“No matter which period you depict, as far as there is something that never changes, I think that will become a story about ‘now’.”
Over at All the Anime, I interview Reiko Yoshida, screenwriter of The House of the Lost on the Cape.
On 24th May 1957, a Chinese widow and her daughter began an angry vigil outside the US embassy in Taipei. Ao Tehua held up a bilingual sign protesting at the decision by a US court martial to find her husband’s killer innocent. Asked to move on, she pointed out that the street outside the embassy was Chinese territory, and it was her right to stand wherever she pleased. By the time a force of twenty-two police officers arrived to persuade her, a mob of 400 onlookers had gathered. A local reporter interviewed the tearful widow on tape, and then broadcast her words through a loudspeaker to an increasingly fractious crowd.
By the afternoon, the crowd had grown to more than 2,000 people, storming the embassy gates. They smashed the windows, ransacked the offices, and patrolled ominously outside the iron door protecting the staff in their panic room. The Stars and Stripes was torn down and shredded, and the flag of the Republic of China raised on the embassy flagpole in its place, to loud cheers from a crowd that now numbered six thousand.
In a moment of gripping cinematic tension, eight men bolted from the embassy through a gauntlet of “clubs, stones [and] fists.” They reached their escape vehicle, a military jeep, only to discover that one of the rioters had stolen the keys. As the mob charged towards them, their Chinese driver tried to hotwire the car with a pair of pliers and the tinfoil from a packet of cigarettes. Police officers started to push the car down the street, at an excruciatingly slow walking-pace, as the driver tried frantically to jump-start the motor. As the rioters caught up with the still-unstarted vehicle, the men reached the safety of evacuation buses, while the crowd yelled at them: “You killed Chinese. We kill you.”
Stephen Craft’s book American Justice in Taiwan is a fascinating snapshot of Cold War politics in Taipei, during the era that the US government vainly attempted to prop up the exiled government of Chiang Kai-shek, in the forlorn hope that it would one day retake the Mainland from Chairman Mao’s Communists. He starts with the shooting that precipitated the embassy attack, a fateful evening two months earlier, when the 41-year-old Master Sergeant Robert Reynolds had rushed out of his house after his wife Clara claimed to have seen a man peeping through the window as she took a shower.
Giving chase in his yard and the street outside, Reynolds apprehended and fatally shot Liu Ziran, an officer in Taiwan’s army and a member of the Institute of Revolutionary Practice. When the authorities arrived, Reynolds confidently admitted to having shot the man whose body was lying in park 200 feet from his house, noting that he had done so in self-defence. That was his next mistake.
In the case of the Reynolds incident, the real issue was a huge disjuncture between Chinese and American legal practice. American law recognised that “a man’s home is his castle” – if Reynolds could prove that the intruder was a threat, he might get away scot-free. Chinese law, however, regarded all violence as a crime that needed to be answered, even if committed in self-defence or without malice. This, observes Craft in an illuminating aside, was why British diplomats were not allowed to drive their own cars in China, as “accidents became incidents.”
So, when Reynolds immediately announced that he had shot the intruder in self-defence, under American law this an argument for his innocence, whereas in China it was an admission of guilt. In similar cross-cultural misunderstandings, the Reynolds inquiry seemed more ready to accept the testimonies of white interviewees, who swore to tell the whole truth, than those of Chinese ones, who were not obliged to swear on a Bible. Following Reynold’s controversial acquittal, it was suggested that he follow Chinese custom in paying compensation to Liu’s family, but his representatives refused, on the grounds that in American eyes it would make him look guilty.
The result was an escalating tension on Taiwan, in which the mob stormed the embassy, and armed military police escorted American children on their school buses, while the authorities warned that “rumour agitation” was a capital offence. And there were rumours galore, enough for a whole mini-series of alternate facts, with claims in the Chinese press that Liu and Reynolds had been secret love-rivals duelling over the same woman. Meanwhile, American intelligence pointed to a number of incredibly suspicious coincidences and happenings, that suggested Ao’s protest sign and the embassy attack itself might have been orchestrated with the help of the secret police, run by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s own son.
Trying to mollify feelings on both sides, Chiang Kai-shek gave a broadcast in which he called it “one of the most shocking and most regrettable things” that had happened in the last five decades – something of an overstatement, considering that the period included two World Wars. As for the embassy staff, they felt “they have been kicked contemptuously by friends for whom they have risked and spent much.”
Craft’s book is a whodunnit, poking around in Reynold’s testimony, and the forensics of Liu’s death. He delves into gendered arguments in both the court and the press, in which commentators seek to question the evidence on the basis of the attractiveness of Liu’s Chinese wife. Why on Earth, they argued, would he want to look at a naked American woman, particularly the frumpy Clara Reynolds – their words not mine! Why, the very idea was an insult to Chinese womanhood, while the argument in Liu’s defence was an insult to Clara Reynolds.
But Craft also turns the story into an examination of the history of justice for Americans in East Asia, all the way back to the Terranova Incident of 1821, in which a naturalised American sailor killed a boatwoman by throwing a pot at her. He talks through numerous similar moments in the record, where illegal foreign activities have gone lightly punished or even unpunished, as well as similar cases in Japan, which were resolved very differently. For a century, Americans and other foreigners enjoyed the umbrella protection of “extraterritoriality” – the right to be tried by a court of their countrymen, rather than the Chinese. The Americans finally renounced their extraterritorial status in 1943 as part of wartime concessions, only to start re-asserting it in a new form by rushing to claim “diplomatic immunity” every time they needed to. But as Craft notes, in a lovely anecdote, the attitude of the US military was still occasionally tin-eared when it came to local issues.
In February 1957, a visiting American general made the error of asking his Taiwanese hosts why the locals were not celebrating the birthday of George Washington.
“We are not a colony yet,” came the beautifully understated reply.
This is a movie waiting to happen, unravelling from two midnight gunshots in a Taipei suburb, into a consideration of the history of justice itself, the Cold War, and the very real possibility that everyone – Reynolds, Liu, the mob and the embassy staff – were all unwitting pawns in a power-play between Chiang junior and his father the Generalissimo. Craft’s narration expertly zooms in on tiny moments of human interest, like Japanese vagrants scavenging for shell casings on a military shooting range, or junior officers pleading with their jeep drivers to use their horn less into order to make more friends, out to grand pivots in geopolitics. With a winning grasp of historical context, he closes with the October 1957 launch of Sputnik, setting the Soviet Union ahead in the space race, and pushing the US and the Republic of China to entrench even deeper in their reluctant alliance.
Rewarding on many levels, American Justice in Taiwan is a book that offers a sweeping view of thorny issues in international justice, which continue to reverberate today.
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. American Justice in Taiwan: The 1957 Riots and Cold War Foreign Policy is published by the University Press of Kentucky. Pics from Wikimedia Commons.
Today, we will log five minutes of footage. The day starts at 0500 and finishes for me at 2200. Every single moment takes a million negotiations, as the English director struggles against jet lag, and the Chinese director, who looks 12 but is actually 34, struggles to continue to make the documentary that he has been unchallenged about for the last few weeks before the foreigners arrived.
Today, all we have to do is film Yan Weixing, who looks uncannily like George Takei, make a deep-fried sweet and sour fish in his kitchen. But the lights have to come from the van, and the sound man has to mic me up, and then the director wants me to change my shirt, and then the B cameraman needs to change his battery, and the filmic world’s ever true cliché of Hurry up and Wait comes true again and again. I read the entire works of Confucius while waiting for my next call on the sheet, and Mr Yan smokes his way through an entire packet of Nanjing fags.
Meanwhile the Chinese director has his own ideas of what things should be, and really doesn’t want foreigners to interfere. Mr Yan and I are in the kitchen, and he is scraping the scales off a carp and slicing a series of incisions into it before rubbing it with salt. The heat in the kitchen is ridiculously high, and the sweat is pouring off us. He makes a batter for the fish and a delicate sweet and sour sauce. This is Lu-cai, one of the “Eight Great Cuisines of China“, and while Cantonese, and Sichuan and the like have made it abroad, nobody really knows much about the delicate flavours of the land of Confucius. Lu-cai used to be all the rage in Beijing until the 1950s, when Mao’s fetish for chilis and an entrepreneur’s willingness to open a Sichuan restaurant in the capital changed the world of Chinese cooking.
A bunch of diners are waiting for us to bring the fish. They have been waiting for three hours. They want to put a mini GoPro camera on the fish as I bring it into the restaurant so that we get a fish-eye view. I open the door and enter, proclaiming in Chinese to much applause: “Here is your Yellow River Carp!” The director makes me do it another six times. Then we have to do the sitting with the diners, six times. Then me asking about the seating arrangements six times. Then they offer me some Sea Cucumber Liqueur. We need to film it again, six times. I have drunk half a liquidised sea cucumber by this point.
We need to shoot the whole scene again, without lights, because the drone team will shoot it from outside the window in the dark. We have a drone team? Yes, they are three guys who have been sitting outside all day waiting for their moment to shine. We drink more sea cucumber liqueur and the drone crashes into a nearby balcony. But they have the shot.
It is 2200. Tomorrow’s call is 0515. I am in a hotel where prostitutes put business cards under the doors. Tomorrow I will be somewhere else by dinner time.
Jonathan Clements is the author of Confucius: A Biography. These events appeared in Shandong: Land of Confucius (2018).
To America, where a group of high-profile voice actors, many with a firm footprint in the anime world, have declared war on artificial intelligences. Or rather, artificial intelligence’s meat masters, noting that many actors performing “voice performance replication work are unaware of or do not fully understand their rights regarding employment contracts.”
Vocal Variants, a pressure group including Yuri Lowenthal, Stephanie Sheh and Matt Waterson, outlined a set of simple demands and stipulations. The group aims to inform companies and actors, chiefly to warn actors off inadvertently signing away all their rights to exclusivity in their own voices.
Any voice actor with a significant body of work inadvertently creates an audio bank of their voice. This is particularly true in the gaming world, where actors are often less reciting a script than delivering “barks” and soundbites. Sakura Wars even made a big deal out of its audio component, for which the Japanese voice actresses recorded themselves saying all 100 syllables in the language, thereby allowing the audio software to address the (Japanese) player by name, and, in theory, to say anything the computer wanted.
Give an AI enough material to play with, and it can generate dialogue as if the actor is saying it themselves. It was Steve Blum, the voice of Cowboy Bebop’s Spike Spiegel, who first poked his head above the Twitter parapet to ask who had the right to make him say things he never said. It started up a social media storm that led to the formation of Vocal Variants, and its statement that voice actors were entitled to safe storage of their voices, clear stipulation of what those voices might be used for, approval on the use of their voices to generate synthetic dialogue, and appropriate payment for use.
Stephanie Sheh noted on Twitter that although many of the AI apps agree to take down unsanctioned audio files, the actors are often obliged to police them themselves, and often don’t even know their voice has been uploaded unless they join each specific app service.
“As AI/Synthetic voice work now covers much uncharted territory,” says the Vocal Variants website, “it’s imperative that we collaborate to create and amend laws and contracts to protect both laymen and professional performers against deep fakes, improper use and exploitation of recorded performances.”
Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article originally appeared in NEO #229, 2023. Since its publication, Vocal Variants has become a division of the National Association of Voice Actors.
The distance from Puli to Hualien is 40 miles as the crow flies. You can drive it in just three hours, although, tellingly, today’s bus and train routes still take seven, edging all the way around the north of Taiwan, rather than making a beeline across the towering central mountains. But there was a time when it was a track unknown to all but a few aboriginal hunters, until one brave Japanese frontiersman, Katsusaburo Kondo, led a surveying party through the jungle.
That, at least, is what Kondo claimed, in a series of 1930s newspaper articles in which he chronicled his experiences among the tribesmen of the Taiwanese hinterland, a life-long association that led him to acquire the nickname “Kondo the Barbarian”. His memoirs have now been published by Camphor Press, a small publishing house that punches way above its weight in Taiwan Studies, responsible for much of the best and most original material in the field in recent years.
In October 1930 a group of Taiwanese Seediq tribesmen infiltrated the sports day at a Japanese-run high school and massacred over 130 Japanese, as well as two Chinese observers who had fatefully decided to cosplay in kimono. The “Musha Incident” became a touchstone of Japanese-aboriginal relations, and would lead to a brief colonial war that claimed hundreds of Seediq lives. The Musha Incident was a shock to the Japanese system, but has also been framed as a form of indigenous apocalypse, as the last generation of Seediq warriors, deprived of their traditional manhood rituals, went hunting for their colonial oppressors in a last, desperate attempt to merit the killers’ tattoos that would entitle them to join their ancestors in the afterlife.
Suppressed for decades under the Kuomintang government, the story of Musha sprang back into life in the 1990s, as the Taiwanese media gained increasing interest in indigenous issues. It was adapted into a comic by a native artist, which itself became a major source for the film Seediq Bale: Warriors of the Rainbow (2011, pictured), an epic action movie that reframed the story along the lines of Braveheart or the Native American “ghost dance” cult.
The Musha Incident, in fact, remains such a huge presence in reports of Taiwan under the Japanese that it still accounts for 10% of all the material published in Japanese relating to the fifty years of colonial rule. Paul Barclay’s new book digs down into one of the ur-texts that inform so many of these stories, the reminiscences of an unreliable narrator who tried to place himself at the centre of the story.
Katsusaburo Kondo is that most dangerous of conmen: an evocative and persuasive writer. He begins his story with the aftermath of the Musha school massacre, when he visits his estranged aboriginal stepdaughter, who confides to him the true reason for the war, before hanging herself in her prison cell. He then leaps back in time to tell the story of his relationship with Taiwan’s indigenous people, as an interpreter, explorer and trader.
In particular, Kondo is keen to insert himself into the narrative of the Fukahori Expedition, an ill-fated platoon murdered by head-hunters in the Taiwanese hinterland. He frames much of his subsequent adventures as a quest to avenge the lost soldiers, and to retrieve their bodies and possessions, finally striking it lucky when he stumbles across their skulls on display in a tribal longhouse. But as Barclay notes in his meticulous annotations, Kondo’s life-long claim that he, too, would have perished on the expedition were it not for a fortunate bout of malaria, was part of his ongoing attempt to appear far more involved than he really was.
“Despite… many inconsistencies, falsehoods and implausible claims,” observes Barclay, “Kondo’s writings wedged their way into discourse, by hook or by crook.” However, they are also loaded with tantalising and convincing glimpses of aboriginal culture, including a chilling account of the “guardian of heads” (the crone priestess who welcomes a new skull to the tribal shrine), and a charming anecdote in which an indigenous girl confides to Kondo that her people are “afraid of the Japanese people who tick-tock.”
It takes Kondo a while to realise that she is frightened of his pocket watch, which makes him, too, seem like an otherworldly creature bearing haunted devices. This is catnip to the historian in search of local colour, but Barclay is on hand to warn that it seems suspiciously close to another story told by one of Kondo’s associates, and was quite possibly something that he ripped off. In another part of the tale, he recounts a horrifying attack by several tribal youths, who decide to lynch him for his skull. He fights them off, but is so grievously wounded that he writes his will… except he is “fully healed” within two weeks. Well, which is it?
And yet, and yet, there are moments in Kondo’s story, translated here in full, that are truly illustrative of the stand-off between the aborigines and the Japanese, such as the sight of tribesmen going cap-in-hand to the local police station to plead for meagre parcels of gunpowder and a couple of bullets, merely so they can continue their livelihoods. Kondo tells tales of the Seediq hardening the soles of their feet by walking on hot iron rods, and of the strict lumber merchants whose insistence on unmarred timber is the cause of much misery among tribal log-carriers. Finding a corpse on their mountain mission, he asks his tribal companions if they want to eat it, and they look at him in horror – cannibalism being taboo among them, despite claims to the contrary made by the foreign media. These observations are so mundane, so everyday that they have to be true. Right?
With Barclay as our guide, Kondo’s tall tales become an object lesson in text-critical analysis, as we get to grips with the lies he tells others, the lies he tells himself, and some of the truths that are still revealed. His account of his divorce from his common-law wife, in which he delivers a pig’s head and a keg of rice wine to her father, seems faithful to tribal traditions, although one wonders just how happy the former Mrs Kondo was with it – Kondo claims she waves him away with a laugh. Barclay even gently makes Kondo more relevant to modern historians, by redacting some of his hand-waving racist dismissals of everyone as “savages”, replacing his blanket descriptions with more exacting classification of tribes and sub-groups.
Sometimes, one thinks, the tribesmen have the last laugh. Kondo writes sneeringly of a moment on his expedition when he convinces his tribal companions that he has a magical amulet that will turn a single grain of rice into a full belly for each of them. “So simple-minded,” he scoffs when they appear to fall for it. And yet he also tuts in annoyance when they attempt to delay the mission by waiting for a new-born baby to grow up so that its mother is free to accompany them. Kondo decries this as a moment of savage sloth, but one wonders if the tribesmen weren’t concocting an excuse to delay the city boy’s dangerous mission for another season.
Resistance to the Japanese authorities was futile. Barclay has some winning data on the nature of colonial wars, pointing out that the Musha Incident was such an embarrassment to Tokyo that the soldiers who avenged it were handed the most desultory of medals and rewards. Even as the Hague Convention attempted to limit the savagery of modern warfare, colonial campaigns were somehow exempt, subjecting the Seediq to some of the very worst of modern weaponry, including aerial bombardment of their forest hideouts.
Kondo writes vividly of some of the attempts to get the aborigines to understand how pointless it was for them to fight back, with a tribal delegation brought to visit Japan itself to show them the power and might of the Land of the Rising Sun. Put aboard a train for the journey to Keelung, the Seediq scream in fear, protesting at the dizzying speed, pointing in terror at what appears to them to be “dancing trees” beside the tracks. It is a beautiful image, but Barclay points out that while Kondo’s early writings describe the aborigines as brave, hardy trackers and hunters, his later work transforms them into clueless, whiny man-children, reflecting Japan’s own drift towards imperial condescension. In Barclay’s hands, Kondo the Barbarian transforms from an account of the Taiwanese indigenous people to an even more revealing narrative about the Japanese who were writing about them.
Kondo the Barbarian: A Japanese Adventurer and Indigenous Taiwan’s Bloodiest Uprising is published by Camphor Press. Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China.
Carefree Finnish nobleman Arnold (Tauno Palo) makes the mistake of beating a Russian prince at cards, and is challenged to a duel over the attentions of a lady. Fearing he is wanted for murder, he flees from St Petersburg back to his native land, switching clothes and identities on the train with a violinist. Hiding out among circus folk, he becomes the unwitting centre of a love triangle between an acrobat and a strongwoman, and has to flee once more, throwing in his lot with a band of gypsies who love his violin-playing.
He soon charms local lady of the manor, Helena (Ansa Ikonen), who is torn between the man she believes to be little more than a tramp, and local rich boy Eric (rent-a-cad Jorma Nortimo, sneaking back in front of the camera after many months directing behind it). Arnold plays up his vagabond status, wriggling out of an illegal fishing charge by pretending he can’t read the sign, and eventually accepting Helena’s charitable offer of a low-ranking job at her mansion in order to “better himself”. The two would-be lovers are surprised by the apparently justifiably jealous Eric, leading to a tense wedding in which Arnold and his gypsy band dominate proceedings. Arnold and Helena elope, only for him to drive her up to his own family mansion, and reveal that he has, somewhat cruelly, been lying to her all along.
All’s well that ends well, because he’s rich.
Leading man Palo is initially unrecognisable beneath a 19th-century moustache, in a film that comes loaded with baroque, imperial sets, hearkening back to the Bad Old Days when Finland was but a Grand Duchy within the Tsar’s Empire, and even posh Finns were little more than servants to the Russians. Much of the fun derives from the slurry of women that Arnold leaves spattered in his wake, including Athalia (Lida Salin), the incredibly enthusiastic circus strongwoman, and Cleo (Laila Jokimo), the lithe acrobat. Regina Linnanheimo in a black curly wig is uncharacteristically joyous and smouldering as “Rosinka the beautiful gypsy girl” for whose affections Arnold briefly wrestles, before being told something borderline racist about how “gypsies should keep to their own kind.”
Of course, he’s also “keeping to his own kind,” pursuing the usual wet-lipped and grasping Finnish film romance of a woman with pots of cash, although one imagines that the producers would plead that, at the time she elopes with him, Helena doesn’t believe he has two pennies to rub together. Ansa Ikonen’s face, in the final scene, is a picture of wounded pride, as she gets a happy ending, but only through a deception that has been perpetrated on her for the entire movie. She genuinely looks like she’s going to slap him, and then she actually does. Their romance is only saved at the last moment by Arnold’s fearsome mother (Elsa Rantalainen), who literally commands them to kiss – a dramatic device we have seen before in The Regiment’s Tribulation and Did Emma Laugh at the Sergeant.
The “Vagabond’s Waltz” was originally a Swedish tune written in 1909 by J. Alfred Tanner. It was the film director Toivo Särkkä who decided that such a well-known ditty deserved a film built around it, in a sort of precursor to modern juke-box musicals. He threw 50,000 marks at the writer Mika Waltari, whose summery script was then lensed in the dark and rainy days of a Finnish autumn, leaving the cast looking somewhat drab and bedraggled when they are supposed to be having fun.
Despite such tribulations, the film became one of the most popular ever at the Finnish box office, circulating in a dozen prints and making it as far afield as Bulgaria and Turkey. “One of the finest products of the Finnish film industry,” enthused the unimpressable Paula Talaskivi in the Ilta Sanomat. “A beautiful, glossy picture,” agreed Olavi Vesterdahl in Aamulehti. “The viewer is happy to forget all the impossibilities of the plot for a couple of hours and surrender to the flow of events when they happen quite effortlessly and in a brisk good-natured way.”
“The film is the Finnish counterpart to the melodrama Gone with the Wind,” wrote Antti Lindqvist in Katso magazine in 1990. “Both works nostalgically describe the idyll of a bygone era that never existed.”
The real stand-out star, however, is Regina Linnanheimo, usually a bored-seeming and often sulky blonde onscreen, suddenly transformed into a vivacious dancer with flashing eyes. Maybe it was the wig?
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Short History of Finland. He is watching all the Finnish films, so you don’t have to.
Zibo is famous for glass. It’s where they make the glass vases with paintings on the inside, and the ones with the different coloured coating that’s carved into the outside. The glass flowers that form vast corporate installations, and the horrible little paperweights and dust-collectors beloved of many a mad old lady.
Li Daxi loves glass. He loves its malleability and the speed with which he can put together a vase or a figurine. This wiry, friendly man shoves a metal pole into a furnace at 1400 degrees, withdrawing it with a hot blob at the end, and he sits at a chair made of scaffolding where he can roll the blog and pat it with a trowel, where he can blow into it and tap it.
“Today,” he says, “we’re going to make a fish.” He taps and rolls the first blob, and as it cools to 800 degrees, the white hot gunge congeals to a bright red. Belatedly, I see the signs that hang on each of the furnaces – “Tea”, “Red”, “White Jade.” The true colours only manifest as it cools, but while the red blob is still too hot to touch, he dunks it into another molten bucket marked as Transparent.
I roll the hot blob for him on the scaffold chair while he sets about the clear outer layer with tongs and clippers, teasing it into fins, shaping a fish’s head and poking two little eyes into it. It’s done in less than five minutes, and yours for thirty pounds. He lets me have a go and my first fish looks more like a dinosaur. The second is more like a teapot. The third is a fish.
Li Daxi is a certified master of glass, and he leads me around the gallery in the factory, in the company of four eager students. They have been scooped up from the local polytechnic, and arrived unaware that they were going to be on television. It’s only as we stand there waiting for a lens change that I decloak as a Chinese speaker, and they suddenly burst into animated conversation about what this show is, and why we’re here. Belatedly, they realise that Li Daxi’s comments on their hand-drawn designs, and my tin-eared questions about them, are going to be broadcast in 30 countries. Everybody is very excited, and intrigued by the process of television, and boggled to discover that their taxes are being funnelled by their local government into putting a film crew in their factory to make a five-minute advert for it.
“Your job is so hard,” says Li, whose arm I have just watched tan in front of me as he holds his pole in the furnace for slightly too long. “So much standing up, and repeating yourself, and running backwards and forwards.”
But his job is hard, too, as he attests, revealing that the youngest student he has is in his thirties.
What about those nice young men this morning, I ask.
“Oh, they were all designers. They come with ideas for vases and jugs, but they still expect someone else to make them. They come to me and I tell them the handle won’t support the weight, or that the whole thing will have to be exterior-cut or interior-painted, but they won’t do any of that themselves. Nobody wants this job. The heat is incredible, every day. We wear asbestos gloves, we’re throwing around molten glass…”
The day started at 0530. By sunset, we are filming the pick-ups of me arriving at the factory and doing a rushed piece to camera in front of a sunset that we are hoping will pass for a sunrise. Then it’s back indoors after the light fails, to film me and Mr Li looking around the gallery and talking about his favourite pieces. We wrap at 1830, then there’s just time for a rushed dinner before the four-hour drive to Qufu, the home of Confucius.
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. These events appeared in Shandong: The Land of Confucius (2018).
“If you are a newbie to manga,” the authors write, “you can certainly find the perfect series to dive into.” And that’s certainly true – this is an excellent introduction to manga, especially for the curious teen.
Over at All the Anime, I review the new History of Modern Manga from Insight Editions.
I see that the cover is up for the Turkish translation of my Brief History of Japan, out this month from Kronik in Istanbul.
“Yazar Clements, Japonya’nın dünü, bugünü ve yarını arasındaki bağlantıyı zekice ve nüktedanlıkla kuruyor ve geniş ama detaylı bir anlatıyla bu paradokslar ülkesini gözler önüne seriyor.”
[“Author Clements cleverly and wittily connects Japan’s past, present, and future, revealing this land of paradoxes in a broad but detailed narrative.”]
Available to buy here.
“Toho Video Shop statistics might have been skewed by a tiny handful of early-adopting male customers, as if Hollywood film production were steered exclusively on the rental choices of Quentin Tarantino and Kim Newman, or as if me repeatedly typing ‘redhead discussing chess moves in her underwear’ into Netflix’s search function, every day for a year, was the sole cause of The Queen’s Gambit getting made.”
Over at All the Anime, I review Tom Mes’s informative and entertaining book on “V-Cinema”.
The Official Schoolgirl Milky Crisis Blog 