“Although Ichikohji relentlessly focusses on the big picture, his narrative implies the existence of actual personalities who must have had some blistering complaints to voice. He alludes, for example, to the difficulties of implementing software updates when a company is trying to work 24-hour days on two simultaneous productions, which made me feel for Toei’s anonymous I.T. managers.”
Over at All the Anime, I review Takeyasu Ichikohji’s new book A Development Strategy for Hybrid Products: The Case of the Japanese Animation Industry.
Kiyoshi Kobayashi, who died of pneumonia [in July], hated the term “voice actor.” He found it to be belittling and reductive, and insisted on describing himself on documentation and contracts as a plain actor. Despite this, a huge amount of his work was narration or dubbing, and he actively shunned the limelight, claiming that it was detrimental to his performances if people formed an image in their minds of the man who played them.
He started off in theatre, drifting into radio and television in the 1950s after he was approached to perform in an adaptation of The Caine Mutiny. A key player in the Izumiza theatre company, he devoted himself to television when the company folded in 1971.
His early roles included parts in Star of the Giants and Yokai Ningen Bem in the 1960s, but his true heyday was in the 1970s, when he began playing the sharpshooter Daisuke Jigen in the Lupin III series.
“I didn’t think it would become such a popular work,” he once said of Lupin III. “I thought at the start it would be just another job. But I was soon saying, I want to do this as much as possible.”
In fact, he would keep doing it for the rest of his life, remaining in the role of Daisuke Jigen throughout the TV series, films and TV specials. In 2011, when the decision was made to retire the original cast in favour of new blood, Kobayashi expected to be given his marching orders, but was kept on, being told that they couldn’t find anyone to replace him. He did not actually retire as Jigen until 2021, after over fifty years of service.
Jigen, of course, was not his only role. He appeared in many other anime, including stand-out performances in Space Adventure Cobra (Crystal Bowie), Death Note (Watari), and the Japanese dub of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Splinter). But his true metier was live-action dubbing, in which he became the go-to guy for voicing Japanese versions of Lee Marvin and James Coburn and even, after the death of his Lupin co-star Yasuo Yamada, Clint Eastwood. If producers needed someone whose voice could send a shiver down the audience’s spine, be it Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon, or Edward Teague (Keith Richards) in Pirates of the Caribbean, they made sure to make Kobayashi their first call.
When asked what his secret was with Jigen, he once confessed that it was the only role he ever played where he had never bothered to “act” at all. In everyday life, he said, “If I speak, it’s Jigen.”
Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article first appeared in NEO #223, 2022.
“Unlike the protagonist of Kyoto Stories, I was never invited as a bonus extra to a wife swappers’ party. Nobody quizzed me about the size of my genitals. I was never offered a bit-part in a B-movie where I had to dress up as a brothel-creeping American GI. At no point, in my teaching career, was I ushered into a room with two gangsters, and ordered to take them from zero to fluency in two months, or else.”
Over at All the Anime, I review ex-Ghibli employee Steve Alpert’s Kyoto Stories, a gleefully unreliable memoir about someone‘s student days.
Tune in for me, as festival jury chairman, with Anime Limited’s Andy Hanley and this year’s guest curator Kambole Campbell, as we discuss the films at this year’s Scotland Loves Anime: Blue Thermal, Goodbye Don Glees, Tunnel to Summer Exit of Goodbyes and Break of Dawn. Spoilers galore, out of necessity.
The architectural movement I mention is the Metabolists.
“The band’s first performance is sure to put goose-bumps on the skin of Japanese (and British) viewers of a certain age. For old-timers like me, and anyone else who saw the NHK TV show Monkey on BBC re-runs or Blu-ray in the years since, the opening bars of Godiego’s ‘Gandhara’ are unmistakeable, along with its doleful yearning for an unattainable utopia, tying it directly to the concerns of the film.”
Over at All the Anime, I write up Mari Okada’s Her Blue Sky.
Several months ago, Motoko Tamamuro and I embarked on a massive multi-volume translation project for a couple of intriguing manga serials. The first volume of the first of those is out now. Atom is written by Masami Yuuki and drawn by Tetsuro Kasahara, and is a prequel to Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy, reimagining the older characters from that classic show back in their college days.
One of the unexpected holdovers from the COVID era has been an increased willingness to pre-record interviews to run after the films at Scotland Loves Anime. So instead of lurking in the wings, or sitting through something I’ve already seen at least twice, or standing alone on a stage and desperately filling for five minutes while the staff drag someone out of the scarf shop (naming no names), I can introduce a film and then go home, secure in the knowledge that I will be popping up onscreen when it’s over and chatting to the director.
This, however, has created a whole load of new requirements – my home studio now boasts a camera that go up to 4K footage, lavalier microphones, a Noco jump starter that doubles as an independent power source, and a family used to me shouting “Everybody shut up for an hour. Mamoru Hosoda is back to talk about Paw Patrol.”
Back in the National Geographic days, I had a whole bunch of staff to faff with things like lights, lenses and sound. In the impoverished world of anime extra-filming, though, it’s just me, and a bunch of sarcy comments on Twitter about the state of my office bookshelves.
Believe it or not, Fukushima, home of that malfunctioning nuclear reactor we all try to forget about, really does have a holiday location called Spa Resort Hawaiians, where along with all the golf and swimming, visitors get to watch Hawaiian dance shows.
Over at All the Anime, I write up Hula Fulla Dance, in competition at this year’s Scotland Loves Anime.
To Ghent, Belgium where conceptual artist and provocateur Ilan Manouach has thrown the cat among the pigeons with a new artwork that reprints 21,450 pages of Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece manga as a single, unreadable book in a slipcase, with the word “D’oh!” prominent in Japanese on its end.
“Online participatory culture and the medium’s new networked possibilities have intensified the nature of comics beyond the scope of professional, established expertise with new and disruptive forms of entrepreneurial fan culture,” writes Manouach on his website. “Readers now actively scan, translate and distribute online their favourite manga series. ONEPIECE is a product of this expanded digital production belt.”
I think what he means to say is that his artwork has been made in reference to the glorious world of scanlation, but if that’s his intention, he is walking right into a copyright minefield. Japanese publishers are unsurprisingly unsupportive of scanlations, since they amount to copyright theft. Nor can Manouach trot out the facetious old saw about “exposure”, because the worldwide bestseller One Piece does not require his help in finding readers.
In a thorny legal area, he implies that his artwork is safe because it is unreadable, and therefore not infringing anyone’s copyright. Except nothing has stopped manga publishers selling “unreadable” books before (don’t get me started…!), and Manouach is offering copies of his supposedly unreadable book for €1900 a throw, in a very limited print run of 50.
“The product you mentioned is not official,” said Keita Murano of the rights department at Shueisha, One Piece‘s publisher. “We don’t give permission to them.” Or in other words, if Manouach expects to coin in €95,000 from selling an unlicensed edition of One Piece, unreadable or not, Shueisha is going to come down on him like a manga hammer.
As a work of art, ONEPIECE is fantastically thought-provoking – a material evocation of what it means today for a single “story” to run on into multiple volumes, which either clutter up one’s bookshelves or sit, unnoticed on e-readers. Manouach, who recently earned a PhD in comics epistemology from Aalto University in Finland, adds it to a list of similar intellectual stunts, including his Topovoros books, which are designed, printed, bound and distributed exclusively within a single district of Athens, and Tintin akei Congo, an edition of Tintin in the Congo translated with anti-colonial verve into the Congolese language. You have not heard the last from him, I guarantee it, but he has not heard the last from Shueisha.
The Official Schoolgirl Milky Crisis Blog 