To Ibaraki, where a man has been arrested for selling customised dolls. The unnamed criminal, 39, had modified anime character goods, committing such heinous acts as removing the head of a Love Live doll, and sticking it onto the body of a Girls und Panzer character, before selling the mutant result online for up to £100.

Ibaraki police bragged that they uncovered the crime during a “cyber patrol” last autumn – I imagine because that sounds cooler than admitting someone in the office was Googling teeny-bop merchandise. The cops swept down on his home, confiscated a thousand dolls, and commenced a proctologically unpleasant audit of the suspect’s bank records. This produced evidence of £58,000 in “suspicious” payments over the last three years, suggesting that he had been running his cottage industry for some time.

If you’re wondering why this is a problem, you would not be the first. Is it not a consumer’s right to do whatever they want with the merchandise they own? Toy Story’s neighbourhood bully, Sid Phillips, might have been presented as a bad guy, but when he modded his toys, he wasn’t actually breaking the law… right?

Many countries have a “first-sale doctrine” that allows consumers to do whatever they want with the products they buy. You can tinker with your Blu-ray player, although that might invalidate your warranty. You can write the name of your favourite pop star on your pencil case. You can even, should you desire, put Hitler moustaches and cat ears on all the writers’ pictures on the NEO contributors’ page (please don’t do this). This is true over most of the planet… but in Japan, trademark owners enjoy more leeway in enforcing how their products are resold. A fan in his bedroom is free to sell a doll to someone else, but not to take money for modifying it in such a way as to potentially tarnish the intellectual property. The anime companies charge a lot of money for the licences to sell merchandise, and, on paper at least, selling a Love Live und Panzer mash-up would require a double licence, and double approvals from the makers. Fortunately, the lawmen of Ibaraki are on hand to stop such sordid perversions, and hopefully have also found the time to catch murderers and stuff.

This article first appeared in NEO #187, 2019. Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of Japan.

Up on the Guardian website, my article about Masakado, the malevolent spirit said to be haunting modern Tokyo.

“Wary of his influence, in 1874 the new government officially proclaimed him an ‘enemy of the emperor’, ending his semi-divine status. Then the finance ministry burned to the ground in the 1923 earthquake. Masakado was blamed. Rumours then spread that the replacement building, too, was cursed: accidents, falls and mishaps claimed 14 lives in five years – including that of the finance minister himself.”

Announced on 1st April, to give calendar makers a whole month to scramble to integrate it into their files, the new Japanese reign era will be: Reiwa (a subject first remarked up on on this blog here). 2019 will bridge the last four months of the outgoing Emperor’s Heisei era, as well as the first eight months of Emperor Naruhito’s reign, which is sure to be a colossal pain in the arse for lawyers trying to read Japanese copyright dates hereafter.

Previous era names have been drawn from Chinese classics, at least officially, although nobody dares to point out what a colossal fudge this is. The last era name, Heisei, was supposedly drawn from two, which is to say, one word from each. That’s such a half-hearted, hand-wavy justification that it doesn’t surprise me in the slightest that Naruhito’s reign should begin with a statement that lifts a phrase from a medieval Japanese poetry book, the Manyoshu, or Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves.

The words rei and wa crop up in the preface to a cycle of thirty-two poems about plum blossoms, translated by Edwin Cranston in A Waka Anthology as: “It is now the choice month of early spring; the weather is fine, the wind is soft.” Choice here doubles for proclamation, as an archaic term for the moon that proclaims the new season; soft for peace – I suppose we should count ourselves lucky that the selected words weren’t “old geese” and “winecup”, which could have been the new era’s Boaty McBoatface.

This isn’t the first time that the Manyoshu has cropped up in NEO’s transom. The sadly obscure sci-fi series Blue Submarine No. 6 came spattered with quotes from it, and Makoto Shinkai’s Garden of Words drew its title from another of the poems. I spent most of April Fool’s Day manfully resisting the temptation to offer fake explanations online. Reiwa, written with different characters, also means “illustration”, which manga creators are sure to have fun with for the next few decades. Somewhat more ominously, it also means “zero-sum”, an apt but rather chilling portent of the struggles ahead in the 21st century, as nations get increasingly bullish over the allocation of resources in times beset by climate change and energy crises. Although one more chance pun probably has them doing the Macarena in celebration at Gainax, since their iconic anime character Rei Ayanami probably just got a whole bunch of new merchandise opportunities.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of Japan. This article first appeared in NEO #185, 2019.