Tag Archives: anime

Flowers of Edo

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Hokusai was the most famous print artist in 19th century Japan. He drew the iconic Great Wave Off Kanagawa, the Views of Mount Fuji and the Stations of the Tokaido Road. He celebrated the celebrities of the kabuki stage and even kicked off the beginnings of tentacle porn. In 1814, he published the first of a long-running series of “how-to-draw” manuals and art references, known as the Manga (Sketchbooks) and eventually lending their name to comics from Japan. And… he had help.

As Hokusai got older, there are stories that he suffered from palsy and infirmity. There are rumours in the Japanese art world that he was practically unable to hold a brush by his final years, and yet somehow kept churning out masterpieces. Word on the street, but rarely admitted in the auction houses, is that for the last years of his life, much of his work was ghosted by his daughter O-ei.

Keiichi Hara’s Miss Hokusai is not a biopic. There is far too little known about the historical O-ei for that to work, and barely a dozen of her acknowledged art pieces remaining. But this itself has inspired numerous fictional accounts, from Katherine Govier’s novel The Print-Maker’s Daughter to numerous untranslated Japanese novels, and an award-winning manga by Hinako Sugiura. It’s this latter work that is the basis for Hara’s film – the director is the world’s biggest Sugiura fan, and deeply in love with the creator’s unique perspective on life in 19th century Japan.

“I wanted to be fresh,” Hara told me at the UK premiere. “Sugiura wrote about the common people; about the townsfolk, artisans and prostitutes. Japanese media is full of depictions of the Edo period, but Sugiura’s manga told me things I had never seen anywhere else.” And his animated film is packed with incidental detail – the bumping of boats under the Sumida river bridge, the chaos caused by the fires that were poetically known as “the flowers of Edo”, even the sensation of stepping in a samurai-era dog turd.

“Of course, we wanted to use Hokusai’s prints as reference material,” notes Hara. “But 19th century prints were not intentionally realist. They play tricks with perspective and proportions. They aren’t blueprints for evoking the period. Sometimes, you still have to go with your imagination.”

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The same might easily be said of the other anime Edo-period piece recently released, Masayuki Miyaji’s Fuse: Memoirs of the Hunter Girl. Despite being demonstrably more irreverent and playing havoc with fantasy elements, false colours and bawdy backgrounds, Miyaji’s film is just as much a celebration of the same city that would be renamed Tokyo, “East Capital” in 1868. Miyaji’s movie is an Edo of the mind, conceived as a commemoration of the 90th anniversary of a famous Japanese literary magazine, and stumbling joyously through a number of different literary modes. It is a retelling and a re-imagining of The Hakkenden, a samurai serial novel first published in 1814, the same year as Hokusai’s infamous Manga, but the film is actually based on a modern “light novel” by Kazuki Sakuraba – one of the notoriously throwaway potboilers popular with modern commuter kids on their iPhones.

The Yoshiwara pleasure quarter looms large in both movies. In Miss Hokusai, it is a place of shadows, the inspiration for O-ei’s most famous surviving picture. In Fuse it is a vibrant, dingy ghetto, ringed by a sewer but aspiring to be a bawdy Disneyland. The historically faithful Hinako Sugiura would have had conniptions if she saw Miyaji’s centrepiece, an entirely unhistorical clock tower in the shape of a woman’s torso, with a skirt that spins and lifts as the chimes strike the hour. But it is arguably just as evocative of the Yoshiwara as Miss Hokusai’s studious recreation.

Fuse is a faithful retelling of the fantasies of the Edo period, when merchants and samurai sat down to read lurid novels about lycanthropic dog-warriors, wandering swordsmen, and geisha with hearts of gold. Its colours are eye-bogglingly vivid, its characters calculatedly larger than life, sometimes threatening to cotton on that they are ciphers in a story being written by an aging samurai trying to pay the bills. Or are they? There are suggestions in Fuse that the real story is being written by his bespectacled, geeky grand-daughter…

This article first appeared in Geeky Monkey #6, 2016. Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of the Samurai.

So What’s New…?

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So there’s a new Ghost in the Shell film, spun off from ARISE. It’s called Ghost in the Shell: The New Movie. Just remember, someone had a meeting about that, and that’s the title they brain-stormed. Someone got paid to say: “We’ve got a title that everyone’s going to sit up and take notice of. It’s Ghost in the Shell. And it’s NEW!”

Seriously, did nobody in the room raise a hand and point out that the last Ghost in the Shell film was also new when it came out? And so was the one before that.

Maybe you missed it at last year’s Scotland Loves Anime, because you, like a number of other punters, thought it was the old new Ghost in the Shell until it was too late. And not just the punters; some journalists also confused this new film with the last time a Ghost in the Shell film was new, and used the wrong stills in their coverage. This new film will only be the new film until a new new film comes along, and then it will be the old new film.

Is there method in the madness? Quite possibly, what with a live-action Ghost in the Shell movie also coming soon. Internet search engines are sure to confuse this new film with Scarlet Johansson’s. Who knows, maybe the distributors will end up like those sneaky bastards who released Ralph Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings cartoon with an all-typography cover just before Christmas, hoping to fool shoppers at the checkout that they were snagging Peter Jackson’s. In movie distribution, such sleights-of-hand are called “spoilers”, not the least because they’re going to ruin someone’s day, possibly yours.

Meanwhile, Makoto Shinkai’s latest film Your Name (Kimi no Na wa…) just happens to have the same title in Japanese as a radio series that was a massive hit in the 1950s, and adapted for television in the 1960s and the 1990s. When the Japanese publicity kicks off, it’s going to trend through the roof on social media with three different generations of tweeters, all of them crossly telling each other that it’s nothing to do with the show they loved from their youth. Someone, somewhere in a Tokyo cocktail bar will be patting herself on the back about how high the title is trending, even though half of the hits will be noise.

Ah, I hear you say, there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Does it really matter how these people get the public talking about their movies? It matters to me, because in five years time when the perpetrators of these crimes are back selling soap powder or brushes, I’ll still be here, dealing with angry letters from people who’ve bought the wrong DVD, or who missed a cinema screening.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article first appeared in NEO #147, 2016.

Variety is the Spice…

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I’m taking the chance to publish the unexpurgated version of Mark Schilling’s interview with me for his piece last week in Variety. My comments were, naturally, reduced to a couple of soundbites, but I think some interesting things came up. Sometimes my brain doesn’t grind into action until it’s asked the right question, and some of my ideas here were straight off the cuff. The question was that old favourite, the “new Miyazaki” in the light of Michael Dudok de Wit’s forthcoming Red Turtle and Makoto Shinkai’s Your Name but as ever, I preferred to think of it not in terms of the creative abilities of modern animators, but of the ways in which the industry can find an equivalent revenue stream for the biggest money-spinner of the last generation.

Mark Schilling: In your view, has the torch truly been passed?

Jonathan Clements: No. There is no torch, at least not in the way that the public expects. Hayao Miyazaki wasn’t just a one-off, he was part of a trio. You can’t have the Miyazaki phenomenon without Isao Takahata and Toshio Suzuki as well. All three of them are retiring. Suzuki spent ten years not just looking for someone to take the torch, but examining the torch itself, trying to work out what parts of it could be replicated by other means. He concluded that there was no torch but the legacy of Ghibli itself, and that’s why the Ghibli Museum is so crucial to understanding the studio’s late period.

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Do you view Shinkai, de Wit and others as “Miyazaki heirs”?

Studio Ghibli spent a decade looking for some way of continuing Miyazaki’s momentum. Takahata couldn’t get the same numbers, although Suzuki did hope to hide that by releasing The Tale of the Princess Kaguya on the same bill as The Wind Rises. When Kaguya was delayed, its box office numbers made it very clear that Takahata didn’t have the following that Miyazaki had. None of the non-Hayao Miyazaki films from Ghibli have done Hayao Miyazaki numbers.

Toshio Suzuki tried everything in the noughties. He tried to lure big-name directors into Ghibli, but they didn’t gel with the studio. He tried to train up new apprentices, some of whom have gone on to make names for themselves elsewhere. But he couldn’t find a proper replacement for Miyazaki.

So Suzuki engineered Goro Miyazaki’s controversial directorial debut, and invited audiences to come and see the car-crash. That lured Miyazaki himself back for Ponyo. That’s where they started the “We Made This” alphabetical credit listings, which conveniently obscured the fact that Miyazaki didn’t actually direct Arrietty! He engineered the father-son team-up on Poppy Hill, and got audiences to see that. Then he lured Miyazaki back for absolutely anything he wanted, no matter how controversial, so he could go out with The Wind Rises. He’s played Miyazaki (and the public) like a fiddle! He’s managed to stretch the heritage of Ghibli since 2006 with only two genuine Hayao Miyazaki movies. But after The Wind Rises, it really is over. Ghibli has to admit it’s got no more features in it that are going to trounce the next five rivals at the Japanese box office. It’s a brutal, accountants’ decision, but it’s based on firm evidence from the last decade that not even the Ghibli name on a film will guarantee that it will match the success of a Hayao Miyazaki film.

Laputa_Robot_on_Roof_of_Museum_-_CopyBut that’s not good enough for distributors, and it’s not good enough for exhibitors. Cinemas are fixed sites, they need more product. July is going to happen whether or not the film studios have something suitable for a vacation tent-pole movie.

The Ghibli Museum turns over US$7.5 million a year, just on admissions. Throw in the restaurant and the gift shop, and the museum is making its owners a modest movie’s worth of revenue every year, just by managing Ghibli’s own legacy. It doesn’t need to make any more films – in fact, doing so would risk compromising the brand. It just needs to keep the conversation going. It needs people like us talking about it like it’s still there, so people remember they want to take their kids to see the giant fluffy Catbus.

So what does it mean when they say The Red Turtle is a coproduction? Is Ghibli just putting its name on it, like it did with the Japanese releases of Aardman films? I’m guessing that Ghibli is slightly more involved in investment than that, but not in actual animation. The Red Turtle will be imitation Ghibli, ‘inspired by Ghibli’, and it’s an experiment to see if a Ghibli imprimatur is enough to get a movie a healthy box office return; and if it doesn’t work, they’ve got plausible deniability to edge it out of the studio history. It’ll be a tenth of Miyazaki numbers, but it’ll keep that conversation going for another year. There will be a Red Turtle exhibition at the Ghibli Museum. Ghibli will keep trending. This is legacy management with very modest expectations. Everybody will be pleasantly surprised if The Red Turtle is a box office smash, but I don’t think anyone is expecting it.

This isn’t new. We’ve seen a lot of this lately, where studios will rent out their IP to someone else and take 5% off the top. A Nigerian Astro Boy? An Indian Star of the Giants? A Wachowski Speed Racer? Ghibli has shut down its feature production arm, but what the hell, if someone else wants to take the risk, Ghibli will put in 5% of the effort for 5% of the returns. This is anime Moneyball.

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Is there a “Miyazaki tradition” being passed on, even though Ghibli is not making features with its own directors?

That’s the conversation Ghibli wants us to keep having. Come and see this movie, to see if the director is The One! Will he save us? Is he the anime messiah? Or are we stuck hereafter with otaku-bait that can’t fill a single cinema for more than a couple of weeks?

That’s why Toei’s risk with Shinkai is so interesting. Shinkai has no trouble pulling in audiences on the small circuit. A Shinkai movie is usually a much more bespoke event. He makes a lot of personal appearances when his films go on tour, so it’s not just a trip to the cinema, it’s a trip to the cinema to see the director and get him to sign the DVD.

“Events” are a small but growing part of the Japanese cinema model, because if you have a small otaku audience, then you want to make sure they spend triple the usual money on a trip to the cinema. It’s not just about popcorn, it’s about T-shirts and phone cases, and often the limited edition Blu-ray. You limit and target the availability of the merchandise, and you make sure that you provide an experience which can’t be pirated. People are ripping off the software all the time, but Shinkai’s not going to sign a pirate copy, not of his movie nor the novel spin-off. He’s not going to shake your hand while you’re downloading the torrent.

“Events” at the moment are worth less than 5% of Toei’s revenue, but that’s a huge increase on just five years ago. It’s taking Japanese cinema back a hundred years to the days of the benshi and a cinema experience as a form of live vaudeville. But Kimi no Na Wa is different because it’s being touted, as you say, as a summer tent-pole movie. Shinkai can’t go to every screening; they can’t spread him that thinly. They’ll do some glad-handing for the hard-core fans at the premiere events, and hope that there’s enough momentum to keep it going with the general public. Watch the marketing on Kimi no Na wa, because I bet Toei goes all-out on interactivity. I bet they steal an idea from Mai Mai Miracle and try to engage the consumers with lobby exhibits. I bet they come up with a hashtag on social media and try and drag everybody into it. They are going to have to do this, because most of the users are going to have to bring their own event.

Look at the title, for God’s sake! They’ve called it Kimi no Na wa because I bet you half the general public will think it’s a remake. There was a radio series of the same name in the 1950s, adapted for TV in the 1960s, and again in the 1990s. Half the eyeballs for this movie’s advertising will only look because they think it’s something else. Much of the social media trending for this film will be people telling their confused friends that it’s not what they think it is. That’s some smart mockbuster marketing to get their attention. Then the pressure’s on Shinkai to keep it.

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Or is the Miyazaki legacy (including his box office supremacy) in danger from not only Hollywood hits like Frozen, but also domestic trends?

I think everyone would love it if there were a domestic trend that could compete with Miyazaki’s numbers. I don’t think there is. Everyone has to dial down their expectations to a level where domestic anime earn the kind of money they did in the 1980s, not the 2000s (or rather, the kind of money that people have earned all the way through if they are not Hayao Miyazaki). That’s the problem with movie punditry. Everybody wants to talk about the outliers. The successes are outliers! Miyazaki was an outlier. The general trend is much more modest in terms of returns, and Miyazaki’s success has hidden that for a generation.

Frozen is a red herring – Disney cartoons have always outperformed domestic product at the Japanese box office, with the exception of Miyazaki movies. A much more long-term issue is CG, because the stats for CG make it abundantly obvious that Japanese movies are getting their ass kicked by computer animation. Japanese movies are still struggling to compete with CG, because even when they get a hit like Stand By Me Doraemon, it’s not exportable like a Miyazaki movie. Nobody wants it abroad because nobody knows what Doraemon is; part of the film’s domestic success was because of the blue-chip marketability of the Doraemon brand, which still doesn’t travel far outside Japan.

Of course, it does export to China, but what happened there? Stand By Me Doraemon wasn’t in the 34 movie quota for foreign movies in Chinese cinemas. The Japanese had to sell it for a lump-sum and take no further profits. That’s not growing a business, that’s treading water and hoping that something will happen.

China’s the elephant in the room in all of this, because it’s the largest possible new market for Japanese animation, but Japanese animation is made to feel very unwelcome in formal distribution channels. It’s censored, it’s banned, it’s shut out of theatre exhibition. There are only two brands that get any love in China: Studio Ghibli and Makoto Shinkai…

Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History.

Faking It

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mcm imageCosplay was not the centre of attention for once at the recent MCM Expo in London, when the copyright licensors of Tokyo Ghoul and Attack on Titan toured the dealers’ room in a carnival of garbage collection, rooting out and confiscating an estimated £20,000 worth of unlicensed merchandise. The unexpected entourage included reps from a Japanese company, the UK’s Anime Limited, a lawyer with a Powers of Attorney notice, and a trio of minions to cart away the swag. By the time the sweep was over, several dealers were shown the door with the full approval of MCM’s management, and the enforcers actually ran out of bin bags, leading to the delicious irony of a bootleg Tokyo Ghoul carry-all being commandeered to lug illegal Tokyo Ghoul merchandise

Gone are the days when some guy from Hong Kong could set up stall in a Birmingham hotel and flog a few lopsided Totoro knock-offs to fans on their way to the masquerade. In the last decade, industry and fandom have increasingly met each other halfway; MCM has become a prime retail location for copyright holders to sell direct to their punters, and to demand the right to do so without facing illegal competition. Meanwhile, such massive consumer events rely upon the continued cooperation of the anime business for guests, exclusives and the purchase of retail space. If you’re looking for pirate goods, MCM is definitely and officially the wrong place

“The first time we found someone [selling such items],” said Anime Limited’s Andrew Partridge, “I wondered if they knew what they were doing. By the time we took action I was sure of why and realised how much they made off selling products that hadn’t even been on the same island as the original creators, ever!” Notably, however, the legal powers invoked in this case only applies to two licences. There is plenty of scope for future clampdowns, although hopefully the dealers have already got the message

An assistant from one of the knock-off dealers, who asked not to be named, said that he appreciated the issues involved, although he considered the public shame of bin-bagging in full view to have been “a bit heavy-handed.” He noted that an equally pressing issue at some events has often been the unlicensed use of fan art on some dealers’ merchandise, and he hoped that the authorities would soon be policing that, too. But where will the small-time fan artists get their legal muscle….?

Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article first appeared in NEO #145, 2015.

Losing My Voice

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217685It’s been 20 years since my first voice-acting job. I was playing V-Daan in KO Century Beast Warriors, and I was going for the growly, shouty, gravelly bad-guy routine. It sounded pretty awesome, if I say so myself, although by the second day my throat was getting a bit tickly. More experienced actors plied me with honey and cough sweets, and warned me off the coffee, but the damage was already done. By the third and final day of recording, I was struggling to maintain the pace. The next day, I realised that I had lost my voice. Totally.

Pretty much nobody cared. Possibly my family and friends even enjoyed such a brief respite. Luckily for me, I didn’t rely on my voice for my entire livelihood. I wasn’t doing an audio book recording the following day, or an advertising voice-over. If I had been, I would have lost the work.

Jessica Calvello wasn’t so lucky. She was the original voice of Excel in ADV’s Excel Saga dub, who screeched and screamed so much that she had to rest her voice for up to six weeks between recordings. She ended up losing the gig entirely in 2002, and was replaced by another actress mid-run. Like a dancer who sprains her ankle, or a stuntman who brains himself on a pylon, she had somehow forced herself out of the workplace, simply by trying to do a good job in it.

I bring this up now because of the dire forebodings issuing from America’s actors’ union SAG-AFTRA, which is threatening industrial action over working conditions for voice actors. Their particular bugbear is computer gaming, where actors rarely benefit in residuals even from a million-selling property, and where conditions are tough enough to recall my V-Daan incident. Meanwhile, the gaming companies recently put their foot in it by trying to introduce a bunch of draconian terms, including fines for actors who somehow aren’t up to scratch, and a clause that permits them to not hire union labour at all. SAG-AFTRA is seeking an agreement on working conditions that will force directors to limit the daily hours of voice-actors to preserve their vocal chords, and remunerate them suitably. They have also been pushing for some interesting extras, such as stunt coordinators for motion-capture work, in order to stop some low-ranking thespian on McDonald’s money from breaking his arm while running away from an invisible monster.

I suspect that, as is traditional when American lawyers get involved, both sides are throwing in everything but the kitchen sink, in order to have bargaining chips they can afford to discard later on. Ironically, much anime voice-work is non-union, so SAG-AFTRA’s latest campaign would have done very little to benefit me or Calvello in our salad days. But you never know – demands forced on the gaming industry and mainstream movies might trickle down. It’s nice that someone is speaking up for those who don’t have a voice.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article first appeared in NEO #144, 2015.

Manga & Anime Go To Hollywood

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51qMWVRg1SL._SX348_BO1,204,203,200_Up now on the All the Anime blog, my review of Northrop Davis’ new book Manga & Anime Go To Hollywood, which was something of a disappointment from an academic press. Where were the peer-reviewers?

“There are a lot of quotes from contemporary internet reportage but far too much of the book simply rehashes earlier publications, pouring in excerpts from works that any serious researcher will already own.”

Christmas Movies: Tokyo Godfathers

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Tokyo-GodfathersThree tramps, alcoholic Gin, transvestite Hana and teen runaway Miyuki, find an abandoned baby while searching through the trash on Christmas Eve. They decide to return it to its mother, only to plunge into a whirl of scandal, kidnapping and attempted murder, all on the one day when Tokyo is supposed to be quiet.

Tokyo Godfathers may have three wise men (one and half of whom are actually female), but its nativity story is not limited to Christian lore, and displays a typically Japanese attitude towards death. A cemetery becomes a treasure trove as the tramps search for votive offerings of sake, and the film’s stand-in for Santa Claus, white beard and all, can only perform his task properly if he dies doing it. The movie alludes to Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, which similarly features old men bickering over a foundling child in a storm, via John Ford’s 1948 Western 3 Godfathers, but at its heart is a search for kindness and warmth in materialist Japan.

Like Perfect Blue before it, Tokyo Godfathers initially seems like a strange choice for animation. With so many real-world locations, why not film it with real people? But nobody in the metropolitan government was going to approve a live-action film depicting a shanty town in the shadow of Tokyo’s distinctive twin-tower tax office, nor were too many of today’s TV idols likely to sign up for a tale of grunge and poverty; however happy the ending, they might have mussed their hair. The clincher would have been the snow. It is popularly believed that it only falls in Tokyo once every ten years – the presence of snow in Tokyo Godfathers being the first of its many Christmas miracles.

The baby’s arrival sends the tramps scurrying to buy water instead of booze at their local convenience store, much to the shop assistant’s surprise. Hana jokes in the soup queue that she is “eating for two”, only to shock the charity worker the following day when she does indeed turn up with a babe in arms. In its comedy and sentimentality, Tokyo Godfathers is the closest thing we’ll see to an anime pantomime, an end-of-year revel that turns everything on its head. It even features stars having a laugh at being cast against type, such as Koichi Yamadera (Cowboy Bebop’s Spike Spiegel), who has a brief cameo as a harassed taxi driver. The movie finds divine inspiration in everyday events, such as a wounded tramp seeing an angel, who turns out to be a bar-girl in fancy dress.

Satoshi Kon’s choice of subject matter is an act of faith in itself – framing the relentless hope and happiness of a Christmas comedy in the stark, realist tones of his other work. Gin walked out on his family over unpaid gambling debts. Hana lost her surrogate family of fellow drag artists after punching out an unappreciative listener to one of her songs. And Miyuki ran away from home over a misunderstanding with her father. Throw in a gangland wedding, a suicidal wife in the middle of a collapsing marriage, and a cross-dressing Filipino assassin, and the result is a seemingly impossible knot of problems to sort out before dawn.

Tokyo Godfathers performed poorly on British DVD, despite higher production values and even more fiendish twists than Kon’s better-known Perfect Blue. In a world where every December sees a rash of cynical, focus-grouped, predictable Christmas specials, Tokyo Godfathers urges its audience to see miracles on every street corner, and it’s good to know that there is a movie with a genuine heart. Since it’s the season to be jolly, why not give Tokyo Godfathers a try? But just remember, anime isn’t just for Christmas, it’s for life.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article first appeared in NEO #14, 2005.

Death By Committee

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sword-art-online-oculus-rift-virtual-realityJust for a day I would like to live my life like an anime production committee member. I shall tell the postman that I don’t approve of the way he opened the gate. I shall refuse to pay for a CD in a shop until the owner guarantees that he will end piracy on the internet. And I shall change my mind about the food I want to order in a restaurant, but only after I have already eaten it.

Such ideas are brought on by the revelation in a Manga UK podcast that the Sword Art Online DVD cover design has to change mid-series, because the Japanese licensors at Aniplex didn’t like the version that had gone out with the first disc – a version that they themselves had already approved. So Manga Entertainment is now left in the bizarre situation of having to change subsequent printings, leaving fans of the show with mismatched covers.

Collectors, if such creatures still exist, will be ecstatic to know that the art on the first pressing of SAO is never to be repeated. Fans who just want matching spines now face the prospect of having to contact Manga Entertainment at some future date to get replacements sent to them, which someone will have to pay for. Unless, that is, the SAO committee has another brainfart and changes its mind again.

Committees are supposed to make life easier. They are supposed to manage the franchises for everybody’s benefit. Since the 1970s, they have functioned as the executive bodies of intellectual property managing its hopefully long afterlife once it’s finished on Japanese telly.

One wonders about the make-up of the average committee. I like to think of a few disinterested lawyers, someone’s well-meaning widow, and the producer’s ex-girlfriend. One almost wishes for the devil-may-care days of the 1980s, when the Japanese didn’t really give a toss what happened to their material abroad. Now, can it be that they care too much? How many cooks are fussing over this particular broth for them to actually reverse their previous decision? At one point, one wonders, can someone stand up on the committee and recommend that their fellow members get a clue? If they can’t get their own product right, what are they for?

Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article first appeared in NEO #122, 2014.

Your Country Needs Geeks Like You

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ob2Just when life looks grim for slacker Shinichi Kano, he discovers that his love of anime, manga and games is a fast-track to a new career. Earth has opened a magic portal to a parallel universe, and now it needs cultural ambassadors to jump into a fantasy world and sell the locals… stuff! Walkmans and iPads, Nintendo consoles and cartoon serials about demon warriors, anything they will buy.

Shinichi is packed off to the magical Eldant Empire. Imagine some hipster salesman wandering around the set of Game of Thrones, trying to interest Queen Cersei in Viagra, and offering Tywin Lannister a better lock for his toilet door. But it’s a dream come true for the average sci-fi nerd, dropping in on a world of slave-girls and stirring swordplay, but still being able to pop home.

The anime series Outbreak Company beautifully captures a very modern sensibility. Look around any classroom of bleary-eyed teenagers, and you will see a bunch of kids who, only the night before, were leading armies of orcs, rescuing kidnapped princesses, and slaughtering legions of zombies… in their bedrooms. Fantasy worlds have made increasing demands on our time, sneaking out of books and films and into our daily lives, our games consoles, conversations and even our phones. And there is, indeed, money to be made. As the spoof advert that begins Outbreak Company makes clear, there is a chance, however slim, that geekish interests can actually turn into a geekish career.

This is only partly true. Take anime itself, for example, where the creation of such shows is a notorious grind, underpaid and unappreciated, and where hard-core fans are given short shrift by producers whose eyes are always on the bottom line.

But Outbreak Company is also a playful retelling of Japan’s own desperate desire to sell its culture to other countries. In the middle of a recession in 2005, the prime minister Taro Aso began a long-term effort to push “Cool Japan” abroad, and to recognise Japanese films, books and games as major exports. You’ve got it; you sell it; you’ve still got it! Some of these initiatives have spearheaded Japanese culture into foreign territories, and, presumably, inspired Ichiro Sakaki to write the seven-volume book series on which this anime is based.

So although your average Japanese salaryman hasn’t quite met a half-elf maid like the anime’s Myucel, or introduced someone like child-queen Petralka III to Japanese comics, they’ve probably done something very similar when trying to push sushi in Sao Paulo, and noodles in Neasden. There is a sense that when Shinichi arrives in this fantasy realm of dragons and accordions, he is like a Japanese tourist staring goggle-eyed at the weirdness of the mysterious West. Nor does Outbreak Company shy away from the fact that much of Shinichi’s sales pitch is offloading a load of junk – the anime equivalent of selling mirrors and beads to clueless natives.

The people of Earth are also busily interfering in the politics of Eldant, from do-gooders trying to bring an end to slavery to military personnel with secret agendas. What starts out as a celebration of fan culture and good-natured bridge-building soon takes a darker turn, as Shinichi is confronted with the economic side-effects of colonialism, and the prospect that cultures can exchange the bad along with the good. His trips to Eldant broaden his mind as he encounters a different way of life, but also leads him to appreciate the world he has left behind.

Commendably, Outbreak Company is not one long allegory for gap-year tourism. Instead, it starts off funny and satirical, and becomes increasingly wary of motivations for such initiatives. As well it might – only last year, the Chinese press in the real world accused the Japanese of trying to win them over by getting them to love the fluffy blue robot cat Doraemon. With ever louder sabre rattling in the South China Seas, some Chinese pundits began complaining that Japanese “soft power” – manga, anime, and games – was functioning as a form of insidious propaganda, and concealing their plans for world domination. Now, there’s an idea for an anime series.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Modern Japan: All That Matters. This article first appeared in Geeky Monkey #2, 2015.