Up now at the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, an entire nest of articles about the women who transformed manga in the 1970s, including large entries on Moto Hagio and Keiko Takemiya, and a general piece on their Year 24 Group. As an additional bonus, there’s also a piece on Sachiko Kashiwaba, the fantasist whose work was infamously proclaimed as an “inspiration” for Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away.
Fat old man Antti Ihalainen (Aku Korhonen) pops out to get some matches, and runs into his old friend, the widower Jussi Vatanen (Uuno Laakso), who has just hitched a new horse to his cart, and is on the road to give it a test. But Jussi is also in a celebratory mood, having waited a reasonable year since the death of his wife. Agreeing on a vague plan for finding Jussi a new bride, the two men go off on a drinking spree, forgetting all about the matches. They cause several accidents on the road, and start several fights, and as news of their escapades drift back to the farm, Antti’s family comes to believe that he has decided to abandon them and emigrate to America.
While his daughter Maija-Liisa (Ester Toivonen, in a wacky Princess Leia hair-do) cries on the shoulder of her idiot farmhand beau Ville (Joel Rinne), Antti and his drinking buddy become involved in chasing a piglet around the nearby town. Then they forget where they left the horse, so they steal another one.
They really should have called this one Dude, Where’s My Horse? At least Tulitikkuja lainamassa is mercifully short, and if the misunderstanding-about-man-off-on-a-common-errand plot is already tired and weak in Finnish film narrative (see, for example, The House at Roinila, 1935), there’s plenty of broad humour to be had. There’s also a lot of unintentional comedy provided by the cast, with Ester Toivonen entertainingly unable to take the plot seriously enough to weep convincingly, a piglet that often outperforms the professionals, and a series of policemen trying a little too hard to be funny, through outrageous facial hair and a running style inspired by the Keystone Cops.
For the 21st century viewer, there is also an intriguing glimpse at the customs and mannerisms of the era, not the least the ready way that the menfolk are prepared to trade their daughters in marriage, with only the merest acknowledgement that the ladies (still eight years away from the right to vote when the original story was written) might want a say in it. The cast also have a strange and stilted way of saying “America”, referring constantly to Amerriikka, as if they have misheard someone speaking of Amer-reich or Amer-riike, a mythical Land of Amer across the sea.
The Finns provide ample material for passing anthropologists with their custom of drinking coffee from a saucer (juoda tassilta), pouring their drink into a cup, staring at it for a while as if wondering what it is for, and then decanting it into a saucer so they can slurp at it like kittens. This was apparently the way of cooling one’s drink down faster – only the upper classes had the time to drink from one of those cup things. Antti also ostentatiously holds a sugar lump in his mouth as he drinks, the better to offset the bitter taste of his discount coffee.
Aku Korhonen reprises much of his Lapatossu schtick as the silly old Antti, adopting the one-eyed school of acting whereby winking constantly substitutes for any other expression. Notable in part for the degree to which the camera can’t keep its eyes off her is the 18-year-old former Miss Heinola, Nora Mäkinen, in the role of a young girl who attracts Jussi’s fancy. She has appeared in bit parts in a couple of previous Suomen Filmiteollisuus productions, but here visibly shines.
The original novel on which the film was based was published in 1910 as by “Maiju Lassila”, a pseudonym for the left-wing radical author Algot Untola (1868–1918), who famously edited the last edition of the Työmies newspaper single-handed in 1918, even though there was nobody left in Helsinki to read it. As well as his exhortations to overthrow the state, he paid the bills by knocking out potboilers under a variety of names, with Borrowing Some Matches sharing shelf-space with his The Barn Boys, The Young Miller and Love. His life took him from what is now Russian Karelia to St Petersburg, and then Finland, where he fled after being implicated in a terrorist conspiracy. His first marriage ended within days, allegedly because Mrs Untola turned out to be a hermaphrodite. His second ended in tragedy when his child died and his wife poured sulphuric acid on his genitals. It ended under doubtful circumstances in 1918, when, captured by the White Guards and on the way to his execution in Helsinki, he either jumped from the deck into the icy waters, or was shot and pushed overboard. He was himself the subject of a biopic, the 1980 film Tulipää (Firehead), which concentrated on his radicalism and ignored his “Maiju Lassila” works entirely.
As if this couldn’t get any more surreal, the screenplay for Borrowing Some Matches was adapted by Jorma Nortimo, a regular player in front of the camera, appearing briefly here in a cameo as a disapproving magistrate. And because once wasn’t enough, the story was adapted as a film a second time, in 1980, the same year as the Tulipää movie pretended it didn’t exist.
Jonathan Clements is the author of An Armchair Traveller’s History of Finland.
Television arrived in Japan in 1953. The technology would transform the city’s skyline. The original transmitter of NHK, Japan’s national public broadcaster, was inadequate to cover the entire Kantō region, and rival firms soon popped up with their own broadcast requirements. In order to avoid peppering the entire city with antennae, a consortium of channels and developers pooled their resources to create one massive broadcasting tower with a footprint that would reach all the way to the mountains. Modelled at least superficially on the Eiffel Tower in Paris, Tokyo Tower was originally intended to be taller than New York’s Empire State Building, although resources and requirements eventually dictated a slightly shorter height of 332.9 metres.
Work began on the tower in 1957 – the 2005–12 film series Always: Sunset on Third Street would later use the sight of the tower under construction as a background evocation of life in the post-Occupation period. Tokyo Tower became a symbol of Japan’s reconstruction, rising from the ashes of the war-torn city, asserting Japan’s greatness in the post-war world, and doing so by quite literally repurposing the trash of the old world order – a full third of the steel used in its construction came from hundreds of scrapped US tanks from the Korean War. It was completed in 1958, proclaimed as the tallest freestanding tower in the world, at least for a while, and painted in a bold orange-and-white colour scheme for safety purposes.
“The fact that the Tokyo Tower is a cultural landmark building,’ writes the author Patrick Macias, ‘speaks volumes about the lack of cultural landmark buildings in Tokyo.” It was always intended to have a dual function as a tourist site, although the prospect of having an observation deck a bit higher than the surrounding buildings would diminish in appeal as the years passed. Today, it seems faintly ludicrous to be excited about the prospect of being a few floors up when you’ve arrived in Tokyo in a jumbo jet. The Foot Town shopping complex beneath lures visitors to stay longer with restaurants and several museums, but, to be brutally frank, the Tower never quite achieved the status abroad that its investors had hoped for. Tourist brochures heralding Japan abroad tended to plump for stereotypical scenes depicting natural beauty or evoking the samurai. If they wanted to go modern, they would go for Mount Fuji, foregrounded by a rushing bullet train. The only place that Tokyo Tower achieved significant recognition was among the legions of movie fans who would see it regularly trashed, bent and stomped on by the likes of Godzilla, Mothra and Mechani-Kong. This is particularly ironic, since at least part of the will to destroy the tower on the part of 1960s film-makers surely stemmed from its role serving the competition, broadcasting the TV programmes that were luring audiences away from cinemas.
From An Armchair Traveller’s History of Tokyo, by Jonathan Clements, available now in the UK and the US.
“Who do you think are the greatest characters in history? I teach that the greatest character of all time is Jesus Christ, and the second is the Devil. The third? Buddha.” My obituary for manga writer Kazuo Koike, over at the All the Anime blog.
Over at the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, I publish three new entries on prominent Japanese authors: Mariko Ohara, she of the maternal fascism and the pregnant vampires; Hiro Arikawa, best known for her paramilitary librarians; and Koshu Tani, author of the history of the AeroSpace Force.
Over at the All the Anime blog, my obituary for Kazuhiko Kato.
“The editor said to me – ‘It’s hard to tell whether your art was done by a Japanese or a foreigner, so let’s create a pen-name that is indistinguishable by nationality.’ And after a lot of discussion in the editor’s room, they came up with MONKEY PUNCH.” Which was nicely inconspicuous.
The singer Akatsuki Teruko summed up the Occupation era with her 1951 song Tokyo Shoe Shine Boy, an upbeat ditty with a downtrodden message about a Japan that was still in thrall to American dominance. The titular shoeshine boy is getting on with his work, doing his earnest best to make every scrap of leather sparkle, while musing:
That lady that I like
Hasn’t turned up yet today
But perhaps she’ll come back
Even if it’s rainy or windy.
The girl in question appears to have business elsewhere, as a later verse reveals:
That lady in red shoes
Is she back walking around Ginza today
With gifts of chocolate
Chewing gum and Coca Cola?
With its recognisable foreign words and its frisky rhythm, Tokyo Shoeshine Boy was a hit in the dance halls – but it is also a flatly hopeless elegy, loaded with subtle clues, starting with the slang term for a Ginza promenade, Gin-bura. As the novelist Tanizaki Junichirō once archly observed, only a country hick would use such a phrase. That poor migrant labourer has nothing to offer her – he literally couldn’t even shine her red shoes with his boot-black polish, nor can he pile her with presents like GI-issue chocolate and chewing gum, or take her for an exotic Coke in swanky Ginza. ‘I’m sure she’ll come back tomorrow,’ he says brightly. ‘Someday we’ll go out dancing together.’ It is a triumph of Japanese melancholy, never once letting its enthusiasm slip, even though any listener can plainly hear what has happened. The song makes background appearances in two films – listen closely and you’ll hear it evoking the pop culture of the Korean War in M*A*S*H, and playing incongruously during a terrorist attack in Akira.
From An Armchair Traveller’s History of Tokyo, by Jonathan Clements, available now in the UK and the US.
Just a couple more years, and Bandai accountants might have thrown away all the relevant documentation, allowing two former employees to get away with deceptively simple crime. But someone got a surprise when checking over old invoices, leading at least one man to get caught cooking the books at the Japanese company most famous for Gundam.
I say “at least one”, because so far among the accused, only Takashi Utazu (44) has pleaded guilty to the charges, which include talking up the costs of installing the giant Gundam statue in Odaiba in 2013, and pocketing the surplus. LED lighting, which should have cost 10 million yen, was billed to the company at 20 million, leaving Utazu and his alleged accomplice with almost £70,000 in pure profit. And that’s only one incident in a four-year scam, thought to have netted the embezzlers a total of 200 million yen (£1.4 million).
Because of the sheer size and volume of certain franchises, toy companies have to deal with sums an order of magnitude above what simple folk like you and I are used to. A few years ago, when the Japanese government was dickering about the expense of the much-mooted National Media Arts Centre, it was a Bandai staffer who put everybody in their place by pointing out that the sums under discussion cost no more than a single new theme-park ride. It’s very easy, said another, to spend a million dollars. He meant that when you’re dealing with numbers this big, the overheads of simply making enough toys for something to stand a chance of becoming a bestseller turn into phone-number sized entries on a spreadsheet. Bandai won’t miss a few thousand, right?
Well, wrong. Their bean-counters are super-powered, transforming maths robots, and the dating on these reports makes me think that someone flagged up something fishy, seemingly in projects connected to another employee – a man who is currently continuing to protest his innocence, even though he was fired in October 2017 over the audit findings. There’s a statute of limitations on financial reporting – in Japan as in the UK, companies aren’t obliged to hold on to records for longer than seven years. So the thieves might have got away with it, if it weren’t for those meddling accountants.
Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article first appeared in NEO #186, 2019.
It was the party to end all parties. Otomo no Tabito, the governor-general of Dazaifu had invited thirty-one bigwigs from all over Kyushu to a fete in his garden, scheduled to be held a fortnight before reigetsu, the “auspicious moon” that marked the second month of the lunar calendar. The year was 730 AD. People came from as far away as Satsuma and Tsushima. The plum blossoms were just starting to open, there was mist on the mountains and the first signs of life were stirring – new butterflies had hatched from their cocoons, and old geese returning from their winter retreats.
Pleasantly sozzled, the vice-governor Lord Ki came up with a poem of welcome, suggesting that it was a nice night to welcome the plums – likely a reference not only to the flowers in the garden, but to the booze everyone was knocking back. His junior assistant, Mr Ono, answered with a poem of his own, pleading with the blossoms not to fall and scatter. Don’t forget the willows, said Mr Awata, another junior, again in verse form, creating a chain in which every guest threw in his own variation on a theme. It was a decidedly Chinese affair, redolent of the contemporary drunken poet Li Bai, conceived in apparent imitation of similar festivities in Chang-an, the distant capital of China’s Tang dynasty. There was a lot of talk of flowers, but also of the transience of life and the joys of booze. Later verses, fuelled by more wine, drifted a little towards the maudlin. The penultimate poem, from the secretary Mr Kadobe, spoke wistfully of the blossoms staying forever to delight the girl he loved… a rather tardy acknowledgement that only men’s voices were being heard, and that maybe they could all find something better to do than sitting around talking to other blokes. The women, presumably, were off somewhere having a party of their own, with limbo dancing and pillow-fights.
Tabito himself spoke in the middle, wondering if he could see scattering petals or flurries of late snow. But once the verse cycle was complete, he seems to have spoken up again, appending several other verses as closing remarks. The guests had tried to keep things light, but Tabito’s final words alluded to his advancing years, and his annoyance at a career that had seen him promoted away from life in Nara to a provincial posting. You could keep your wine, he said. You can keep your thoughts of Daoist immortality treatments. No booze or magic potion will make me feel young again. Only seeing the capital will do that for me. “To see [the capital] / That will cure this villainous old age / And give me my youth again.”
Otomo no Tabito died the following year, in his mid-sixties. The cycle of verse from his big party was preserved for long enough to end up a generation later in one of the poetry selections in the Manyoshu (Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves). It came accompanied by a preface written in literary Chinese, which set the scene with the fateful line (taken here from Edwin Cranston’s translation in A Waka Anthology: “It is now the choice month of early spring; the weather is fine, the wind is soft.” One thousand, two hundred and eighty-nine years later, the two characters rei and wa would be lifted from that phrase, and used to name the reign of the new Japanese emperor, Naruhito, in 2019.
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of Japan.
Lured by tales of bright lights and the big city, country girl Hulda Juurako (Irma Seikkula) comes to Helsinki to make her fortune, but finds herself the object of study in the salon of judge Soratie (Tauno Palo), where girls like her, migrating to urban areas, are regarded as “the pinnacle of social problems.” The outspoken and sharp-witted Hulda bristles at the class divisions of 1930s Helsinki, where servants are not permitted to use the same entrance as their masters, and buries herself in studies in the hope of bettering herself.
She does so, with Pygmalion-like success, despite the patronising attitude of the men around her, and the outright hostility of the women of Helsinki parlour society, who regard her as an upstart hick, devoid of manners or class.
The release of a complete Suomi-Filmi box set late last year, to complement the previous Suomen Filmiteollisuus box already in use, means that this blog can now start interpolating the works of two Finnish film companies from the 1930s, beginning with this, the first of several in which director Valentin Vaala adapted originals by the author Hella Wuolijoki.
This film has had a wild ride in terms of critical reception. It sold a million tickets at the box office in 1937, a tall order in a country with only three million inhabitants, while many of the locations became tourist spots in their own right. Some praised it as a piquant puncturing of bourgeois tastes, while some home-owners forbade their servants from watching it, lest they get dangerous ideas. The film was denigrated during the 1970s, but rediscovered in the 1990s, quite possibly because its approach to upstairs-downstairs interactions, while mansplainy and naïve by today’s standards, was nevertheless fiercely progressive when compared to similar films of its era. Certainly, Seikkula is an actress ahead of her time, boldly claiming her space on the screen, parading around the kitchen with her hands in her pockets and speaking with her mouth full, but most notably giving as good as she gets in fast-paced arguments with the menfolk. The film was remade in Hollywood as The Farmer’s Daughter (1947), for which Loretta Young won an Oscar, and in the 1990s, Kari Uusitalo selected it as one of the Top 100 Finnish films of the twentieth century.
But there’s more, because the class tensions of this film have, deep, deep roots in Finnish identity, back to the Red-versus-White conflict of the Civil War, and even further to the Fennicisation of its upper class in the late 19th century – Mr Soratie, it is revealed, was once the more Swedish-sounding Mr Sanmark, but changed his name along with many other Finns. Author Hella Wuolijoki (1886-1954) was a vehement left-winger and Communist sympathiser, and long suspected by the Finnish police of being a Russian sleeper agent. She would, eventually, be arrested for harbouring a Soviet spy in 1943, and sentenced to life imprisonment, although she only served a few months before her release, and soon after becoming a politician in the Finnish People’s Democratic League, a king-making left-wing alliance in post-war politics.
All of which seems a world away from a spunky country girl, singing to herself as she washes the windows while perched precariously on a sixth-floor balcony, but let’s not forget that in the same year, the rival company Suomen Filmiteollisuus released The Assessor’s Woman Troubles, supposedly a light-hearted comedy, promoted with a shot of Aku Korhonen literally raising his fists to a cowering Laila Rihte. Hulda is a creature from a different dimension, who believes that a simple education will turn her into a better person, ready to stand up to the braying ninnies in the parlour who think that they are smarter than her because their husband bought them a nice necklace. She is shown climbing the steps of the polytechnic in a seasonal montage, inadvertently foreshadowing a similar march of progress in the Ruth Bader Ginsburg biopic On the Basis of Sex (2018). She is in fact, the first of several powerful women to appear in screen adaptations of Wuolijoki’s books plays, although the following year’s The Women of Niskavuori (1938) would not have quite such a happy ending.
[The DVD of this film also came with a seven-minute documentary Vaala’s Film Rolls, about the work of the director Valentin Vaala.]
Jonathan Clements is the author of An Armchair Traveller’s History of Finland.
The Official Schoolgirl Milky Crisis Blog 