“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.
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.”
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.”
In a moment of historical irony, this column inadvertently predicted its own demise, back in NEO #233, with a comment on the rising costs of paper. That picture there is a stack of all the Manga Snapshot titles I had ready to roll for the rest of the year, which I can now chuck in the bin.
It’s been exactly twenty years since I handed in my first article for issue one of NEO magazine, a young whippersnapper of a title that would be destined to outstay them all. Anime UK and Anime FX and Manga Mania and Manga Max combined covered UK anime journalism from 1991 to 2000, but NEO magazine spanned a huge chunk of time, from 2004 to today. Gemma Cox became the longest serving anime magazine editor in British history some years ago, and I doubt very much whether anyone is going to break her record.
Gemma has spoken in interviews about the haptic joy of a print magazine – the simple value of being able to flick around and cherish, and indulge in reveries with a collection of printed pages. There’s a poster for your wall. There’s a picture of that thing. There’s an article you stuck in your scrapbook. You won’t get that on the interwebs. As of today, you won’t get it in your newsagents, either.
Twenty-five years ago, Jim McLennan, the editor of Trash City magazine, stated that the ultimate aim of anime journalism was to render itself obsolete. The last anime journalist out of the building, he said, could turn off the lights, because if the mainstream was carrying anime coverage alongside real films, interviewing anime directors, and reviewing the new titles, then there was no need for a specialist sector.
When athletes are flashing Dragonball Z hand signals, and Uniqlo sells Evangelion T-shirts, anime is certainly mainstream… in a sense. But for every Makoto Shinkai interview in Sight & Sound or SFX, there are a dozen TV shows that go unnoticed, and a cluster of movies that get no attention at all. That’s going to be someone else’s problem from now on.
Print costs money, and everybody on the web wants everything for free. When the All the Anime blog was shut down earlier this year, I was told that kidz today aren’t interested in “long-form journalism”, which apparently means 800 words or more.
So, what happens next? After 33 years of print anime journalism in the UK, I guess it’s time for me to go looking for another job, and for the internet to put its money where its mouth is. What happens next could even be up to you.
Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article first appeared in the 245th and final issue of NEO magazine, November 2024.
Asked recently if I could “recommend” ten manga for an unspecified group, I wondered if I could come up with ten that I had encountered in my recent (and now cancelled) Manga Snapshot columns that had yet to be legally translated into English. It turned out that almost everything I had most enjoyed in the last few years remains unavailable. Not that these titles are best-sellers in waiting – many are niche titles that only appeal to weirdos like me. But nevertheless, this is my top ten of untranslated manga at the time of writing. Comments have been harvested from the last couple of years of the Manga Snapshots.
The Honest Real Estate Agent (Shōjiki Fudōsan, Big Comic), based on a book by Takeshi Natsuhara, adapted for manga by Mitsuhiro Mizuno and drawn by Akira Otani. Our leading man, Nagase, is an estate agent, and initially a proud exponent of the industry known in Japan as the “1003” – as in, for every thousand words spoken, only three are true. However, after bullishly desecrating a Shinto shrine during a ground-breaking ceremony, he is cursed to only tell the truth, and forced to radically rethink the way he sells houses, homes, apartments and development plots to the Japanese public. I know, right – it’s a lovely idea, and again one that is sure to appeal to older readers who have ever had to go through the misery of trying to buy a house. Somehow, it’s managed to run in Big Comic for the last six years… there is obviously a market for honest real-estate. Or for people who like watching the conniptions that Nagase has to go into in order to still close a deal. Turned into a live-action TV series in 2022.
This Does Not Fall Under Expenses! (Kore wa Keihi de Ochimasen, Cookie) drawn by Kosachi Mori from the light novel series by Yuko Aoki, is the tale of 27-year-old accountant Sanako Moriwaka, who has landed the unenviable position of processing expense receipts at the large Tenten Corporation. Unlike the patronisingly dismissed “office ladies” of many a corporate manga, Sanako is a woman with qualifications and power, but also a minion who has to police the invoices of people substantially higher-ranking than herself. Sanako is thrown into the middle of an ongoing territorial dispute between Sales and Accounts, the constant chancers of the Publicity department upstairs, and a high-up personal assistant with a hand-wavingly vague attention to receipts. In particular, she is thrown into tense stand-offs with Taiyo Yamada, the ace of the sales department whose new project, Paradise Café, involves so many entertainment expenses and travel boondoggles that he and Sanako see a lot more of each other than either is comfortable with…. At least at first.
This Does Not Fall Under Expenses! is that most amazing and rare of new creations, a criminal procedural that often runs without crime; a drama of reluctant partners investigating corporate skulduggery, a deeply involved study of due diligence in the workplace, and a fantastically forensic account of just what we can tease out of the metadata of receipts. So if you were in Kyoto on the night of the 26th, why are you putting in an receipt for an evening bowl of noodles in Fukuoka? Only a bullet train ticket from before 4pm on that day will save you…. But please don’t tell me you went first-class, because THAT DOES NOT FALL UNDER EXPENSES! In this issue’s chapter, Sanako and Taiyo fight in the street over his slapdash expense claims, and her personal policy of “not chasing rabbits” – which appears to be an attempt to get the staff at the company to police their own expensing. Turned into a live-action TV series in 2019.
Tempus Ethicae (Big Comic Superior) by Yuichiro Okamoto and Yukio Tamai, is set in a near future where advanced artificial intelligence is on the verge of breaking through, it features the hapless humans whose job it is to teach thinking to computers. AI machines will make their own decisions unless they can be steered into having a bit of empathy for humans, which means as various elements of government and society are handed over to machines, someone has to walk our future metal masters through the pros and cons of making difficult decisions.
And these aren’t black and white decisions like “is it a good idea to support a cataclysmic isolation policy that will destroy your country’s economy for the next decade and make you the laughing stock of Europe?” Oh no, these are far more unanswerable questions, much more akin to the lose-lose scenario of Star Trek’s infamous Kobayashi Maru test. Terrorist attacks, unstoppable accidents and situations which are sure to kill someone are all presented as case studies for the humans, who have to debate in front of the machines in the hope that some sort of ethics will rub off. Of course, what makes it all so chilling is the fact that these things have to be taught at all, and that should someone’s debating powers go wrong, an AI somewhere will make Donald Trump dictator for life, cancel NEO magazine, or otherwise create some other terrible situation.
The Departed Become Distant Over Time (Sarumono wa Hibi ni Utoshi, Young Champion) by Ryo Orikasa and Kyo Hatsuki derives its title from an early medieval Chinese anthology of poetry and literature, the Wen Xuan… which makes it all the more surprising when the opening pages of this chapter feature an adult movie being shot on the quiet in a deserted gymnasium. The Departed… zooms in on the lives of the young adult-video actresses who bunk together in a Tokyo flat, presided over by their stern-faced matron, Ms Itadori. The action sweeps from eye-poppingly explicit sequences of the filming underway to the mundane downtimes of the cast and crew, some of whom throw themselves into their work with gung-ho pragmatism, while others wish they were anywhere but here. Anywhere…? Ah, that’s where Mikoto comes in – a handsome, bespectacled young man who works at a Buddhist altar shop, and has a mysterious sixth sense that allows him to detect when a human being is approaching the end of their life. And one of Ms Itadori’s girls has that aura about her.
Hospital Cop: The Snake of Aesclapius (Innai Keisatsu: Asclepius no Hebi, Young Champion) based on a story by Tsutomu Sakai but adapted for manga by Ichi Hayashi. As the main title suggests, the setting is a mega-hospital so large that it counts as an entire city district, and hence has its own police box. And that means that the local bobby Osamu Murai, a rakish youth plainly destined for detective, walks a beat that is largely indoors, around a teaching hospital thick with wacky students, a cancer ward plagued by serious illnesses, a research wing where bespectacled boffins might be up to no good, and an emergency room with a bunch of suspicious gunshot wounds. Sakai’s storyline is a brilliant idea for creating a clash of popular dramatic styles, as if Holby City were mashed into Line of Duty in a BBC cost-cutting exercise, and it is an idea so winningly populist that I am amazed nobody has thought of it before, not the least because there should be sirens and police tape all around resident surgeon Moeko Kamijo, a smouldering sawbones whose clashes over jurisdiction and boundaries with Sakai may well conceal a mutual attraction that neither of them is prepared to acknowledge. Also, I think there might be ghosts.
The hero of Kawano Yobundo’s Shima-san (Manga Action) is an old man who really should be retired by now, but instead holds down two menial jobs. By day, he works as a “traffic security guard” – one of the glorified human traffic cones whose sad fate in corporation car parks often disguises a management figure being constructively dismissed, shunted into a lower-paid menial position. In the evenings, Shima-san comes to work at the Better Days convenience store, where his younger coworkers are aghast at his attitude. When a young woman brings in a radio, complaining that the batteries are already dead, Shima replaces them with an apology, even though she didn’t buy the radio at Better Days.
Shima-san’s staid, unimaginative artwork belies its charming examination of Japan’s generation gap. Shima is a throwback to the literal “better days”, a shop assistant who believes in customer care, even when he is merely the frontman for a faceless corporation. He’s a man who carefully nurtures a sense of community in an anonymous suburban street, ready to bend the rules when it’s the right thing to do, and to enforce them with steely resolve when people try it on – woe betide the giggling underage teenagers who try to buy a packet of fags.
But there’s more, because Shima has a past. He alludes in conversations with Hiroyuki, his teenage coworker, to “making mistakes” in his youth, but its only when you see the elaborate dragon tattoo on his back that you put two and two together. Shima-san is the last of a long line of yakuza – his dead-end jobs are not merely a sign of dropping out of the mainstream rat-race, but of having somehow failed at being a gangster. Artist Kawano’s story suggests that back in the good old days, even the criminals had a better sense of honour and duty. Shima-san is the quintessential 2020s manga – a gentle workplace reverie about trying to make a difference where it counts, in the hope of paying it forward.
Manchuria Opium Squad, (Manshū Ahen Squad, Young Maagzine) written by Tsukasa Monma and illustrated by “Shikako”, charts the progress of an ex-soldier as he turns to the opium trade to support his family in 1937 China. Our leading man is Isamu Higata, a soldier in the infamous Kwantung Army that effectively seized the Chinese territory of Manchuria and turned it into a Japanese puppet state. Fallen on hard times, he starts out small in the illegal opium trade, eventually clawing his way up through a corrupt society in which the Russian mafia, Shanghai Green Gang and Kwantung Army duel over the extremely lucrative industry in a highly addictive and deadly drug.
This issue’s chapter is a flashback to Shanghai in the mid-1930s, as the Green Gang (a real organisation) stabs and beheads its way to the control of the local drug trade. I was in Shanghai only recently, and impressed not only by the photo-real accuracy of Shikako’s depiction of the city’s famous waterfront, but of its historical accuracy – there is a shot of a statue of Winged Victory, a monument to the Great War that dominated the Bund from 1924 to 1941, when the occupying Japanese ripped it down. Reviewers, however, have had mixed reactions to history as depicted in Manchuria Opium Squad, since Monma’s storyline inevitably walks into a series of political minefields. His leading man is realistically hard-nosed and pragmatic about the fact that Japan has appropriated an area the size of Colombia, and understandably ruthless in the way he creates and exploits addicts. He is a criminal, after all, and the depiction of Manchuria as a lawless narco-state is also entirely reasonable. But Japan’s invasion of China, a “Fifteen-Year War” that eventually blossomed into WW2, remains a touchy and emotive subject, and there are those who have accused Monma of pandering to Japanese power-fantasies and atrocity denials, not to mention a lurid interest in the running of an ever-growing harem of drug-addled Chinese slave-girls. It ultimately leads the reader to question when we started rooting for the bad guy. But before you start to wonder if this is manga’s Breaking Bad, Manchuria Opium Squad veers into horror in its depiction of opiate euphoria and addiction, and into pulpy satire in the form of Isamu’s foil, Lihua, the sassy, sinister Green Gang queenpin.
Himiko(Big Comic Original), by Richard Woo and Mariko Nakamura, is a glimpse at Japan in the Dark Ages, when the islands were still a patchwork of contending kingdoms in the shadow of distant China. Woo’s story is drawn from asides in contemporary Chinese chronicles, turning ancient Japan into a heady mix of sorceresses and kings who claim to wield magic swords – Game of Thrones with tattooed faces and thatched long-huts. A King Takeru is fated to become a mythological hero, but he is only a supporting character for the central cast of women – the witch Akame and the teenage girl Yanoha, whom I suspect will eventually be enthroned as the priest-queen Himiko.
This is great fun – perhaps the alien qualities of the names don’t quite come through in English, but Himiko presents a Japan that is both familiar and atavistic – it’s a chance to see the ancient Japanese as one step removed from the Dothraki, before their country was swamped by refugees from Korea and their native religion was over-run by Buddhism.
Prior Convictions (Zenkamono, Big Comic Original) by Masahito Kagawa and Toji Tsukishima is a bogglingly interesting topic – a slice-of-life drama in modern Tokyo, told through the eyes of a probation officer. Lawyer Kayo Akawa is an unpaid, voluntary parole officer, appointed by the Ministry of Justice. It’s a fascinating exploration of criminality and the return of offenders to society – Kayo’s unpaid (!) job brings her into contact with every level of society, from middle-class journalists serving supervisory probation for white-collar crime, to the stringy-haired former addict mopping floors in a convenience store.
After so many years of Manga Snapshots, Japanese comics can still give me a thrill. Prior Convictions is a marvellous idea for a story – a crime drama that takes place after the crime has happened, and often after the offender has paid their debt to society. But what happens next? Can criminals in Japan ever overcome the stigma of having been criminals? Can they get back on the job market? Can they find love? And what kind of temptations, reprisals or revelations can return to haunt them from their former life?
In this chapter, Tamiko has been out of jail for 18 months, and is bussing tables at a food court, where a rough customer seems ready to exploit her timidity and unwillingness to cause a scene. He thinks he’s starting a relationship with an indulgent new squeeze – Kayo puts him straight, telling him to back off a vulnerable young woman who needs a better break than he can give her. It’s a mix of psychotherapy and low-level crime-fighting that is just crying out for a TV remake (one was made in Japan in 2021). This manga appears to have been also released abroad, but in French.
And saving my all time favourite until last, Like Shooting Stars in the Twilight (Tasogare Ryūseigun, Big Comic Original), by Kenshi Hirokane, practically switches its entire cast once a volume, because for the last 29 years, it has been running love stories for the over-50s. Ridiculously inventive, covering every genre conceivable from sci-fi to horror, it has been adapted for live-action television a number of times, since every one of its stories packs enough punch, at very least, for a TV movie-of-the-week. I first championed it in Manga Max magazine 25 years ago, but manga reading, even today, is still very much an occupation of the young in the English-speaking world, and it’s difficult to imagine that sales would ever do it justice.
Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. The Manga Snapshot column ran in NEO magazine from 2005 to 2024.
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