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.

“The problem with Taisho-era Tokyo is that almost all of it was wiped out by the fire-bombings of the Second World War. Director Kiyoshi Saeki is forced to keep his camerawork close on street scenes and most exteriors, because a wide-shot of 1920s Tokyo, filmed in 1968, would have been an impossibility before the rise of digital effects. Only the temples remain constant, existing in a time warp unchanged for centuries, allowing the camera to linger on monastic scenes in a way it cannot do with the urban.

“The production team seize upon a fact that is often true the world over – that traditional events, like funerals, and traditional uniforms, like the Salvation Army, are much slower to change than other elements of society. Imagery of the Taisho era is instead telegraphed through the costuming, such as the plaid trousers and straw boater worn by Kentaro , the must-have fashion accessories of early twentieth-century Japan.”

From my video essay in Arrow’s forthcoming Blu-ray box set of the Wicked Priest films, starring Tomisaburo Wakayama.

Sori’s idea was to treat Ping Pong like a science fiction project or a fantasy movie – to get all the mundane stuff in the camera, and then treat it afterwards to add the special magic, which in this case, was the ball. By his estimation, 90% of the balls in the table-tennis scenes were animated effects, storyboarded by Sori’s long-time collaborator Shinji Aramaki, with whom he would later make Appleseed (2004).

“Actually,” he noted, “a quarter of the entire film, or about 300 shots, were processed with CG.”

In order to ensure that the actors were physically matched with the way real table tennis players would move, Sori drafted Yoshihiro Hiraoka, the coach for the Meiji University table tennis club, to give the cast a crash-course. Players from the real-life club can be glimpsed among the background players, while Hiraoka himself was cast as the coach from Kaio Academy.

“The actors were completely choreographed, or rather, they were practicing their swings. But in the end, they trained for about two months,” said Sori. “After that, they were all young, so they got really good, and they could really hit the ball. But in this production, the setting was super-players, so we added the CG ball later. In the end, that was just an added bonus; the power and beauty of the swings were everything.”

The concentration on interaction with an invisible object proved to be an exciting discipline for the actors, returning them to a stripped-down form of theatre, like stage performers swaying with the motion of an imaginary boat, or mimes negotiating an invisible obstacle.

“We were filming without the ball in sight,” said Sori, “but at that point, the image was almost close to the finished product. I’m not exaggerating; the actors themselves said, ‘When I’m practising, I can see the ball.’ ‘I can tell the ball is there.’ And the cameraman was also following the ball, which he couldn’t see, so it’s amazing.”

From my sleeve notes to the upcoming 88 Films Blu-ray release of Fumihiko Sori’s Ping Pong (2002).

“The backers were all expecting Totoro to be a flop. I mean, who cares about a movie where nothing happens in the countryside, right? Suzuki came up with the idea of shoring up Miyazaki’s mad pastoral project by running it on a double bill with something that the schools would have to block-book as ‘educational.'”

Over at Animation World Network, Andrew Osmond interviews me about my book Japan’s Anime Revolution.

“Japan’s Anime Revolution is a greatly enjoyable, informative read, even on films you thought you knew back to front. Hey, Pokémon fans! Did you know Mewtwo’s Japanese voice actor, Masachika Ichimura, was picked for that role because he’d played the masked hero in the stage musical of The Phantom of the Opera?”

Over at Anime News Network, Andrew Osmond posts a long and gritty review of my book, Japan’s Anime Revolution.

“Fujisawa drifted into industrial journalism, working for a while as a reporter for that scandal-ridden gossip rag, the Japan Food Processing Newspaper. His area of specialty was ham and sausages, and even as editor-in-chief, he wrote a column called ‘Sweet & Spicy’, which frequently called out declining food safety standards.

“Widowed at 36, he moved back in with his ailing mother, and cared for her while trying to raise his daughter. Eight years later, he married his second wife, who took over the household chores and bought him vital time to write fiction. He began winning literary prizes in 1971, and in 1974 quit the turbid world of food processing newsletters to become a full-time novelist.

“‘When I reread my novels from that time,’ he wrote, ‘many of them are so dark that I feel a little pain. Love between men and women ends in separation, and stories end with the death of samurai. I couldn’t write happy endings.'”

Over at Media OCD, I commence my new column by relating samurai to sausages.