Nothing quite sums up the tone of Ango Sakaguchi’s 1946 short story as this surreal opening, in which idle, listless losers live in blank, carefree existences amid the destruction of their nation. Sporting the Vidal Sassoon haircut first popularised by Mary Quant in the 1960s, preening models cavort in the wreckage, while the traumatised victims of war stare blankly at them, still in monochrome, as if the past is watching the future.

We are in a world where the Second World War never stopped, where Japan somehow barrelled along, until the saccharine media performances of 1980s J-pop end up co-opted into national propaganda. We see cutaways to soldiers on the frontline; our starlet appropriates Siamese costume for her big number – this is a Japan where the Empire endures, and where the media pump out dross about how “Love’s Power Will Crush My Enemies.” The inanities of pop songs are here repurposed, as they once were in the 1930s and 1940s, as unsubtle allegories for military efforts.

Initially staying out of the family business, the young Macoto Tezka chose to study film, one of many young wannabes working with 8mm and video, but inevitably one who could call upon his father’s monstrously powerful contacts in the business. He directed his first feature, Legend of the Stardust Brothers, when he was still a student, and went on to work in a dozen different media enterprises. His resumé includes not only directing, but novels, a computer game, theatrical events and even the opening ceremony of the 2001 East Asia Games.

His career has always had a strange, double-sided nature, in which Tezka often appears to be a fiercely original, low-budget independent film maker, and yet also serves on the board of the family business, Tezuka Productions, which remains a powerful presence in the Japanese media and a ready source of support. It gives much of his work a bizarre, metatextual shimmer, as if an indie director finds a magical address book that allows him to speed-dial anyone and everyone to call in favours. In particular, Tezka developed a habit of sneaking celebrity associates into his films as extras, such as a party scene in Hakuchi where the guests include the actor-photographer Masatoshi Nagase, the writer-director Kaizo Hayashi, and the writer-musician Sunplaza Nakano.

But there is also a degree of self-figuration here. Tezka’s own biography fixates on an 8mm film he made at college, which for him might well have been the one moment that he got to be himself in his early twenties, before he was dragged into a vortex of family legacy management and years of bill-paying jobs in advertising.

The casual viewer might be forgiven for thinking that Tezka was making two films at once, and considering Hakuchi’s long gestation period and running time, that may well have been what happened. A straightforward, narrative reading of Sakaguchi’s story is interwoven with a sci-fi media satire in the same vein as Tezka’s Legend of the Stardust Brothers, and the only real point of contact is that the protagonist in the original story also worked for a state media outlet. Tadanobu Asano, our supposed leading man, disappears for minutes at a time, while Tezka populates the film with towering models from his advertising contacts, comedy business from Japanese bit-players, and a lavish Busby Berkley-inspired that frames the star of the moment as a Thai goddess, surrounded by flying apsaras and dancers on giant prayer wheels.

We are asked a question common to many historical periods. It’s asked by Aaron Sorkin in Studio 60. It was asked by Japanese intellectuals during the war. And it is asked today, whenever you are hearing me say this. What use is art, at a time like this?

From my video essay on the Bu-ray of Macoto Tezka’s Hakuchi: The Innocent, coming in January 2027 from Toy Robot.

And off I go to Glasgow to introduce the films in the first leg of this year’s Scotland Loves Anime festival, which features post-apocalyptic lesbian vampires, a samurai ballerina, a loveable Italian stalker, doomed teenage nurses, talking swamp-gas, a condemned fireworks factory (what could possibly go wrong…?), Rashomon with school kids (although the director says it’s not Rashomon) and a welcome return from everybody’s favourite toxic-blooded lady ninja.

And that’s just the staff. What’s it really like? It’s sort of like this:

Producer Haruki Kadokawa also sneaked on-screen in his own film, playing a detective. In his memoir, My Struggle (2005) the flamboyant media mogul describes how as a twenty-something nepo-baby, handed the reins of his father’s publishing company, he decided to revive the fortunes of an obscure novelist whose works were falling out of print. Seishi Yokomizo, for it was he, had supposedly become so obscure that Kadokawa himself wrongly believed him to be dead, and was surprised when the novelist, very much alive, answered his own doorbell.

At the turn of the 1970s, Kadokawa began to create a Seishi Yokomizo brand, repackaging his novels for teenage readers. In Japanese, this involved stripping out some of the more complex characters, and adding furigana pronunciation guides, transforming them from 1950s throwbacks to what today might be more akin to “light novels.” This careful redaction took the Yokomizo detective novels out of the dusty stacks in libraries, and back in bookshops all over Japan, targeting a new generation.

Kadokawa was a firm proponent of what is now called the “media mix” – a synergy of multiple media in which each format became an advertisement for the other. His first Yokomizo reprint was The Village of Eight Graves (originally serialised 1949-51), not because it was the best, but because Shonen Magazine was running a manga adaptation by Go Nagai.

“Comics,” wrote Kadokawa sagely, “tend to be ahead of their time.” If the teens were devouring Yokomizo-based manga, he reasoned, then the time was right for a revival of the books. Kadokawa makes no mention of what was surely another huge influence on his decision – the high ratings for an American show about a similarly scruffy sleuth, Columbo (1968), which began running on Japanese television in 1972.

From my sleeve notes to the new Blu-ray box set of Kon Ichikawa’s Inugami films, coming soon in Australia from Umbrella Entertainment.

Outside the Brixton auditorium, I shuffled my papers and checked my notes. Only a few minutes to go, and we could go in and get on with the event. I had been dreading it all week, but the crowd seemed to have the right mix. A few kids, a few fans, a few Japanese people; I hoped they’d get along and not throw things. One drifted nearer, and I realised she was going to ask me something. That’s what you get for being tall and holding a clipboard in public places.

“What’s the movie again?” she asked.

“Er… It’s called Tomorrow’s Joe,” I said.

“Not Akira then?” she pressed.

“Er… no,” I said. “Not Akira.”

“I was hoping for Akira,” she added, helpfully.

As best as one can in a crowded cinema, I tried to explain that no matter how much she pouted, Akira was not on the menu this morning. Instead, the cinema was going to be screening Tomorrow’s Joe, the most famous anime based on the most famous manga by Tetsuya Chiba.

“Never heard of him,” she said. “Is he famous?”

“Yes! He’s famous!” I said. “He drew Tomorrow’s Joe! It’s been one of the top ten manga in Japan for the last thirty years, and we’re talking about a story that finished before you were born.”

“Oooh!” she breathed. “That sounds impressive. Is there a lot of fighting in it?”

“It ends with a fifteen-round boxing match,” I replied.

She curled one side of her lip and thought for a moment.

“Doesn’t sound violent enough for me,” she said. With 20/20 hindsight, I wish, I so wish I had asked her what could possibly have sounded more violent than that.

“But,” I said, knowing I was going to regret it. “The reason this cinema is showing Tomorrow’s Joe today is that Tetsuya Chiba himself is here. He’s going to do a talk, and a live drawing demonstration, and answer questions from the audience and all that kind of stuff.”

“Meh,” she said. “Let us know if you show Akira again.” And with that she was off.

“What was that all about?” asked Tetsuya Chiba, who had been standing next to me all along, the conversation bellowing about him in super-fast English. An affable man, wearing a baseball cap over his white buzz-cut hair, he’d been studying the language for years, but nothing had quite prepared him for the staccato argot of South London. I thanked the Lord for small mercies.

“She was looking for a friend,” I said diplomatically.

“Was his name Akira?” he asked.

This article originally appeared in Newtype USA, #208, 2003. I reprint it here now with the real names restored.

If written ten years later, this might have become an isekai story with a lame title like I Drowned in Ancient Rome and Woke Up in Japan Where I Learned About Marketing. But the 2008 publication date for the first volume of the Thermae Romae manga kept it classily Latinate, infused with its creator Mari Yamazaki’s fascination with the classical world, and peppered with her hectoring rants about modern-day European hygiene. Its movie incarnation, in particular, emphasized the very personal nature of her storyline—despite being played for laughs, it is also the tale of a struggling manga artist who finds herself sharing her life with a man who knows a lot about the Roman Empire.

Although Yamazaki received a paltry million yen for the movie rights, a live-action film went into production starring heartthrob Hiroshi Abe as the manga’s Lucius Modestus. It turned out that some of the majestic sets built for the sadly truncated HBO series Rome (2005) were still standing, allowing the Japanese cast the chance to cavort around scenery that looked far more salubrious than one might expect for a low-budget movie.

Over at my “Behind the Screens” column at MediaOCD, I write up the time-travelling-Roman-bather tale Thermae Romae.

For decades, the samurai carved out new lands and fortunes for themselves on Japan’s northern frontier, fighting under a “commander in chief to suppress the barbarians” (Sei-i Tai Shōgun). Ultimately, these kings in the north became more powerful than the nobles that appointed them, and coveted a return to the peaceful capital, Kyoto.

In 1192, Minamoto no Yoritomo revived the title as a means of holding power in the Emperor’s name. In doing so, he initiated seven centuries of military government, relegating the Emperors to the sidelines. The height of Shōgunal power was the rule of the Tokugawa clan, which held an iron grip on Japan for two centuries, until it was brought crashing down by the Black Ships of the United States.

The Shōguns examines the rise and fall of Japan’s samurai warlords, and the many oddities among them. One was defeated by a mosquito bite; another valued dogs more than humans; still another kept busy with 900 concubines thanks to a cocktail of bizarre aphrodisiacs. All these, and more, appear in this illuminating chronicle of Japan’s true rulers.

• 1 Raising Tigers: The Wars with the Emishi
• 2 Anointed Through Victory: The Japanese Turn on Each Other
• 3 The Latter Days of the Law: The Rise of the Kamakura Bakufu (to 1199)
• 4 The Brood of the Nun Shogun: The Early Hojo Regency (to 1244)
• 5 A World Full of Rats: The Decline of the Kamakura Bakufu (to 1333)
• 6 Martial Establishment: The Kenmu Restoration (1333–1336)
• 7 Like Fire and Water: The Rise of the Ashikaga Shogunate (to 1449)
• 8 Warring States: The Decline of the Ashikaga Shogunate (to 1597)
• 9 Peace Prevails: The Early Tokugawa Shogunate (to 1651)
• 10 The Locked Country: Life in a Time Warp (to 1716)
• 11 Tidings from the West: Ships on the Horizon (to 1853)
• 12 The Meiji Restoration: The Last of the Shoguns (to 1868)
• 13 The Edo Inheritance

To my great surprise, the manga creator Junji Ito has shown up on YouTube shilling for the book I wrote about his anime series, The Art of Junji Ito Collection, which is coming out this week.

For a long time, it was believed that a folk tradition among Hokkaido’s indigenous Ainu people was some race-memory of a forgotten genocide. The belief that there were korpokkur “little people” whose unseen activities rustled the broad-leafed fuki plants (Japanese butterbur, a.k.a. sweet coltsfoot) were a kind of faery folk, hiding in the undergrowth from invaders who had displaced them.

Their effigies sit at the heart of Hakodate’s Museum of the Northern Peoples, seemingly grown to human size, but really shrinking the human visitor to their level, to consider just for a moment how the world might look to the very small, like The Borrowers.

But modern scholars have repeatedly changed their mind about the korpokkur. These days, it is widely believed that the korpokkur of Ainu mythology are an odd suppressed memories of the Ainu’s own past – a fairy tale told among modern Hokkaido city-dwellers about the people they used to be. Korpokkur legends thin out, the further north you go; they appear to have arisen as the Japanese infiltrated Hokkaido, and the Ainu began to associate themselves not with their old selves, the “people of the land” (yaunkur), but with the new arrivals, the “people of the sea” (repunkur).

Like all hauntings, they occasionally manifest in popular culture. Hokkaido gift shops are dripping with gnomish representations as dolls, fridge magnets and lucky gonks. In 1973, Sumitomo Life Insurance sponsored a 23-part anime series, Adventures of Korobokkle – when I put it on the slate for the Anime Encylopedia twenty years ago, I was not familiar with Ainu orthography, hence the misspelling, although the book does note that it seemed to prefigure a much more famous moment in Japanese animation.

Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbour Totoro is riddled with references to the forgotten beliefs of marginalised peoples. Like his later Princess Mononoke, it is seeped in alternate pathways in Japanese history. We see Jomon pottery scattered at the entrance to Totoro’s sacred tree, itself a relic of long-gone camphor forests. Jizo statues lurk discreetly in the background as Mei wanders the countryside, hinting that there is no danger, because this child is under divine protection. And when Totoro himself shows up at the iconic bus stop, he, too, carries the marks of ancient traditions, wearing a fuki leaf on his head.

It is a wonderful moment of artistic playfulness – the least convincing of all “little people”, like an elephant wearing a man-sized baseball cap. But that is Totoro all over: a symbol of ancient, numinous power, manifesting to the children as a fat, cuddly teddy bear, his ominous, fixed Cheshire Cat grin and his obvious claws only unsettling to adults.

“Only when you are a child,” says the theme song, “will he appear to you.”

Jonathan Clements is the author of Japan’s Anime Revolution: Twenty Animated Films That Changed the World.

Ever since I first visited Hakodate, gathering materials on its ill-fated Republic of Ezo, I have loved the city. It has a certain resemblance to my native Southend on Sea, but also a bunch of craziness. There’s the locals’ odd obsession with pretty-boy vigilante Toshizo Hijikata, shown on contemporary T-shirts fighting a giant squid for some reason, and celebrated in a blue-and-white slushy that imitates the colours of his lynch mob, the Shinsengumi.

There’s the town’s weird Foreigners’ Cemetery, with all the stories implicit in the headstones of sailors and entrepreneurs far from home at one of the first Treaty Ports, just up the hill from a Monument to Local Prostitutes. There’s the Old Town Hall, which inevitably comes scattered with Japanese women of a certain age, cosplaying as Victorian aristocrats. And as I discovered to my cost (about ten thousand yen), it now has a town tartan, registered with the Scottish Register of Tartans in 2024.

“This design is intended to reflect the city and its location including the ridgeline of Mt. Hakodate and the curves of the Port. Colours: red is intended to symbolise the red brick warehouses and the tram trains; dark blue for the Tsugaru Strait; light grey for the winter snow in the city and sepia for squid ink.”

“Officially, the film was shot entirely in Iran during the last years of the Shah, presenting a priceless time-capsule of everyday life before the 1979 revolution propelled the Ayatollah into power. Secretly, several pick-ups and interiors were actually filmed back in Japan, but the media printed the legend, possibly because admitting it might have triggered a breach of contract with the manga creator.”
Over at MediaOCD.com, I delve into the curious history of Golgo 13’s live-action mission to Iran.