The seaside town of Zhuhai is famed for its seafood, its modernist clamshell opera house and its statue of a fisher girl, but my ongoing fascination with Red Tourism leads me to ignore all of that and instead go in search of the Zhuhai Martyrs Cemetery, a modest park with an on-site museum that proudly puts the city on the revolutionary map. For those who had never even heard of Zhuhai before it become one of the Special Economic Zones in the 1980s, the museum has a bunch of interesting stories, starting with the “Qi’ao Anti-British Skirmish” of autumn 1833, in which two Dutch cannons, said to have been liberated from Taiwan over a century earlier by local-born official Zhong Bao, were turned upon foreign opium-smugglers.
According to a 2016 article from the Guangzhou Ribao, the Manchu authorities had “not offered a single silver tael” for civil defence, turning the Qi’ao resistance into a moment of considerable historical moment, in which the Chinese people not only stood up for themselves eight years ahead of the Opium Wars, but did so with half a dozen locally-made guns and two antique cannons – the eight ordnance pieces are, supposedly, still there on the Qi’ao waterfront, elegantly rusting away.
The defence of Qi’ao was a response to years of harassment from opium smugglers, who used the nearby cape as an anchorage, and thought nothing of stealing supplies and livestock and terrorising the villagers. A statue to Cai Yi, one of the defenders, claims that his cannon emplacement sank two of the enemy, leading to his local sobriquet Shen Paoshou, the Divine Gunner. Another commemorates the local men and women, who are said to have held off the attackers with pitchforks and kitchen knives. The British, according to the Guangzhou Ribao, were eventually obliged to hand over 3,000 silver taels in compensation, which was used to restore the local temple of the Goddess of the Sea – and, I suspect, initiated a new era in which the smugglers still showed up, but with a degree more respect.
“Qi’ao has not fallen,” brags the local monument. “And we draw our swords and volunteer to slay the enemy together; the British army [sic] seeks death, and throws away their armour and flees for their lives. Four years of haze are swept away in one day, and the mountains and rivers are forever preserved and the sun and moon are shining again.”
And I’m still only three steps inside the front door!
Pride of place in the opening bas-relief is given to three local boys who were instrumental in the Chinese labour movement. Qi’ao-born Su Zhaozheng (1885-1929) [centre] was the Seaman’s Union leader who masterminded the Hong Kong strike of 1922, over inequities in Chinese pay. Without answers for their demands for 40% pay rises, 1,500 deckhands and stokers walked out in January. Numbers grew to 30,000 by the end of the month, paralysing the colony’s shipping. By February, the numbers had climbed to 50,000, and included workers in the food and transport sectors, and even civil servants at Government House. With Hong Kong shut down, the authorities passed an Emergency Regulations Ordinance allowing the chef executive to enact extreme measures in times of crisis. [As a pre-existing law from colonial times, it remains a “nuclear option” on the statute books in modern Hong Kong, and was recently invoked in 2019 to ban protestors from wearing face masks].
Governor Edward Stubbs imposed strict passport rules, leading to a performative attempt by local union members to walk to Guangzhou to collect their strike pay. Four were shot and killed as they approached a line of colonial troops.
Lin Weimin (1887-1927) [left] went to Hong Kong to work on foreign ship, but became a key figure in the Canton-Hong Kong General Strike of 1925, inspired by the shooting of anti-colonial protestors in Shanghai and Guangzhou. Fearing that the authorities were about to retaliate by poisoning the water supply, a quarter of a million Chinese labourers fled Hong Kong, again shutting the colony down. Notably, he started out as a left-wing Nationalist, before joining the Communist Party and effectively becoming its representative for Hong Kong until his death, apparently from overwork at 40.
Yang Pao’an (1896-1931) [right] was the sole survivor of nine children, who embraced Marxism in his twenties as the only form of “scientific socialism.” He was an early representative of the Communist Party within the Republican government, which ousted him in 1926 on the grounds that he was a subversive and Communist recruiter. He embarked upon writing a Marxist history of the world and was arrested in Shanghai for pamphleteering and sedition. He was executed at the Longhua Garrison Command, now the Longhua Martyrs Cemetery.
Like the cemetery outside, the museum divides its main curation into the fallen heroes of the Revolution, of the war of resistance to Japan, of the civil war with the Nationalists (which actively stretches into the 1950s), and a rather vaguely defined Any Other Business, which I suspect, as in Shanghai, celebrates local-born people who have died in civil actions such as fire-fighting or sea rescue.
In particular there is a wall-length painting of Communist gunboats repelling Nationalists from islands near Zhuhai, bursting with pew-pew energy, and focussing on the immense dichotomy between the plucky little PRC boats and the Nationalist ships they are fighting – a victorious spin on the story that I have normally heard told by the other side, as a lament about lost territory.
Last year I wrote an article about the surprises of returning to mainland China after five years’ absence due to COVID and other circumstances. I’ve just come home from another trip in which I drew a lazy circle around south China’s “Great Bay Area”, up and around the Pearl River estuary. So this is your update about getting by as a visitor to a China that has tried to remove all cash from daily life: including ten apps that may make your life easier. I’ve also included a few details about the Special Administrative Regions of Hong Kong (which still takes cash and everyday credit and debit cards) and Macau (which is a law unto itself).
The official story is that services have to accept cash because not all old people have compatible phones. In reality, whereas you can usually pay in cash at a supermarket or train station information desk, you need to find a human who will take it from you, and they will need to find change. Meanwhile even buskers and beggars now have QR codes written on their buckets, and an irritating enshittification is underway in which some restaurants now want you to scan in a QR code and then do all your ordering and payment on their supposedly bespoke website. I was struggling to scroll down to the noodles in one cafe, when the old lady sitting next to me shouted: “I am not dogfarting around with this nonsense. Give me a paper menu.” They very swiftly provided her with one, so if you are old and angry, you can still get away with it.
On this most recent trip, I only used cash on three occasions — once when a pointlessly faffy restaurant website in Foshan wouldn’t load for long enough to let me pay for my noodles (I handed 51 kuai, the exact amount, to a waitress who may well have pocketed it); once to buy a mini Macanese flag at a souvenir shop in Macau; and once at the bizarrely old-school left luggage office at Hong Kong Airport Express station, which continues to insist on cash-only like it’s 1985.
ALIPAY. My default payment option in China, Alipay offers a visitors’ version that does not require a Chinese phone number. This only works in China, but as it requires a scan of your passport page and some warm-up box-ticking, it is best done before you arrive. Most shops and services take Alipay, and instead of the old “cash or card”, servers now normally say some variant of “Scan you or scan me?” referring to the barcode that activates the transfer. Alipay also has a Transport option that allows you to immediately join the local travel card network. So the moment I walked across the border in Shenzhen, I was able to create a Shenzhen Tong travel card on my Alipay, and use that instead of faffing around trying to find someone to sell me a real Shenzhen Tong card. As an additional bonus, fares are deducted from your standard Alipay account (which links to your credit or debit cards), so you don’t leave China with £20 unspent on a travel card you might not ever use again.
WEIXIN (WeChat). Most Chinese seem to prefer Weixin, which works just like Alipay and seems to have more supporters among some small shops and in certain areas of China. I found myself using it almost exclusively on my first trip to Guangzhou, where the locals seem to favour it. Weixin is fine for payments, and comes barnacled with a bunch of other things such as travel booking, which I don’t bother to use. It also has its own chat service, which often makes it the default app for taking down someone’s contact details. You can also see who else has WeChat near you, which inevitably means a bunch of hellos from under-dressed ladies each time I arrive in a new phone catchment area.
TRIP. For the last fifteen years, I have increasingly come to rely on Trip (formerly cTrip), a travel booking option that streamlines hotels, planes, and trains, as well as access to local attractions and experiences. I’ve used Trip to book me onto a bullet train at twenty minutes’ notice, and onto the Macau hydrofoil with no fuss. The app preloads travellers’ passport details, so your passport *is* your ticket on Chinese trains. To my great surprise, Trip also turned out to offer me better deals on hotels than a well-known chain’s own laughably titled “loyalty” scheme, of which I had been a member for many years. I love Trip so much that I even got it to book my hotels last time I was in London. Trip also has an unexpected bonus value in China, since it has a Map function that works behind the Great Firewall and not only shows you where you are, but items of interest nearby, which led me to several tourist sites on my most recent trip that I would not have otherwise known about.
OCTOPUS. The absolute joy of travelling in Hong Kong is the Octopus card. The version sold for tourists does not require a local phone number, and can be loaded onto your iPhone. Octopus is a reloadable travel card like London’s Oyster card, which works on trains, ferries, buses and the metro. It even works on the Peak funicular tram and the piddly little boat that putt-putts across Aberdeen harbour in three minutes. It can often also be used in place of other payments in 7-11s, restaurants and other shops. Nothing feels quite as welcoming as shambling off a plane at the airport and straight onto the express into Kowloon without a moment’s thought — the Octopus card makes a huge difference to Hong Kong’s ambience by making you feel like a local the moment you arrive.
ALOSIM. None of these digital apps work without an internet connection. You can pay for a travel connection from your usual service provider, but if you have an iPhone X or later you can load in an eSIM card that will handle all your data. I use aloSIM, which offers an Asia data package that works in 13 countries and regions, so there is no tech fiddling as I cross from Hong Kong to Shenzhen to Macau. I also use aloSIM everywhere else I travel, switching from their European, to American, to Asian data packages depending on where I am. It usually works out about half the price of getting the same service from my regular provider. If you use my customer code M74D4V9, both you and I will get a $3 discount.
EXPRESS VPN. If you use Gmail, or Facebook, or Google, you may find that these sites are blocked in China. To spare yourself the frustration of suddenly not being able to see your emails, Express VPN will create a tunnel made of Science, under the Great Firewall and onto a server in another country. If you want a free month on your first year’s subscription, you can use this link and I will get a free month, too.
METROMAN. For many years, I have had a growing number of Chinese metro maps proliferating on my phone. Now I just have Metroman, which corrals them all into one place, updates them when a new line suddenly appears, and allows you to plot likely routes before you head out for the day, instead of squinting at a map on a station concourse.
MOOVIT. I didn’t make huge use of Moovit on this recent trip, but on several occasions when I found myself in the middle of nowhere in a strange town, it was handy to be able to call up a free app that told where I could get to from the nearest bus stop.
PLECO. Not everybody reading this is going to be a Chinese speaker. But if you are, Pleco is an app that allows you to write unfamiliar words with your finger, and then look them up in a dictionary. It requires you to be able to work out the correct stroke order to enter your query, so it is not suitable for people who are new to the language.
MPAY. I would like to be able to sing the praises of MPay, a Macanese app that works in much the same way in Macau as Octopus works in Hong Kong. Except currently MPay requires you to have a Chinese, Macanese or Hong Kong phone number, so it was as much use to me as a dog filled with sand. I had no trouble using cash in Macau, but local cash machines only dish out money in large notes. Most places happily accept Hong Kong dollars as payment, but since Hong Kong dollars are worth 10% less than MOP$, everything comes attached to a “surprise” surcharge, like you are in America being having to come up with extra change for a sales tax. Of course, it’s not really a surprise — the Macanese are doing you a favour by taking foreign notes, but they could do everyone an even bigger favour by taking Octopus payments or just setting up an “MPay for Tourists” in the Octopus style. Hopefully there will be some good news about that next time.
Not all these apps will be ideal for everyone — not all of them were ideal for me! But as a Chinese speaker venturing into unfamiliar parts of the country, and trying to make the best of my time, many of them (except MPay) proved to be very useful indeed.
Early morning interview with our landlord, Tubby (his real name is Yu), a jolly little man half my height who will shortly become the village chairman. This makes him something of a heavy-hitter with the locals, and he truly appreciates the value of TV coverage, so he is ready and willing to talk about the history of the Miao, their affection for the pheasant as their totem animal, and sundry other organisational issues to do with the village. He even obliges us by running down the hill to tell the singing competition, which has been running right through the night, to bloody shut up for half an hour so we can film him in relative quiet. When they get shirty with him, he literally steals their microphone, strolling back to the house with it and telling us all will be well.
The Tubby interview is swift and efficient, and it gives us ample material to cover our B-rolls and cutaways. Despite the misery of filming here in what is now our fourth day of impenetrable fog, we have enough in the can now for this episode to work. The fog has become part of the story, as have the armies of amateur photographers getting in the way. There is even a rival Chinese film crew, dubbed Mr Osmo and the Neckbeards, since their chief cinematographer is wielding an Osmo – a tiny steadicam like a gun on gimbals, allowing for running shots and action.
Mrs Yu (Tubby’s wife) and Miss Yu (Tubby’s sister) take me out onto a clifftop to teach me how to walk like a woman. This takes longer than expected, as they have to put their glad rags on and do their hair, and then we have to wait for the air-raid sirens to stop. Today is the anniversary of the Japanese invasion of China, and sirens all over China are going off to remind people of who the enemy is.
“Left foot forward,” says Mrs Yu. “Now watch my arse. I wiggle it this way, and then that way, then this way, then that way.” It’s only when the cameraman reframes for a close-up that she realises she is volunteering to wiggle her bottom on camera for viewers in 30 countries.
The sisters-in-law then move onto the Phoenix Dance, that slow-motion invisible skipping rope motion that combines their wiggly walk with flapping arms and steps that go left-right-left-right-right-left-right-left-left, over and over again.
“Do you think they enjoy doing this?” wonders our fixer.
“I hope so,” I reply. “Because this lot don’t seem to do anything else.”
Mrs Yu is very excited about the electric kettle we have acquired in a vain attempt to have some warm water to wash in every day. She walks around the house caressing it like an adored pet. I have not washed properly for four days now. It is theoretically possible to barricade the door to the combined toilet-shower, strip off and use a kettle, but such an enterprise would require washing the floor first, and drying off afterwards, which since we are literally living inside a cloud, would be a futile exercise. As for going to the toilet, don’t get me started. I am happy if I manage to hit the hole and remember toilet paper.
“When we get to the Congjiang hotel tomorrow,” says the director dreamily, “I’m going to turn the lights low, put on some ambient background music, light some aromatic candles, and have a massive dump.”
Born in the early 1900s, Stiina (Irma Seikkula) is a foundling child, left on a doorstep in Helsinki’s Hermanni district, and taken in by Maria Berg (Anni Aitto). Maria is suffering from empty-nest syndrome after her grown-up son Martti (Tauno Majuri) has gone to sea. Stiina is christened at the same time as the neighbour’s son Vesa (Rauli Tuomi), and the two grow up more like siblings than strangers.
After her foster-mother dies, the adult Stiina is working at a grocery when Martti returns from sea. He is impressed with her sunny attitude and charitable acts, and recommends that she study home economics. At college, she shows sympathy and affection for an illegitimate child, remarking that she, too, bears the “Mark of Sin”, despite having no say in the matter herself.
Eventually, she discovers that the frail old lady Helviira (Henny Waljus) works as a backstreet abortionist, and is dying “haunted by the footsteps of all those I have killed.” Tragedy strikes when an abortion goes wrong and the patient, Stiina’s friend Martta (Heilka Helinä) died. The grieving pharmacist’s daughter, Kaarina (Emma Väänänen) reveals that Martta was her own illegitimate daughter, conceived with her fiancé Martti before he went to sea. Or at least, so she thinks. In fact, it is Stiina who was the infant handed to Helviira to dispose of, and Helviira who left the baby Stiina on Maria’s doorstep. Martti and Kaarina are reunited, and Stiina and Vesa are married, two whole families created out of chaos.
I can’t help but wonder if The Mark of Sin (Synnin puumerkki), like the same year’s Safety Valve, is another rumination on the generation that has grown up in Finland since women won the right to vote in 1907. Based on a 1928 novel of the same name by Laura Soinne, its narrative of illegitimacy and discrimination is intensely familiar from many a previous tale of foundlings and single mothers, but whereas such children were McGuffins and plot points in films like The Child is Mine (1940), here they are the protagonists and the agents of their own fate. Many of the tribulations that Stiina faces are rooted in the tensions of the gender divide – a pretty girl without financial security or an official guardian, she is regarded as an easy target by the menfolk of Finnish society. Some of them are genuinely predatory, others are simply unheeding of the pressures she is under simply by being born into her situation.
Writer-director Jorma Nortimo started out as an actor with the rival Suomen Filmiteollisuus studio, before moving into directing – The Mark of Sin was his first movie for Suomi-Filmi, and makes much of Hermanni, a one-time meat-packing district that has been the location of the city prison since 1888. Today, it is a warren of boxy apartment blocks, but Nortimo’s camera thrills in its clapper-board houses, allotments and laundry lines, back in the day when it was not-quite-town and not-quite-country, like so many of the characters that inhabit it.
The ease with which a novel can leap across the years is compromised on film, where one actor cannot play someone for their entire lifespan – although then again, they tried very hard with Ester Toivonen in Scorned (1939). Consequently, much of the establishing moments of the first 20 minutes are left in the hands of two child-actors, Suvi Soila (actually Suvi Orko, daughter of the producer Risto Orko), and Orvo Kalevi, who appeared as Orvo Kontio in the same year’s Four Women.
It’s they who have to carry the narrative weight of Stiina being bullied as a child, and Vesa coming to her rescue; as well as the character-defining moment when Stiina tries to offer her button collection as payment for her foster-mother’s vital medicine, thereby winning the approval of the local pharmacist. But as critics were quick to point out, there are an awful lot of defining moments in this film. “There would be enough material for several different films,” observed Toini Aaltonen in the Suomen Sosialidemokraatti. “Towards the end, the viewer becomes so numb that they completely apathetically accept everything, no matter what happens. Nothing seems impossible anymore.”
Others were quick to point out that life in modern Finland was not quite so Dickensian for illegitimate children as the 1928 source material suggested, although I would counter that they might like to ask a few illegitimate children about that. I was present in the room on a fateful day in the 1990s when the father of my then-girlfriend realised that the man he had always thought of as his uncle had actually been his dad. It was a shocking revelation that stopped him in his tracks, as a whole bunch of familial slights and dramas, unspoken tensions and kindnesses suddenly made sense. It also opened a whole new can of worms, since the outed “uncle” had been a Catholic priest.
It all happened in mere seconds, before my very eyes, and it pole-axed him with a dramatic weight you only usually see in movies. It called into question his whole life, years of self-doubt, insecurities and gaslighting, as well as the often-odd behaviour of the people he now realised were his adoptive parents. All of this fell like an anvil on a man who had been born in the 1940s, a whole generation after Finnish critics were scoffing that the drama in The Mark of Sin was all outmoded and forgotten.
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Short History of Finland. He is watching all the Finnish films, so you don’t have to.
Over at Russell Hogg’s history podcast Subject to Change, I keep things festive by discussing Japan’s Christian Century and the apocalyptic revolt that ended it in 1638. Part one features sneaky Jesuits, mass conversions, crucifixes as fashion statements and a secret Spanish plan to conquer China.
How did a street fight in Macao escalate into a naval battle off the coast of Nagasaki, leading to an executed nobleman and a fateful change in management in Shimabara? Features me impersonating Batman and speaking Spanish.
And then in part two we deal with the teenage messiah, the siege of Hara Castle, and the craziness of the Mirror of the Future, a supposed prophecy or, if you like, the departing curse of an angry Jesuit:
“When five by five years have passed / Japan will see a remarkable youth / All-knowing without study / See his sign in the sky / In East and West the clouds will burn / Dead trees shall put forth flowers / Men shall wear the Cross on their heads / And white flags shall flutter on the sea / Fires engulf fields and mountains, grass and trees / To usher in the return of Christ.”
Grandma Ella (Leena Uotila) may be starting to lose her marbles, trilling with dead-eyed wonder at the height of the ceilings in the new Lahti Citymarket. Her daughter Susanna (Ria Kataja) wouldn’t know, because she “only shops for groceries in Sokos”, although what appears at first to be the airs and graces of a nouvelleriche turns out to be a matter of staff discount for a corporate minion. Each declaims random thoughts at the other as they muddle through the preparations for Christmas Eve, in Family Time (2023), a film that this chronological Finnish film blog will not get to in sequence for twenty years or more, but which your correspondent happened to stumble across on Finnair.
Grandpa Lasse (Tom Wentzel) heard a funny story at the fishing club. Daughter Susanna has got a promotion at the department store. Sister Helena (Elina Knihtilä) isn’t as impressed as Susanna thinks she should be. Helena’s son Simo (Sakari Topi) is just about to move out, considerably later than one might expect. Susanna’s kids just want a real Christmas where Grandpa doesn’t watch the telly with a beer in his hand. And Susanna’s husband Risto (Jarkko Pajunen) buries himself in tech support because at least that makes him useful. Literally nobody cares about what anyone else is doing, because nobody really wants to be there.
There is something of a shock for the Finnish film watcher who is hoisted suddenly out of this blog’s current location in the 1940s, to Tia Kouvo’s searing and empathetic study not so much of lost dreams, but of people who never got around to dreaming in the first place. Her modern-day Lahti is a soulless, joyless series of boxy supermarkets; her family gathering is a tense series of misunderstandings from a group of virtual strangers just waiting for it to end. This, then, is what is going to happen to the Family Suominen children when they grow up and have kids, and their kids have kids, and those kids don’t want to do anything but spin doughnuts in the Karkkianen car park.
Kouvo has an incisive eye for people who made a wrong turn so long ago that they can’t even remember which road they were on – a well-deserved win for her as both director and writer at this year’s Finnish academy awards, for this expansion of her 22-minute 2018 short. The film’s Finnish title, Mummola (“Grandma’s Place”) is supposed to invoke cosy winter reunions, but instead is revealed as a series of unwelcome culinary compromises, accompanied by a constant litany of people’s aches and pains. In English, it is called Family Time, alluding to an excruciating workplace workshop that Risto attends, in which he is exhorted to make the most of the eight hours a day that he isn’t sleeping or working. Risto does his best – he is the only person in the film seen reading a book – but even as he attempts to mansplain Isaac Asimov’s Foundation to his wife, she harrumphs that he has no interest in sex any more. Their subsequent confrontation in the garage, where the light sensor plunges everything into darkness unless someone is gesticulating wildly, is a study in pressure cooker drama and black humour.
Kouvo’s feature debut is a series of locked-off shots, the family often in shadow or off-screen, as a series of Pinteresque conflicts unfold. Nobody wants the awful Christmas dinner, Grandma has bought three packets of raisins “because they were cheap” but nobody got any walnuts. Grandpa isn’t just watching the rally in his pants (“NOBODY WANTS TO SEE YOUR BALLS!” shouts Grandma) but it’s a video of the rally, while his grand-daughter Hilla (Elli Pajanen) harangues him for not watching a Christmas movie at Christmas.
In one beautifully executed sequence, Risto and the kids tardily decorate the Christmas tree in silence while his off-screen wife and sister-in-law embark upon a nuclear argument about the difference between butter and margarine. Remarkably little happens in Family Time, but one is left with the impression that remarkably little has happened to these people for their whole lives. At least Hilla makes an attempt at being the voice of reason, gently chiding her grandfather for the amount of money she presumes he has thrown away on booze. These are quintessentially Finnish heroes, living embodiments of what Tolkien once called “sadly unsentimental lovers,” speaking wonderfully clear Finnish, for all you language students who want to be able to practice: “Grandpa shat on the carpet right in the middle of Hilla’s lovely song.”
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Short History of Finland. He is watching all the Finnish films so that you don’t have to.
One of the photographers staying in the same building as us seems different from the rest. She is a slim Chinese girl in a bobble hat, dubbed “Alice” by Mickey the sound man because we are living next door to her – one of many obscure 20th century pop references in Mickey’s everyday banter. He noticed her because she alone seemed to know how to operate her camera, and it turns out that she is a genuine professional. She sells prints of her photos, but is wandering China, somewhat aimlessly, in the help of selling a book about it, because “foreigners don’t know anything about any tribe apart from the Han.” I resist the urge to point out that even if it were true, there are thousands of pre-existing picture books about China, none of which she appears to have heard of.
Alice was born in Hong Kong and now lives in New York, and is one of those Chinese girls who believe that being Chinese is the sole qualification required for understanding China, that she has learned everything she needs to know solely through her DNA, and that foreigners are all clueless. She has already pegged me as a high-maintenance idiot after overhearing half a conversation between me and the director the day before, about the best time for me to shave when there is no hot water.
Yes, I say, we were going over what kind of timing was needed to make my face look presentable in 4K digital. If you’re behind the camera, you can look like shit warmed up and nobody will care. But if you’re in front of it, you need to look like you’ve run a comb through your hair, or it is distracting.
“Oh,” she says in surprise, “you appear to understand quite a bit of Chinese.”
Behind their porridge bowls, the crew snicker and snort.
“Have you been to China before?” she asks, and the snorts turn to giggles.
A village fete of some sorts has sprung up around the village gate. There’s a mobile convenience store on the back of a truck, a fruit seller, a lady selling gristle on sticks, a lucky dip and a spin-the-wheel stall where you can win a live terrapin in a cup.
The Very Slow Motorcycle Race is another of the town committee’s attempts to keep the young people interested. Chalk marks in a wavy chicane are drawn across the car park, and the local bikers are made to traverse the path in the slowest time possible. Not that that is much of an issue, because only two bikers actually make it all the way along the fiendishly winding path at all. The director decides that I shall have a go, and purloins a bike from a passing man.
It is a 250cc white Chinese model, and as I sit astride it with entirely misplaced confidence, I remember that I haven’t actually sat on a motorbike for 25 years. The locals immediately cluster around with helpful advice, including “Starting in second gear is a stupid idea, mate”, and “If you rev it that much, you’ll go over the cliff.”
Luckily, I have vague memories of the five minutes I once spent in a Taiwanese car park on Gilbert Mackay’s little 150cc bike in 1991, so at least I know that what would be the left brake on a bicycle is actually the clutch on a motorbike. I know where the gears are to shift it down into first (they’re by your left toe), and I know that pulling too hard on the front brake will pitch my head over the handlebars.
I gingerly wheel it to the starting line with only two stalls, and then head off when Tubby, our landlord, blows his whistle. It’s all over in barely a second, as I careen along the opening leg, fail to correctly take the first corner, and whirl off into the crowd, through a screaming flock of onlookers, and around the car park, coming to a juddering halt a couple of feet away from the precipice that leads down into the rice paddy.
The camera catches not just my comedy performance, but all the Chinese laughing at me at the starting line, as well as the fleeing onlookers as I charge through them. It’ll look good.
I chug the bike over the man we got it from, and thank him for letting us use it.
“Oh, it’s not mine,” he says. “I have no idea whose bike you just stole.”
In a moment of historical irony, this column inadvertently predicted its own demise, back in NEO #233, with a comment on the rising costs of paper. That picture there is a stack of all the Manga Snapshot titles I had ready to roll for the rest of the year, which I can now chuck in the bin.
It’s been exactly twenty years since I handed in my first article for issue one of NEO magazine, a young whippersnapper of a title that would be destined to outstay them all. Anime UK and Anime FX and Manga Mania and Manga Max combined covered UK anime journalism from 1991 to 2000, but NEO magazine spanned a huge chunk of time, from 2004 to today. Gemma Cox became the longest serving anime magazine editor in British history some years ago, and I doubt very much whether anyone is going to break her record.
Gemma has spoken in interviews about the haptic joy of a print magazine – the simple value of being able to flick around and cherish, and indulge in reveries with a collection of printed pages. There’s a poster for your wall. There’s a picture of that thing. There’s an article you stuck in your scrapbook. You won’t get that on the interwebs. As of today, you won’t get it in your newsagents, either.
Twenty-five years ago, Jim McLennan, the editor of Trash City magazine, stated that the ultimate aim of anime journalism was to render itself obsolete. The last anime journalist out of the building, he said, could turn off the lights, because if the mainstream was carrying anime coverage alongside real films, interviewing anime directors, and reviewing the new titles, then there was no need for a specialist sector.
When athletes are flashing Dragonball Z hand signals, and Uniqlo sells Evangelion T-shirts, anime is certainly mainstream… in a sense. But for every Makoto Shinkai interview in Sight & Sound or SFX, there are a dozen TV shows that go unnoticed, and a cluster of movies that get no attention at all. That’s going to be someone else’s problem from now on.
Print costs money, and everybody on the web wants everything for free. When the All the Anime blog was shut down earlier this year, I was told that kidz today aren’t interested in “long-form journalism”, which apparently means 800 words or more.
So, what happens next? After 33 years of print anime journalism in the UK, I guess it’s time for me to go looking for another job, and for the internet to put its money where its mouth is. What happens next could even be up to you.
Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article first appeared in the 245th and final issue of NEO magazine, November 2024.
Asked recently if I could “recommend” ten manga for an unspecified group, I wondered if I could come up with ten that I had encountered in my recent (and now cancelled) Manga Snapshot columns that had yet to be legally translated into English. It turned out that almost everything I had most enjoyed in the last few years remains unavailable. Not that these titles are best-sellers in waiting – many are niche titles that only appeal to weirdos like me. But nevertheless, this is my top ten of untranslated manga at the time of writing. Comments have been harvested from the last couple of years of the Manga Snapshots.
The Honest Real Estate Agent (Shōjiki Fudōsan, Big Comic), based on a book by Takeshi Natsuhara, adapted for manga by Mitsuhiro Mizuno and drawn by Akira Otani. Our leading man, Nagase, is an estate agent, and initially a proud exponent of the industry known in Japan as the “1003” – as in, for every thousand words spoken, only three are true. However, after bullishly desecrating a Shinto shrine during a ground-breaking ceremony, he is cursed to only tell the truth, and forced to radically rethink the way he sells houses, homes, apartments and development plots to the Japanese public. I know, right – it’s a lovely idea, and again one that is sure to appeal to older readers who have ever had to go through the misery of trying to buy a house. Somehow, it’s managed to run in Big Comic for the last six years… there is obviously a market for honest real-estate. Or for people who like watching the conniptions that Nagase has to go into in order to still close a deal. Turned into a live-action TV series in 2022.
This Does Not Fall Under Expenses! (Kore wa Keihi de Ochimasen, Cookie) drawn by Kosachi Mori from the light novel series by Yuko Aoki, is the tale of 27-year-old accountant Sanako Moriwaka, who has landed the unenviable position of processing expense receipts at the large Tenten Corporation. Unlike the patronisingly dismissed “office ladies” of many a corporate manga, Sanako is a woman with qualifications and power, but also a minion who has to police the invoices of people substantially higher-ranking than herself. Sanako is thrown into the middle of an ongoing territorial dispute between Sales and Accounts, the constant chancers of the Publicity department upstairs, and a high-up personal assistant with a hand-wavingly vague attention to receipts. In particular, she is thrown into tense stand-offs with Taiyo Yamada, the ace of the sales department whose new project, Paradise Café, involves so many entertainment expenses and travel boondoggles that he and Sanako see a lot more of each other than either is comfortable with…. At least at first.
This Does Not Fall Under Expenses! is that most amazing and rare of new creations, a criminal procedural that often runs without crime; a drama of reluctant partners investigating corporate skulduggery, a deeply involved study of due diligence in the workplace, and a fantastically forensic account of just what we can tease out of the metadata of receipts. So if you were in Kyoto on the night of the 26th, why are you putting in an receipt for an evening bowl of noodles in Fukuoka? Only a bullet train ticket from before 4pm on that day will save you…. But please don’t tell me you went first-class, because THAT DOES NOT FALL UNDER EXPENSES! In this issue’s chapter, Sanako and Taiyo fight in the street over his slapdash expense claims, and her personal policy of “not chasing rabbits” – which appears to be an attempt to get the staff at the company to police their own expensing. Turned into a live-action TV series in 2019.
Tempus Ethicae (Big Comic Superior) by Yuichiro Okamoto and Yukio Tamai, is set in a near future where advanced artificial intelligence is on the verge of breaking through, it features the hapless humans whose job it is to teach thinking to computers. AI machines will make their own decisions unless they can be steered into having a bit of empathy for humans, which means as various elements of government and society are handed over to machines, someone has to walk our future metal masters through the pros and cons of making difficult decisions.
And these aren’t black and white decisions like “is it a good idea to support a cataclysmic isolation policy that will destroy your country’s economy for the next decade and make you the laughing stock of Europe?” Oh no, these are far more unanswerable questions, much more akin to the lose-lose scenario of Star Trek’s infamous Kobayashi Maru test. Terrorist attacks, unstoppable accidents and situations which are sure to kill someone are all presented as case studies for the humans, who have to debate in front of the machines in the hope that some sort of ethics will rub off. Of course, what makes it all so chilling is the fact that these things have to be taught at all, and that should someone’s debating powers go wrong, an AI somewhere will make Donald Trump dictator for life, cancel NEO magazine, or otherwise create some other terrible situation.
The Departed Become Distant Over Time (Sarumono wa Hibi ni Utoshi, Young Champion) by Ryo Orikasa and Kyo Hatsuki derives its title from an early medieval Chinese anthology of poetry and literature, the Wen Xuan… which makes it all the more surprising when the opening pages of this chapter feature an adult movie being shot on the quiet in a deserted gymnasium. The Departed… zooms in on the lives of the young adult-video actresses who bunk together in a Tokyo flat, presided over by their stern-faced matron, Ms Itadori. The action sweeps from eye-poppingly explicit sequences of the filming underway to the mundane downtimes of the cast and crew, some of whom throw themselves into their work with gung-ho pragmatism, while others wish they were anywhere but here. Anywhere…? Ah, that’s where Mikoto comes in – a handsome, bespectacled young man who works at a Buddhist altar shop, and has a mysterious sixth sense that allows him to detect when a human being is approaching the end of their life. And one of Ms Itadori’s girls has that aura about her.
Hospital Cop: The Snake of Aesclapius (Innai Keisatsu: Asclepius no Hebi, Young Champion) based on a story by Tsutomu Sakai but adapted for manga by Ichi Hayashi. As the main title suggests, the setting is a mega-hospital so large that it counts as an entire city district, and hence has its own police box. And that means that the local bobby Osamu Murai, a rakish youth plainly destined for detective, walks a beat that is largely indoors, around a teaching hospital thick with wacky students, a cancer ward plagued by serious illnesses, a research wing where bespectacled boffins might be up to no good, and an emergency room with a bunch of suspicious gunshot wounds. Sakai’s storyline is a brilliant idea for creating a clash of popular dramatic styles, as if Holby City were mashed into Line of Duty in a BBC cost-cutting exercise, and it is an idea so winningly populist that I am amazed nobody has thought of it before, not the least because there should be sirens and police tape all around resident surgeon Moeko Kamijo, a smouldering sawbones whose clashes over jurisdiction and boundaries with Sakai may well conceal a mutual attraction that neither of them is prepared to acknowledge. Also, I think there might be ghosts.
The hero of Kawano Yobundo’s Shima-san (Manga Action) is an old man who really should be retired by now, but instead holds down two menial jobs. By day, he works as a “traffic security guard” – one of the glorified human traffic cones whose sad fate in corporation car parks often disguises a management figure being constructively dismissed, shunted into a lower-paid menial position. In the evenings, Shima-san comes to work at the Better Days convenience store, where his younger coworkers are aghast at his attitude. When a young woman brings in a radio, complaining that the batteries are already dead, Shima replaces them with an apology, even though she didn’t buy the radio at Better Days.
Shima-san’s staid, unimaginative artwork belies its charming examination of Japan’s generation gap. Shima is a throwback to the literal “better days”, a shop assistant who believes in customer care, even when he is merely the frontman for a faceless corporation. He’s a man who carefully nurtures a sense of community in an anonymous suburban street, ready to bend the rules when it’s the right thing to do, and to enforce them with steely resolve when people try it on – woe betide the giggling underage teenagers who try to buy a packet of fags.
But there’s more, because Shima has a past. He alludes in conversations with Hiroyuki, his teenage coworker, to “making mistakes” in his youth, but its only when you see the elaborate dragon tattoo on his back that you put two and two together. Shima-san is the last of a long line of yakuza – his dead-end jobs are not merely a sign of dropping out of the mainstream rat-race, but of having somehow failed at being a gangster. Artist Kawano’s story suggests that back in the good old days, even the criminals had a better sense of honour and duty. Shima-san is the quintessential 2020s manga – a gentle workplace reverie about trying to make a difference where it counts, in the hope of paying it forward.
Manchuria Opium Squad, (Manshū Ahen Squad, Young Maagzine) written by Tsukasa Monma and illustrated by “Shikako”, charts the progress of an ex-soldier as he turns to the opium trade to support his family in 1937 China. Our leading man is Isamu Higata, a soldier in the infamous Kwantung Army that effectively seized the Chinese territory of Manchuria and turned it into a Japanese puppet state. Fallen on hard times, he starts out small in the illegal opium trade, eventually clawing his way up through a corrupt society in which the Russian mafia, Shanghai Green Gang and Kwantung Army duel over the extremely lucrative industry in a highly addictive and deadly drug.
This issue’s chapter is a flashback to Shanghai in the mid-1930s, as the Green Gang (a real organisation) stabs and beheads its way to the control of the local drug trade. I was in Shanghai only recently, and impressed not only by the photo-real accuracy of Shikako’s depiction of the city’s famous waterfront, but of its historical accuracy – there is a shot of a statue of Winged Victory, a monument to the Great War that dominated the Bund from 1924 to 1941, when the occupying Japanese ripped it down. Reviewers, however, have had mixed reactions to history as depicted in Manchuria Opium Squad, since Monma’s storyline inevitably walks into a series of political minefields. His leading man is realistically hard-nosed and pragmatic about the fact that Japan has appropriated an area the size of Colombia, and understandably ruthless in the way he creates and exploits addicts. He is a criminal, after all, and the depiction of Manchuria as a lawless narco-state is also entirely reasonable. But Japan’s invasion of China, a “Fifteen-Year War” that eventually blossomed into WW2, remains a touchy and emotive subject, and there are those who have accused Monma of pandering to Japanese power-fantasies and atrocity denials, not to mention a lurid interest in the running of an ever-growing harem of drug-addled Chinese slave-girls. It ultimately leads the reader to question when we started rooting for the bad guy. But before you start to wonder if this is manga’s Breaking Bad, Manchuria Opium Squad veers into horror in its depiction of opiate euphoria and addiction, and into pulpy satire in the form of Isamu’s foil, Lihua, the sassy, sinister Green Gang queenpin.
Himiko(Big Comic Original), by Richard Woo and Mariko Nakamura, is a glimpse at Japan in the Dark Ages, when the islands were still a patchwork of contending kingdoms in the shadow of distant China. Woo’s story is drawn from asides in contemporary Chinese chronicles, turning ancient Japan into a heady mix of sorceresses and kings who claim to wield magic swords – Game of Thrones with tattooed faces and thatched long-huts. A King Takeru is fated to become a mythological hero, but he is only a supporting character for the central cast of women – the witch Akame and the teenage girl Yanoha, whom I suspect will eventually be enthroned as the priest-queen Himiko.
This is great fun – perhaps the alien qualities of the names don’t quite come through in English, but Himiko presents a Japan that is both familiar and atavistic – it’s a chance to see the ancient Japanese as one step removed from the Dothraki, before their country was swamped by refugees from Korea and their native religion was over-run by Buddhism.
Prior Convictions (Zenkamono, Big Comic Original) by Masahito Kagawa and Toji Tsukishima is a bogglingly interesting topic – a slice-of-life drama in modern Tokyo, told through the eyes of a probation officer. Lawyer Kayo Akawa is an unpaid, voluntary parole officer, appointed by the Ministry of Justice. It’s a fascinating exploration of criminality and the return of offenders to society – Kayo’s unpaid (!) job brings her into contact with every level of society, from middle-class journalists serving supervisory probation for white-collar crime, to the stringy-haired former addict mopping floors in a convenience store.
After so many years of Manga Snapshots, Japanese comics can still give me a thrill. Prior Convictions is a marvellous idea for a story – a crime drama that takes place after the crime has happened, and often after the offender has paid their debt to society. But what happens next? Can criminals in Japan ever overcome the stigma of having been criminals? Can they get back on the job market? Can they find love? And what kind of temptations, reprisals or revelations can return to haunt them from their former life?
In this chapter, Tamiko has been out of jail for 18 months, and is bussing tables at a food court, where a rough customer seems ready to exploit her timidity and unwillingness to cause a scene. He thinks he’s starting a relationship with an indulgent new squeeze – Kayo puts him straight, telling him to back off a vulnerable young woman who needs a better break than he can give her. It’s a mix of psychotherapy and low-level crime-fighting that is just crying out for a TV remake (one was made in Japan in 2021). This manga appears to have been also released abroad, but in French.
And saving my all time favourite until last, Like Shooting Stars in the Twilight (Tasogare Ryūseigun, Big Comic Original), by Kenshi Hirokane, practically switches its entire cast once a volume, because for the last 29 years, it has been running love stories for the over-50s. Ridiculously inventive, covering every genre conceivable from sci-fi to horror, it has been adapted for live-action television a number of times, since every one of its stories packs enough punch, at very least, for a TV movie-of-the-week. I first championed it in Manga Max magazine 25 years ago, but manga reading, even today, is still very much an occupation of the young in the English-speaking world, and it’s difficult to imagine that sales would ever do it justice.
Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. The Manga Snapshot column ran in NEO magazine from 2005 to 2024.
Breath freezes in the air in the morning, and there is no view past the next house, since we are level with the clouds and the whole place is shrouded in fog. I grit my teeth and dowse my hair in cold water in an attempt to get it to assume a reasonable shape. Nobody elsefrom the crew wants to wash.
The fog has not lifted. If anything, it is even worse. We cannot see to the next house, let alone the allegedly stunning vista below. The hill-climbing race has been postponed, if not cancelled, and there is no point in sending up the drone, because all it will be able to film is the inside of a cloud.
With nothing else to shoot, the crew are trying to get footage of the family cooking in their kitchen, but there are already six photographers blocking the view and getting in the way. Some of them are wearing the logo of the Guizhou Photography Club, and have plainly been bussed in with the same vague hope as us of catching something suitably ethnic.
The Miao village women are assembling for the Pheasant Dance in the square. A lusheng band, some of them carrying instruments twelve or more feet high, are blowing a farty, unchanging tune that sounds like The Doors trying to tune up to play “Light My Fire”, with an additional unnecessary tuba player co-opted into the band. The Pheasant Dance involves making a half-hearted motion with one’s hands, as if skipping with an invisible rope, and then shuffling left-left-right-right-left-left-right, endlessly, endlessly, for hours.
There are fourteen or so dancers and a five-man band, already outnumbered by a crowd of photographers, toting expensive Nikons and Canons that they seem ill-equipped to use, with lenses that cost more than a year’s wages for some Chinese. Our cameraman is already getting pissed off with the two dozen, then soon three dozen interlopers, who keep ruining his shots, wandering into the frame and talking over the music. There are even several foreigners – desiccated pensioners with Tibetan jackets and Spock haircuts, grimly pointing their own cameras at the mess.
The village women are crowned with elaborate headdresses topped with pewter birds and foil ribbons, wearing dresses that give them bulky hips, tailing embroidered streamers. The embroidery is all done themselves, serving as advert for their potential wifely skills.
The crew and I lurk around the village gate, where we are soon accosted by a bunch of local characters. There is the drunken, bespectacled man from Beijing, who has plainly necked far too many dishes of welcome booze, and wants to talk to me about Northern Ireland. There is the local Party secretary, whom I have dubbed Man With a Stick, because he walks everywhere with a nobbly branch that he insists is used in massage techniques. And there are two giggly girls from a Beijing college who want their photograph taken with me because they have never met an American before. And they still haven’t.
A Pheasant Dance competition breaks out in a drained rice paddy… well, partly drained, as my shoes soon discover. Different Miao tribes compete over their interpretation of the Pheasant Dance, but since the music is the same every time, and you can’t score them for having better headdresses just because they come from a different tribe, the judges (and indeed the crew) resort to judging them on entirely arbitrary criteria – matching shoes, boob size, and whether or not they look as bored as we are. There really is no contest, since the last group on is the local girls from this village, Maniao, who actually have a bunch of different steps and a Eurovision costume-change gimmick where the outer dancers grab the skirt ribbons of the lead girl, and form a pheasant tail behind her.
The director is phoning it in from the house, supposedly because we are droning from that vantage point, but actually because the chaos is unfilmable, and she knows that the best our cameraman can do is snatch some cutaways. It’s not like we need new audio when everybody plays the same song; the light is fading; the background looks like a building site in the mist, and the place is full of middle-aged men with preposterously expensive cameras, trying to snatch a “National Geographic”-style bit of local colour, and ironically preventing National Geographic from doing so.
I am perhaps the last to realise that today is a disaster. I have been hired, at least in part, for my curiosity about such things, and I confess that I stayed to watch the welcoming ceremony because I wasn’t going to travel for ten hours and not see it. Our director and cameraman, with an eye on the visuals, probably worked out at lunchtime that there was no point in shooting any more footage today. The rest of the crew just took the path of least resistance.
A huge dance, a swirling circle of all the Miao tribes, is kicking off in the main square as the sun sets, with all visitors invited to join the end of the invisible-skipping-rope conga line. But by the time it begins, I am all alone from the crew, radioing back up to the house with increasingly plaintive reports about the number of dancers and the tribes who have joined the fray.
“Thank you for the commentary, Jonathan,” says the director carefully over the walkie-talkie. “But come back to the house. Today is a wrap.”
The Official Schoolgirl Milky Crisis Blog 