company. Le Monde, of all places, fumed that Suzuki took the chance at the Iwate exhibition to “enjoy the hot springs with his girlfriend” which hardly seems like a crime.
If there’s any impropriety at work, it’ll be up to Hoshino’s replacement to clear it all up. That would be Toshio Suzuki, back as president after a 15-year absence.
Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article first appered in NEO #230, 2023.
My great-grandfather was one of the men that Tim Burrows writes of in his new book, one of the grime-smeared workers toiling in the Essex brickyards. He literally dug up the mud around him, compacting it and firing it into uniform rectangles of baked building material, shipping it west out of the county to build that ever-growing metropolis of London. Even as London looked down upon the people of the low-lying marshes to the east, those same people were working long hours, digging up the very ground they stood on, in order to raise their masters ever higher.
“Many nations have an Essex,” writes Burrows, “a much-mocked place that has grown up in the shadow of a major city to become the supposed spiritual homeland of the nouveau riche.” His book, The Invention of Essex is a well-told history of how this vaste swathe of what was once regarded as a “Home County” somehow became the butt of national jokes.
Burrows is in love with his birthplace. He recognises the many criticisms directed against it, but also takes infectious pleasure in recounting its tall tales and grotesque historical figures. In a gesture of heart-stopping romance, he chooses to marry his bride at the end of Southend Pier, transforming its mile-long stretch into the Thames Estuary into “the longest aisle in the world.”
Southend Pier forms a recurring topic in his narrative, not the least for the way in which it encapsulates the county’s long-running class warfare. Affronted at the sight of steamers passing the town by, Southend’s inhabitants built the first structure into deep water in 1830, extending and improving it repeatedly in the decades that followed. But just as Southend created a new anchorage for respectable middle-class travellers, the opening of the railway in 1856 suddenly brought the town within the reach of working-class day-trippers from the East End of London.
A local councillor, Alderman Brightwell, even made the modest proposal that Southend should practice some sort of class-based apartheid, with the hallowed pier as the line of division. In a demarcation that still can be glimpsed today, he suggested that the west of the pier should comprise the pursuits and habitats of Victorian ladies and gentlemen, while the east of the pier – today’s “Golden Mile” of amusement arcades and chip shops that stretches down to the remnants of the Kursaal amusement park (now a rough council estate), should be the playground of the shit-shovellers, factory-workers, barrow boys and slappers of the London “excursionists”.
But Burrows has a winning sympathy for that same underclass, taking the time to observe the awful conditions of their London lives, and the transformative effects that a trip to the “Essex riviera” might offer them. His history of Essex county thrills in the technological determinism of new inventions that transform daily lives and of new laws (such as the invention of the Bank Holiday in 1871) that create new opportunities.
Modern history is his main interest – particularly the two hundred years that saw Essex as we know it “invented” – but he also harks back to many earlier moments. There’s time for the bold Saxon noble taking a stand against the Vikings in Maldon; for the Boleyn family whose daughter Anne was the first infamous and defamed Essex girl; the experiments in social housing and new lifestyles, many of which were subsequently perfected elsewhere with no credit given to the pioneers. There’s the King of Bling whose Saxon grave put my own native Prittlewell on the map, and the historiography of Essex as a place “much-maligned”, from several centuries in the past to the year 2020, when the Oxford English Dictionary tardily removed the term “Essex girl” from its lists.
Burrows offers fascinating glimpses of the changes in the landscape, from its prehistoric origins in meltwater and retreating ice, to its many centuries of malarial swampland – no wonder the locals love their G&Ts, since the medical use of quinine was also discovered here. But before the marshes were drained of their mosquito-harbouring ponds, the “ague” fever was so notorious that the churchmen began to dread an ill-starred posting to “Killpriest Country.”
His book has a nobility to it, and a sympathy for its subject, as well as a ready eye for those moments in history and literature that have a poetry all of their own. In William Morris’s News from Nowhere, a time-traveller arrives in the 19th century to warn its inhabitants of the perils of the future.
“I come not from heaven,” he says, “but from Essex.”
Jonathan Clements is the author of The Emperor’s Feast: A History of China in Twelve Meals, which begins and ends with the Garden of China restaurant in Southend-on-Sea. Tim Burrows’ The Invention of Essex is published by Profile Books.
After what has plainly been a long, long wait through her teenage years, enthusiastically modern orphan girl Raili Wirma (Sirkka Sipilä) collects her inheritance and prepares to flee the stern supervision of her maiden-aunt guardians – a terrifying trinity of scowling women, who glower at her as she joyfully packs. They warn her that she might be biting off more than she can chew, but she laughs it off and skips out the door, ready to make her fortune as a secretary in That Fancy Helsinki.
Before long, she is overwhelmed by the mounting costs of her bachelorette apartment, literally crowded by men on the staircase proffering bills. She is vanquished in office politics by Saara (Kaisu Leppänen), the boss’s favourite who even appears to be winning the flirtatious attentions of eligible bachelor Topi (Jorma Nortimo, directing himself, in his own script adaptation). Attempting to drown her sorrows at a “bachelor boy” party where all the girls dress up as boys, she becomes trapped in a series of misunderstandings, ejected from Topi’s house after she catches him a clinch with Saara, and roped into helping the drunken Captain Nilsson (Jalmari Rinne) find his way home.
Kindly offered a floor for the night by Mrs Nilsson (Lilli Sairio), Raili repays her kindness by delivering a package for her to the Femme Belle beauty salon. Since she is still dressed as a boy, she is a hit with the lusty proprietor Mrs Schmitt (Elsa Rantalainen) who laments that if only Raili were a girl, she would offer her a job. Seeing the chance to get back on the employment ladder, Raili announces that “he” has a twin sister who would be ideal…
Now living a double life as “Risto” the delivery boy and “Tytti”, Risto’s twin sister, Raili must keep switching disguises to evade the police, who want to arrest her for defaulting on her debts. The creepy artist Erkki (Joel Rinne) witnesses one of her elevator quick-changes, and uses the information to blackmail her into becoming a model. When he badgers her to take off more clothes (there is, in fact, a wholly gratuitous nude shot, much appreciated by your correspondent), she throws herself on the mercy of the deputy judge Olli (Finland’s Shatner, Eino Kaipainen), who inevitably falls for her himself.
Raili soons runs into trouble at the salon, where she avenges herself on the oblivious Saara by agitating her delicate skin and giving her indelible mascara freckles. Fired by Mrs Schmitt, she returns, dejected to the family home, where her day is brightened by the news that some other relative has died, leaving her enough money to bail herself out of her self-made problems as if she is an American conglomerate or a British politician. She invites Erkki to a restaurant to tell him that his blackmailing no longer works, only for the lovelorn Olli to see them together and assume the worst. Donning her Risto disguise for the last time, Raili arrives at Olli’s house, ostensibly to deliver a painting of herself. Olli recognises her for who she really is, and proclaims that for her “crime” he will sentence her to life imprisonment.
Marriage… he means marriage. To which Raili replies that his punishment will be to be her jailer.
She accepts… that means that she accepts.
Unmentioned on this blog since her welcome state of undress in Dressed Like Adam and a Bit Like Eve (1940), Sirkka Sipilä lights up the screen with her modern charm, bopping to jazz and wearing a skirt scandalously above the knee. Like her counterpart Helena Kara in The Bachelor Patron (1938), she is a creature that we can only in hindsight understand to be out of her time. Nowhere is this more obvious than at Topi’s naff party, where a singer with crimped hair warbles through a dance number, and revellers in tuxedos and frilly ballgowns seem inexplicably excited by the sight of paper streamers. There are times, in fact, when Raili parades around in deco chic, while the other actresses seem largely clad in tablecloths and animal pelts.
Of course, once she turns up the androgyny as “Risto”, she becomes even more anachronistic, tucking her hair under a flat cap, and drifting ever closer to a French gamine look that would be regarded as the height of sexiness a generation later. In part, this is because she isn’t actually very good at playing a man – compare to Tauno Palo’s similar cross-dressing exploits in Dressed Like Adam and a Bit Like Eve.
Based on the young adult novel Mörk punkt (Black Spot, 1934) by the Swedish-Finn Melita Tång, Perheen musta lammas replays the cross-dressing comedy of The Man from Sysmä (1938) in a contemporary urban setting. Eino Palola, writing for the Helsingin Sanomat, damned it with the faintest of praise, calling it “different in a nice sort of way”, albeit lamenting that “a little cutting and gluing here and there” would have streamlined the film’s dramatic cul-de-sacs and lagging pace. “The film lacks focus,” agreed the critic for Uusi Suomi, “taking the second step before the first.”
Right at the end, the film writes itself into and out of a veritably queer spot, as Olli’s housekeeper looks on in tight-focus horror as her boss appears to be passionately fondling a teenage boy. But when we cut back to the young lovers, Olli waves the housekeeper away, his fiancée now magically transformed back into her feminine self, dress and all. Phew, that’s a relief.
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Short History of Finland. He is watching all the Finnish films, so you don’t have to.
I see in today’s Times that the family of Robert Elegant have placed a notice of his death — frankly I am rather surprised that he doesn’t warrant a larger official obituary. Thrice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for his Asia reporting, a confidante of both Nixon and Kissinger and the biographer of multiple Communist Party bigwigs, he will be most remembered for his many novels on East Asian historical subjects, particularly the brick-sized Imperial China series, Manchu, Mandarin and Dynasty, that inserted outside observers into the tumultous history of China from the fall of the Ming dynasty up to the rise of the People’s Republic.
He was often described as the author who did for China what James Clavell did for Japan (although that rather ignores Clavell’s multiple China works), and it’s certainly true that there were many times when his was the only China-specific material you could find on the bookshelves at the average WH Smiths. “Fiery, witty, kind and generous in equal measure,” write his family, “he was a loving rather, grandfather, brother and uncle.” One hopes that the various newspapers that carried his acclaimed journalism for so many decades might get around to memorialising him, rather than leaving it to his relatives to wedge in a paid advertisement of his lifelong achievements.
The Official Schoolgirl Milky Crisis Blog 