“It is a typical case of ninjutsu fake news, citing a historical incident, shoving ninja into it, and shrugging if no-one was left alive to confirm the claim. Shinobi no Mono demands that the viewer accept its central conceit – as if a newly made Robin Hood movie wanted everyone to agree he was also a vampire.”
Over at the Radiance Films substack, they have reprinted my booklet essay on the Shinobi no Mono films from the now unavailable collectors edition.
“On top of the usual information about cast and crew, Clements provides useful historical and cultural context to the film and its setting. It’s a wonderfully informative and engaging track. Clements is becoming one of my favourite commentators, and I hope to see him get the opportunity more often.”
David Brook at Blueprint review goes looking for The Invisible Swordsman from Arrow Films.
“Every title in the set includes some kind of extra content, and they are all very good. I found them fascinating; I particularly adored the video essay by Jonathan Clements for Carlos, especially his breakdown of the film’s title.”
Robert Ewing at The People’s Movies pokes around the extras on Arrow’s V-Cinema Essentials box set, which is loaded with heavy-hitters in the world of Japanese pop culture, including Samm Deighan, Patrick Macias, Tom Mes, Mark Schilling and a dozen others. And me. I haven’t actually got to my copy yet myself, but it looks to me like the video essays and creator interviews are easily the length of one or two whole extra movies.
As for what I said: “There are plenty of Portuguese names that are easily pronounced by a native Japanese speaker. Carlos isn’t one of them. Japanese has trouble differentiating the letters R and L, and doesn’t end naturally on a sibilant. The title KARUROSU is hence a deliberate, rather malicious tongue twister for the Japanese, accentuating its alien nature.”
‘Can it be a coincidence that the girls’ schoolteacher, Miss Ayumi, has a hairstyle recalling that of the magical girl Creamy Mami? Is it possible that Mari, the hulking warrior-schoolgirl, is a feminised take on Kenshiro, the titular Fist of the North Star? Is that Captain Harlock’s vessel, the Arcadia, stuck to the prow of an alien battleship? When the girls go to the cinema, are they watching a pastiche of the recent hit Harmageddon? And when they leave the cinema, do we get a momentary glance of the words “Spartan X-ko” on the marquee, referring to Spartan X, the Japanese title of Jackie Chan’s Wheels on Meals? Yes, yes, yes, yes and yes.’
Almost a year after I handed in my 12-page article on Project A-ko, the Anime Limited collectors edition of the Blu-ray that contains it is finally coming out.
I’ve deliberately chosen this hotel in Zhuhai because it is in walking distance of Gongbei, the massive border crossing to Macao. I join the dawn hordes streaming towards the border, across the wide expanse of its square out in front. There are men in hi-viz jackets and schoolgirls in uniform, many of them joining the “Macao Residents” line – so, in fact, not Macao residents at all, but actually living over the border and commuting every day.
The kettling is designed for thousands of people, but there is only one person in front of me at the Foreigners line to leave China, and again at the line to enter Macao. I am through in fifteen minutes, and at first glance, I might as well be back in Hong Kong again. But the streets are narrower, there is more tiling on everything, and the first shop I see is St Mary’s Bakery.
In the course of my day in Macao, I manage to somehow walk across the entire old town, from the northern warren of tower blocks, past yet another statue of Lin Zexu, hero of the Opium Wars, through the tunnel that passes under Guia Hill, around the empty mall at Fisherman’s Wharf, and all the way to the statue of the Goddess of Mercy that faces the casino-riddled island of Taipa. The signage is all bilingual in Portuguese and Chinese, but while I hear Mandarin, Hakka and Cantonese spoken around me, I do not hear a single word of Portuguese all day.
Macao’s signature location is the Ruins of St Paul’s, a towering church façade at the top of steps in the old town, a magnet for hordes of selfie-taking influencers and girls who think that a V-sign, jumping in the air, or pointing poutily makes their photos more interesting. Google Macao, and the Ruins of St Paul’s is among the first images that show up. People show up, take their picture and then sod off back into the maze of side-streets, where pushy hawkers try to get them to buy Macao fridge magnets and pork cakes.
St Paul’s is not the name of the church. The church is called the Church of the Mother of God. St Paul’s is the name of the college complex that it was part of, founded in 1573 by the Italian Jesuit Alessandro Valignano. Valignano will be a name familiar to many in this parish, because he is a major character in my book Christ’s Samurai. Horrified that missionaries in Japan didn’t speak Japanese, he set up a Japanese-language boot camp in Macao, which he intended as “the City of God in Asia” – the centre of all Jesuit activities. St Paul’s College was the result, the site of Macao’s first printing press, which churned out Japanese learning materials and… Bible stuff. In the 1630s, it became a training ground for Japanese priests (exiles and the children of exiles) ready to undertake the one-way clandestine mission to enter Japan and administer to the underground Christian communities.
In fact, so many exiled Japanese were in Macao at the time that locals mistook them for the advance party of a Jesuit scheme to invade China, with their churches assumed to be forts and their seminaries taken for barracks. The church façade was partly built by Japanese masons, living in exile as their country turned increasingly anti-Christian. This has turned the extant stonework into one of the only surviving examples of what some have called “Japanese Baroque”, with a quirky take on Christian themes, and multiple appearances of Japanese chrysanthemums. The Virgin Mary is depicted subduing a seven-headed dragon, and a skeleton exhorts passers-by in Chinese: “Remember death and do not sin.”
The seven-headed beast of Revelation 17 is supposedly ridden by Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and the Abominations of the Earth, so quite possibly the legend next to it that reads “The Virgin Mary Tramples on the Dragon’s Head” is a desperate attempt to explain why she’s there, which only muddles thing further, because there is an image of another woman on the dragon, and an image of Mary next to the dragon, and I sense we are looking at the 1630s equivalent of an argument between rival commenters in Google Docs as a priest frantically tries to stop Dave the Japanese Stone Mason from accidentally committing any further carved heresies.
An inscription on a cornerstone reads: “Virgini Magnae Matri Civitas Macaensis Libens Posuit an. 1602”[The City of Macao built this Church in honour of the Great Virgin Mother in the year 1602]. By the “City of Macao”, it refers to the Christian inhabitants, who were persuaded by the incumbent Captain-Major to donate a half percent of their earnings to build a church if the ship they were waiting for turned out not to have been destroyed in a storm as expected. It was the first wager in Macao’s long gambling history, and paid off a few days later. But work on the building continued until 1640, leaving ample time for new Japanese workers to flee their homeland and to work on the façade.
The interior was also once a triumph of oriental artistry, although we can only imagine the decorations as reported by Peter Mundy in 1637: “Carved in wood, curiously guilt and painted with exquisite collours, as vermillion, azure, etts., Devided into squares, and att the Joyning of each squares greatt roses of Many Folds or leaves one under another, lessning till all end in a Knobbe.” There were also numerous pictures, now also lost, thought to have been made by Japanese students of Father Giovanni Nicolao, who formerly taught painting in Arima and Nagasaki, but arrived in Japan, with his students, in 1614 following the latest anti-Christian prohibition.
At least one painting by Nicolao’s students is known to have survived the fire that destroyed the building in 1835. It now hangs in St Joseph’s Seminary, nearby, and is an image of St Michael, drawn as only a Japanese painter would imagine him, clad in samurai armour, wielding a katana, his helmet decoration a ring of bursting rays. Takashi Miyanaga, in a 1995 article, determines that it must have been part of a roof image above the “Altar of St Michael” where several prominent Japanese Christians were buried, which would imply that there was, at very least, a second panel depicting the dragon that Michael is supposed to be fighting, although in the extant image, there are only a few of its flames landing near his foot.
Jonathan Clements is the author of Christ’s Samurai: The True Story of the Shimabara Rebellion. You can hear him talking about Japan’s Christian Century on the Subject to Change podcast.
“Swept up in the UFO fervor of the era, aviation journalist Yusuke Matsumura derived a strong inspiration from the flying-saucer cult of George van Tassel in the United States, suggesting that aliens could be contacted through telepathy by chanting the mantra ‘Bentra, Bentra.'”
Over at the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, I write up the Cosmic Brotherhood Association, a Japanese saucer cult that cast a long shadow in popular culture.
A tram-ride away from the main train station in Matsuyama, set on the side of a hill, there is an array of 98 stone pillars, each bearing the name of a long-dead foreigner. All were Russian prisoners of war, held by the Japanese from 1904-5.
Some 4000 “Russians” were interned in Japan as the war went on. Louis Seaman, a reporter from the Daily Mail, was scandalised at how many of them weren’t really Russians at all.
“The prisoners at Matsuyama were all from White Russia, mostly Finns and Poles, with a decided sprinkling of Jews. Pondering on… the woes of these people in their own unhappy land, the thought was forced upon us that his Imperial Majesty the [Tsar] of all the Russias was emulating with emphasis the illustrious example of David of old with Uriah, in sending these people as cannon fodder to the Orient, where the more killed the better for the safety of his throne at home.”
Although many names on the headstones are Konstantins, Sergeis and Dimitris, the graves evoke the multi-racial mix of the Tsarist war machine that was defeated by the Japanese. Uladai Kodasayev (d. 17th April 1905), a Muslim, is plainly from West Turkestan, as is the soldier Khazeem Shayekov (d.30th May 1905). Jakob Kleinman (d. 15th May 1905) is a Jew, perhaps from Poland; Henrik Tadorius (8th May 1905) might have been a Swedish-Finn. Moyshe Volkov (d. 28th March 1905) has a Jewish name but a Christian grave-marker – did he convert or did someone mix things up? All these men died thousands of miles from home as part of the Tsar’s ill-fated attempt to take on the Japanese in Manchuria.
The Russian graveyard is a relatively obscure pilgrimage site in Japan. Even I can read enough Russian to see that the Cyrillic nameplates have been written by someone from Japan, muddling through with a dictionary and crossed fingers. Sixteen years later, as I am clearing out my desk drawer, I find the notebook in which I wrote down the name on every “Russian” headstone in the Matsuyama cemetery. It’s not a whole lot of use to me at the moment, but someone out there in the internet may find it useful, so I have made it available here.
Jonathan Clements is the author of Japan at War in the Pacific: The Rise and Fall of the Japanese Empire in Asia 1868-1945.
After the surprise news that I had inadvertently contributed to a three-part podcast about Chairman Mao last year, I also show up in Noiser’s Real Dictators series talking about General Tojo.
I vaguely remember that when I was recording the Mao interview on camera ten years ago, in a whirlwind day in which I was only above ground in London for 90 minutes or so before I was on the Tube back to the airport, the director asked me for a soundbite about Tojo. I said something vaguely related to Japan at War in the Pacific and thought no more of it. Presumably, I then showed up in a docuemntary I have never seen, and a decade later, the audio was repurposed for a podcast I didn’t know about.
When signing contracts for TV interviews, one does tend to agree that the company can do whatever they want with the material, and I think it’s quite nice that the work can be repurposed so long after the fact. It wouldn’t have killed them to let me know, though.
Disaffected computer salesman Shunsaku Aoshima (Yuji Oda) changes careers at the ripe age of 29, becoming a detective at the Wangan police station. Though he is initially ignored by most of the officers, he demonstrates an early skill for empathising with victims and is able to draw important evidence out of uncooperative interview subjects. His chief nemesis is Shinji Muroi (Toshiro Yanagiba), a self-made man from Akita, who has fought his way up through the Police Board Criminal Council despite snobbish opposition from the Tokyo University graduates who make up most of its numbers. Though the two men are permanently at odds, the emotional Shunsaku and the logical Shinji eventually form an uneasy partnership
Their friendship flourishes in the course of several episodes that introduce other members of the team. Old hand Heihachiro is due for retirement but trying to settle some of his outstanding cases. One comes back to haunt him, when an old adversary sends him a booby-trapped office chair, forcing him and Shunsaku to stay completely still while the rest of the office try to defuse the bomb—a steal from a similar setup in Lethal Weapon 3. Sumire is Shunsaku’s would-be love interest in the Department of Theft, whose cold exterior hides an abused past. She attracts a stalker who is convinced that she is the earthly incarnation of the anime character Pink Sapphire (a thinly veiled homage to Sailor Moon) whom Shunsaku and Shinji must stop before he turns into a killer.
Bayside Shakedown is one of the landmark Japanese TV shows of the 1990s. Though the high concept is nothing new, it struck a chord with the Friends and Ally McBeal generation, offering last-chance wish fulfilment for twentysomething viewers that there was still a possibility to change careers and start afresh. The glossy production values and pop video sensibilities glamorised the world of police work— the officers try very hard to play it young and cool. They achieve this through an unobtrusive anti-intellectualism that derides academic achievement in favour of simple attitude and instinct. When a team of criminal profilers arrive at Wangan, they are depicted as hapless college boys whose charts and graphs are no substitute for door-to-door enquiries and knowledge of the streets. There is similar comedy bungling from the Three Amigos, a group of unashamedly brown-nosing seniors who preside over the younger officers with an air of benevolent incompetence.
The series aims several pop culture references squarely at anime fans, including an arrest at an Image Club where visitors can hire prostitutes dressed as famous characters, and the regular recurrence of music from Shiro Sagisu’s soundtrack to Evangelion. Viewers are also advised to keep an eye out for each episode’s token foreigner, including ending-theme song collaborator Maxi Priest, though our personal favourite remains the suspect who can be heard loudly protesting, “But I am from Finland!”
Later episodes adopt a more serious tone, as the team go on the trail of a cop killer who has also seriously wounded police chief’s son Masayoshi Mashita, as well as with the promise of future collaboration between the lowly Shunsaku and the fast-tracking Shinji as he rises through the ranks.
The series stayed in the public eye through a novelisation and several seasonal TV movies, as well as a number of cinema spin-offs that kited it far into the 21st century. Twenty-eight years after it first appeared, it is fated to return yet again with leading man Oda now nearing sixty, cast in the upcoming Bayside Shakedown N.E.W. And for some utterly baffling reason, it has suddenly sidled onto Netflix, where its 4:3 screen size, predating the rise of the widescreen, and its leeched digital-video palette, make it look like what it is: an artefact from a bygone age.
But Bayside Shakedown was huge in its day – a hopeful second-chance for late twenty-somethings that propelled it into the status of a national phenomenon. With a peak audience share of 23.1%, its cinema adaptation was sure to be a hit, with the first movie becoming the third most high-earning domestic movie in Japanese cinemas. But although it was screened overseas on expat TV, and had its following among dorama fans in south-east Asia, it never seemed to attract the attention of the English-speaking world.
Twenty-five or so years ago, I went along to a London screening of the first Bayside Shakedown movie, put on for exhibitors ahead of the big buying frenzy at the upcoming MIP-TV in Cannes. A friend in the business said he’d add me to the guest list as a favour, so it’s not like I was sneaking in. It was a joyous continuation of the series, beginning with a wonderfully evocative depiction of contested jurisdiction, as police units on either side of a canal each try to prod a floating corpse over to the other side so it’s somebody else’s problem. It continued with a comedic account of class differences and office politics within a struggling police station, and finished with a sly reference that replayed the ending of Akira Kurosawa’s High & Low (1963).
The film was only marred for me by the occasional sound of seats flipping up, as one-by-one, the various exhibition reps decided the film wasn’t for them, and got up to leave. When the lights came up, I was alone in the theatre. I walked over to the distributor to confess that I was not a buyer for a video company.
“You are Jonathan Clements,” he said with a smile. “I know because you laughed at the Kurosawa gag. And you stayed to the end.”
Adapted from the Bayside Shakedown entry in The Dorama Encyclopedia: A Guide to Japanese Television Drama Since 1953 by Jonathan Clements and Motoko Tamamuro. Bayside Shakedown, much to everybody’s surprise, is suddenly available on Netflix.
Over at Russell Hogg’s history podcast Subject to Change, I keep things festive by discussing Japan’s Christian Century and the apocalyptic revolt that ended it in 1638. Part one features sneaky Jesuits, mass conversions, crucifixes as fashion statements and a secret Spanish plan to conquer China.
How did a street fight in Macao escalate into a naval battle off the coast of Nagasaki, leading to an executed nobleman and a fateful change in management in Shimabara? Features me impersonating Batman and speaking Spanish.
And then in part two we deal with the teenage messiah, the siege of Hara Castle, and the craziness of the Mirror of the Future, a supposed prophecy or, if you like, the departing curse of an angry Jesuit:
“When five by five years have passed / Japan will see a remarkable youth / All-knowing without study / See his sign in the sky / In East and West the clouds will burn / Dead trees shall put forth flowers / Men shall wear the Cross on their heads / And white flags shall flutter on the sea / Fires engulf fields and mountains, grass and trees / To usher in the return of Christ.”
The Official Schoolgirl Milky Crisis Blog 