“Now the monks working for Kashinkoji are specifically described as Negoro monks, who were a real-life group operating out of the Negoro temple in Kii province, who were famously and obviously much more military than they were monk-y. They were legendarily accomplished not only with muskets, but with gunsmithing, and archery, and would be a major playing pieces in the samurai battles of the 1570s and 1580s.

“After their temple was destroyed in 1585, some of them ended up fighting for other clients, most notably forming some of the best musketeer platoons in the army of Tokugawa Ieyasu. And this film is set, as best as I can tell, somewhere in the late 1560s, shortly before the historical death of Matsunaga, so possibly the temple has yet to be destroyed.

“So the opponent here is a monk called Suijubo, the Fluid Spitting Monk, played by Gajiro Sato, who was a familiar face to mainstream Japanese audiences. He played another monk, although not one who vomited viscous gunge, in almost every installment of the Tora-san movies, for decades. He only missed one, due to a car accident, but he was still credited on the poster!

“That punch perm you see really marks him out as an unusual character in a period drama, but it was a part of his general look, and was a feature of many of his onscreen appearances throughout the 1960s and 1970s.”

From my commentary track to Arrow’s forthcoming UK/US release of Ninja Wars.

“…lives up to its title as a thoughtful discussion of how twenty select, enduring, and iconic anime transformed cinema worldwide… Jonathan Clements provides his unique insights into the evolution of an artistic medium. Thoroughly detailed yet accessible to all backgrounds, and replete with fascinating, little-known vignettes about historic anime and the people who created them, Japan’s Anime Revolution! is a ‘must-read’ for anime connoisseurs and highly recommended for both personal and public library theatre/cinema studies shelves.” — Midwest Book Review

Much to everybody’s surprise, including mine, I shall be appearing today on screen at the Odeon West End in London, introducing Mamoru Oshii’s Angel’s Egg. For connoisseurs of my introductory videos, I believe this to be the first recorded in my new office, so everyone can criticise a different section of my bookshelves.

The distributors at Anime Limited announced this yesterday, only to receive a welter of social media replies from fans demanding Bleach. This is why you can’t have nice things.

Angel’s Egg, presumably along with my face looming out of the screen, will also be appearing in a number of other locations in the weeks to come.

“His first novel, Paradise, is a ‘genetic’ romance, in which two star-crossed prehistoric lovers are separated by the Bering Strait, only for their distant descendants in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to be reunited by some strange attraction and hereditary memory. However, it was with Ring, a supernatural detective drama, that Suzuki first found true success. Combining an eerie sense of the time abyss of the Japanese countryside, in which modern comforts are written only lightly over centuries of tradition and secrets, with one of fiction’s most perfect basilisks, it posits a ‘haunted’ scrap of film that will strike its viewer dead unless it is shown to another, hence passing on the ‘curse’.”

From my entry in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction on the author Koji Suzuki, who died last Friday.

The Emperor Meiji tried to draw a line under the seditious leanings of some of those in his service. Pointedly, in 1879, he changed the name of the “Tokyo Shrine to Summon the Spirits” to the “Shrine to Quiet the State” (Yasukuni Jinja). Like many of the other classical Chinese allusions in 19th-century Japanese politics, this reference tends to be cited out of context, without much consideration of the text being quoted. In the original Chinese, the term is found in an official’s defence of his decision to put a soldier into a government position:

“I have done it to secure the quiet of the State. When you have men who have rendered great service, and you do not give them the noblest offices, are they likely to remain quiet? There are few who can do so.”

Amid the songs of the 1930s, one stands out not for its musical or lyrical achievement, but for its tone. “Mother at the Nine Steps” (Kudan no Haha, 1939) was written for the spring ceremony at the Yasukuni Shrine, where the newest war dead would be ceremonially accepted into its halls. The song tells the story of a lady from the provinces, coming to the Nine-stepped Hill (Kudanzaka) that leads to the venue:

It seems oddly ungracious to ridicule a bereaved mother for being a “yokel”, like she hasn’t suffered enough. But for music historian Osada Gyoji, that is part of the song’s subversive appeal. We have gone, in the space of two years, from the unlikely sight of mothers waving off their sons “without tears,” to this broken old woman in the big city shedding tears that are plainly not “of joy” at all, but continuing to put a brave face on her personal desolation.

Extracted from Japan at War in the Pacific: The Rise and Fall of the Japanese Empire in Asia 1868-1945, by Jonathan Clements.

“The verb for beheading, in this context, retains a visceral sense of the battlefield – it is not the stark, slashing kiru of a ritual execution, but the unpleasant, gritty kubinejikiru, literally, ‘head twisting off and cutting’, wrenching the head from the neck with the aid of a dagger or butcher’s knife.”

The Rest is History podcast gets to grips with medieval Japan, including a reading from my Brief History of the Samurai.

Sorry if it’s a bit quiet on the blog at the moment, but I am literally all at sea, onboard the MS Westerdam on a two-week circumnavigation of Japan. I’m this voyage’s designated expert with Road Scholar, a company that “enriches” travellers’ experiences by forcing them to spend time with me, something that readers of this blog get for free. I’ve been lecturing about the samurai and the history of Japanese food, and squiring people around castles and tea farms, sake breweries and museums. This week alone, I’ve soaked in the hot springs at Arima, shouted myself hoarse at a sumo wrestling match, and joined in the celebrations in Kochi when the locals discovered they’d struck the tourist jackpot by becoming the subject of the just-announced 2028 NHK taiga drama.