“Kosei Ono writes a chapter specifically about the impact of Chinese cartoons in Japan, beginning with the watershed success of Princess Iron Fan, conceived in China as an anti-Japanese parable, but screened in wartime Japan as an innocent children’s cartoon retelling an episode from Journey to the West. Of course, it also spooked the hell out of the Japanese Navy, which threw money into making a rival feature so that Japan could regain the cultural high ground – the result was Momotaro: Sacred Sailors.”
Over at All the Anime, I review Daisy Yan Du’s new collection Chinese Animation and Socialism, which manages to link wartime propaganda, Chairman Mao and contraband dubs of Jenny Agutter in The Railway Children.
“In other words, just as Ascendance of a Bookworm shows a character changing the world through the pursuit of a certain invention, and How a Realist Hero Rebuilt the Kingdom saves a nation through accountancy (no, really), Tearmoon Empire’s protagonist sets out to change her world by not being such a terrible bitch.”
Over at All the Anime, I review Nozomu Mochitsuki’s Tearmoon Empire.
Back out to the park in ten degrees below, to film the shamanic procession and dancing from yesterday. Yes, we already filmed it, but today we have to do it again for the benefit of the drone to get some picturesque aerial photography. That isn’t as easy as it sounds, because the drone batteries go flat within ten minutes of hitting the cold air, and it often takes ten minutes to calibrate them, because the sound man’s phone is the interface with the controller for the flying camera, and it refuses to operate unless it is cuddled and cosseted within a pile of camping heater-packs.
Our drone pilot must also operate the phone using its touch-screen, which means he can’t wear gloves in the freezing temperature, and can’t actually feel where his finger ends and where the screen begins. The shamans are also complaining, because they never realised that they would be standing around in the snow.
“We don’t do this in winter,” says one tubby lady, whose name is Yufang. “And some of us are in our sixties. And what’s with all this ‘OKAY’ business? That director woman is always shouting ‘OKAY’ all the time. She says it when it’s time to start, she says it when it’s time to finish.” Her fellow shamans all titter and giggle, and start chanting “OKAY” while banging their drums and shaking their hips to ring the bells on the end of the long ribbons.
A man walking his dog stares at me like I am somehow responsible for the dancing wizards in gold crowns and rainbow ribbons, banging drums on a Tuesday morning in the park.
I explain what okay means, and ask Yufang what it is in Mongol.
“Bolok,” she replies, which is too good to be true.
The drone barely manages two ten-minute runs in the cold air, while the shamans shiver and wait for their cue. The locals don’t help by insisting on treating a public park like a public park, so that at least a couple of shamanic rituals are interrupted by a hatchet-faced woman in a purple tracksuit, power-walking along the path. The usual crop of men with giant telephoto lenses are in evidence, but we don’t think they are spies. Everybody and his dog seems to own a massive telephoto lens in Songyuan – maybe this is where they make them.
The afternoon is spent in an embroidery workshop run by the twins, Black Silver and Coral Red. Their grandfather was the scriptwriter on a Genghis Khan movie and they are plainly posh literati, whose workshop specialises in the Planet Mongo fashions of the Mongols, all Vulcan shoulders, and hats that seemingly have dildos sticking out of the top. Black Silver and Coral Red fuss around their guests with a pot of tea, and I interview two of the shamans, including Furong, the witch-woman from last night.
Furong isn’t drooling bogies and ash any more, nor is she spitting firewater at the camera. Instead she has transformed back into a well-turned-out forty-something in a fluffy fur coat, with the occasional habit of rolling her eyes to commune with unseen spirits. She is only 42, but I can see from the light behind her hair that she dyes it, and wonder if she is hiding bolts of grey witchy hair. But if she had it, why would a shaman hide it?
Her hands are amazingly warm and soft. Furong starts stroking my hands, peering underneath my eyelids, examining my stuck-out tongue, and pulling out one of my hairs.
“You must be careful with your heart,” she says, after conducting this odd examination. “You have an odd heartbeat, and stomach problems, too. Maybe your kidneys. But these are all signs of a haunting.” Sickness of some sort, particularly in the heart or stomach, is one of the signs of a shamanic disciple in waiting. “Your fingers are cold, but your hands are warm,” she continues. “This is because of the bad circulation from your heart.”
“There are spirits watching over you,” she says. “And you have great power within you, to be a black shaman, the most powerful kind of all. Your dreams already see the future. You cried when I danced. You must be exorcised to banish the sickness, and then you can begin your training, assuming you find a suitable mistress.” Her eyes flash.
In the mirror behind her, I see the crew exchanging quizzical glances. Nobody was expecting this, least of all the other Mongols in the room, who are wide-eyed with excitement. The sound man doesn’t help by humming the theme from Bewitched while he fiddles with the sound dials.
“Been a while since we found a black shaman!” beams Mrs Bao.
“Bit of a turn-up,” agrees Mr Bao. “Bolok!”
A black shaman apparently something of an untouchable in East Asia, who mediates with the lower and more terrifying spirits, as opposed to the white shaman who consorts with the nobility and the nicey-nicey spirits. It doesn’t sound like a particularly appealing career to me, particularly if I have to eat ashes and spin in circles while talking to the evil dead. But, you know, if writing doesn’t work out, it’s nice to have exorcism to fall back on.
Furong already has a disciple (some shamans have dozens), a soft-spoken man called Ping who was the subject of last night’s exorcism. While Furong sips daintily at some red tea with her long-suffering husband, Ping tells me about his damascene moment.
“I was in an accident,” he says, “and I couldn’t do sports any more. For three years my limbs were stiff like there was something squeezing my bones. But then I saw Her, and I realised I had seen Her before. I felt like I already knew Her, and we talked as if we were long acquaintances. And then I remembered, I had seen her in my dreams. You see your teacher in your dreams, and your dreams lead you to Her. She agreed to teach me. They chased out the ghosts and welcomed in the good spirits, and I felt such happiness. I was so happy… I, I…. can’t say in Mandarin.” He switches into Mongol, and we have to wait until we get home to get it subtitled.
Michelle the assistant producer is getting on with her usual tasks, scribbling the next shot title onto the clapperboard.
Furong suddenly seizes Michelle’s hands.
“You are a shaman,” she tells her. “You are from a family of shamans. I see your ancestors in you.” Michelle recoils in horror and scurries out to the toilets.
Furong doesn’t seem to be bothered by this.
“She knows,” she shrugs. She looks at me again, her eyes hypnotic. “Your dreams come true, don’t they? You have seen the future in dreams, but you only know it when it occurs. That is the first sign.”
The director is getting increasingly annoyed by all this hocus-pocus, and starts shooing people out of the room to the next location. The cameraman is similarly unmoved, claiming that Ping the Possessed only shook and wobbled at the exorcism last night when he saw that the camera was on him.
‘He found an unlikely celebrity supporter in the form of the author Yukio Mishima. “The pay-library comics that once could only be purchased in the flea markets of Ueno had ten times more vulgarity, cruelty, wild abandon and vitality than today,” Mishima wrote. “But in Hiroshi Hirata’s samurai comics, with their direct, serious art style, I find a nostalgia for kamishibai of old, and a sensibility in the manner of the violent warrior prints of the late Edo period.”‘
Over at All the Anime I write the obituary for the manga creator Hiroshi Hirata.
Unlikely achievements part 311221: discovering my 2012 translation of the Art of War is #1 in Amazon’s Ancient Chinese History Chart.
Part 311222: discovering that Amazon has an Ancient Chinese History Chart.
Part 311223: Discovering that of the other books in the top ten, one is a comic, another is about the middle ages, and the rest aren’t actually about China at all.
Part 311223: Noticing that the biographical data on the page describes me as “James” Clements.
“Man-made ecological disaster is not a single event, but an ongoing cycle of ever-greater deprivation and compromise, Conan’s generation simply have to live with it, prefiguring the controversial storyline of a much later anime, Makoto Shinkai’s Weathering with You.”
Over at All the Anime, I review Alexander Key’s The Incredible Tide.
Baron von Sumers (Paavo Jännes) is worried about his legacy. His grandson Klaus (Kalevi Koski) is displaying oddly violent and aggressive tendencies, and seems to have little sense of his obligation to be kind to his underlings, staff and servants. Fretting that Klaus needs to be taught about noblesse oblige before it is too late, the Baron tries to arrange for him to visit a local pastor’s family, where Klaus predictably acts like an entitled dick, and fights with the pastor’s boy Yrjö (Raino Hämälainen). But Yrjö isn’t the pastor’s son, he is the pastor’s ward, whose past increasingly obsesses the Baron.
Klaus is the child of the Baron’s daughter. But the Baron had a son, who was cast out and disowned twenty years earlier over a misunderstanding. Could it be that Yrjö is the Baron’s long-lost grandson, sired by the son in exile, and hence, technically, the true heir of Tottisalmi?
Well, yes, he is, but not if the scheming locals have anything to do with it. The Baron’s horrible son-in-law Frederik (Sasu Haapanen) is the guilty party who framed the heir all those years ago, now fretting that his machinations will be found out. Apparently unaware that the best thing to do when stuck in a hole is to stop digging, he instead enlists his servant Jonas (Hugo Hytönen) in a scam to frame Yrjö as a thief, before the bright and sunny boy wins over any other members of the family.
Not unlike the same season’s The Tenant Farmer’s Girl from rival studio Suomen Filmiteollisus, this Suomi-Filmi production displays all the signs of a company scrabbling for something to offer comfort under austerity conditions. Turning aside from the miseries of contemporary life, director Orvo Saarikivi instead delivers a slice of old-world aristocracy, itself deriving from Anni Swan’s 1914 children’s novel, featuring the producer’s ten-year-old daughter, Tuulikki Schreck in one of the lead roles, and even using the Schreck family’s home and furniture. Originally intended as a Christmas film in 1939, but postponed by the Winter War until it shuffled out in April 1940 to widespread indifference, it took several years to earn back its production costs, despite really obvious corner-cutting, such as a running time of a mere 66 minutes, and that’s with a 90-second opening overture that plays over an entirely blank screen.
Again, as with The Tenant Farmer’s Girl, the transplant of a 19th-century story to a 20th-century setting only serves to accentuate the vast gaps in culture and expectations in the intervening period. In particular, the fact that the original story called for Yrjö’s father to die in the Battle of Navarino, during the Greek War of Independence in 1827. This explains how he ends up to have a posthumous son, born to a Greek woman six months later, and why a bunch of Greeks (Turo Kartto and Evald Turho, wearing fezzes because fezzes are cool) descend upon Tottisalmi to lend weight to Yrjö’s claim and, ultimately, spirit him back home to his mother in the Aegean. Presumably, von Sumers junior has been reimagined as some sort of volunteer in the First World War, but that would have just meant he dodged any involvement in the revolution and Finnish Civil War back home, and would hardly have endeared him to older viewers.
Little was written about it in a Finland still recovering from the Winter War, and by the time it appeared on television in 1975, the world had changed even more. “This is a film that has had its day,” wrote Mauri Taviola in the Helsingin Sanomat. “The children bang briskly through their lines like they are reciting verse at a six-year old’s birthday party, but you can hardly call it acting.”
Buick want us to showcase their latest model on this trip. I should be able to tell you all about it, but all I can say for sure is that it will be released in America in 2017, and that it is a red one. And the one we have been supplied by the Songyuan Buick dealership unhelpfully has National Geographic decals plastered all down the sides, having previously been part of this year’s journalist junket convoy. So the director orders a trio of idiots (me, the fixer and the D.O.P.) to take it out and get it cleaned, preferably in such a manner as to generate some interesting footage that will also fill up this episode’s quote of product-placement car shots.
She is hoping for an automated car wash, so she can get a sequence of me glumly sitting behind the wheel while big spongey rollers splash on the windscreen. My colleagues and I unanimously decide that what we really need is a Bikini Car Wash, where they can photograph me trying to look glum while perky Chinese girls rub their soapy boobs on the windscreen. This turns out to be a non-existent service in arctic Songyuan (or indeed, anywhere in China, indeed possibly in the world… I might have dreamt it). The best we can hope for is two men with low-hanging trousers and a high-pressure hose, blowing hot water on it in a garage. This, however, fogs up the lens every time he gets close, so we are getting very little footage.
The fixer’s phone rings. Even I can hear the irate voice yelling at him from the speaker. It is the manager of our hotel.
“What the fuck are you doing? Your wizards are out of control!”
We are, indeed, currently in charge of an octet of shamans, who are supposed to be setting up in one of the hotel’s dining rooms. It is an opulent, pointlessly baroque Chinese suite, decorated with pictures from the life of Khubilai Khan, overstuffed sofas, and for reasons that only a Mongol can explain, an astroturf pasture scattered with one-quarter-scale models of goats. And apparently, the shamans are “smoking and spitting on the floor.”
I find this hard to believe, not the least because there are eleven ashtrays in the suite, which seems to imply that smoking isn’t that big a deal. Indeed, even though smoking indoors is now at least officially illegal in Beijing and Shanghai, up here in the frozen north the people of Manchuria can regularly be seen chuffing indoors, in the warm. In fact, back at the room, a forensic investigation confirms that only one person, our liaison Mr Bao, has lit up at all, on the basis of his girly Huang Shan fag-ends in the ashtray. Even the director has not smoked anything while we were away. But the hotel’s complaint isn’t really about alleged smoking and notional spitting. It is about the presence of eight shamans on the premises, plainly up to no good.
Tonight they are performing an exorcism ritual, or chu gui, which requires them to dance in circles with drums and tambourines, chanting spells in Mongol, while the central shaman, a lady called Furong, whirls and hyper-ventilates while setting fire to a small doll that looks like My Little Ku Klux Klansman.
In order to hang onto the suite, we have had to order dinner, which sits untouched on the Lazy Susan in the dining area while the ritual continues. The waitresses stare in stony disapproval, and tut as the sofas get moved. “We don’t care for their sort,” mutters one.
“‘Their sort?’” snarls Coral Red, a poet who happens to be sitting in. “THIS IS YOUR CULTURE, YOU STUPID HUSSY.” After that, the waitresses leave us alone, and when we need water, I have to go outside to the shops.
Meanwhile, the chanting and drumming reaches a crescendo. Furong’s long black hair now surrounds her face, completely obscuring it, and she is panting and muttering, her eyes rolling. She eats the embers from the fire she lit around the Ku Klux Klan doll, and is drooling black gunge from her mouth. She collapses onto the sofa and is fed 60% proof Mongol booze, which she spits across the room, muttering to herself in Old Mongol, a language that she has never learned.
“WESH!” she shouts hoarsely, “WESH!” She is drooling more black slime, and spitting out more firewater, her eyes wide, and staring at me across the room. “WESH!” she shouts. “WESH!”
Suddenly Furong’s henchman shouts at our assistant producer, who is standing by the exit, clutching at her head.
“OPEN THE DOOR! OPEN THE DOOR! IT’S TRYING TO GET OUT!”
She opens the door, and suddenly there is silence.
“Stevie Suan’s new book, Anime’s Identity, cannot resist telling a story from the production of King’s Avatar (above), a 2019 Chinese animated series that subcontracted some of its animation work to a studio in Japan, only to send back the materials on the grounds that the Japanese work was not of high enough quality. That was definitely a bad day at the office for someone, but was it trolling for the hell of it, or a sign of a true sea-change in quality control and expectations?”
Over at All the Anime, I review a great book about Japanese animation and its place in the world.
“Yasugi’s death, apparently by his own hand, in December 2021, might also be attributed to the COVID pandemic, in that he had earlier confessed to relatives that much of his work had dried up as a result of it.”
Over at the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, my entry on Masayoshi Yasugi also turns out to be his obituary.
The Official Schoolgirl Milky Crisis Blog 