Over at the Subject to Change podcast, we reach the third and final part of our deep dive into my book Japan at War in the Pacific, as the months of “running wild” come to an end, and the Allies grow ever nearer.
Includes the pernicious propaganda of Alexander’s Ragtime Band, the reasons why cops find a gold-painted human skull in an American lake, creepy casting decisions for Hamlet, and the dramatic gunfight at the imperial palace as extremists tried to prevent the broadcast of Hirohito’s surrender address.
Over at the Subject to Change podcast, I discuss the history of Japan in the late nineteenth century in the first of three episodes based on my book, Japan at War in the Pacific. Includes China and Japan compared to two tramps fighting over a cardboard box in a skip; the false imperial proclamations of the Meiji Restoration; the sing-along revolution, and the scandalous story of the murder of the Empress Myeongseong, so-called vampire queen of Korea.
“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.
“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.
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.
The Official Schoolgirl Milky Crisis Blog 