“I had a pretty tough life until I became popular with Maruko. I had so many part-time jobs, and even when I debuted as a voice actor, I was good at being poor, but… I was happy because my voice was similar to Momoko-chan’s.”
Over at All the Anime, I write the obituary for the actress singer-songwriter Tarako.
“People often say that drawing on a computer is tasteless,” he once quipped, “but it’s not like I’m creating a work of art!”
Over at All the Anime, my obituary for Akira Toriyama, the creator of Dragon Ball.
In an unusual YouTube anime, the aggrieved creative Chiho Okura attempts to explain Japan’s consumption tax to freelancers. Her 15-minute Invoice School series features a bunch of animals, including a gorilla greengrocer who’s ploughing on through it, and a snake who is giving up a career in illustration because he just can’t be arsed any more.
British readers will be entirely unphased by the idea of a “Value Added Tax” – because VAT is basically what we are talking about here – an actual alien turns up partway to point this out to the other animals. But in Japan it was only introduced in 1989, at a piddly little rate of just 3%. It got hiked in 1997 to 5%. In the aftermath of the Tohoku earthquake, a government in search of more money racked it up to 8%. Facing the costs of the Olympics and a declining population of income tax payers, Shinzo Abe turned the thumbscrews yet again in 2019, raising it to 10% for many items – I was actually on a ship touring Japan at the time, and the passengers were advised to buy their objets d’art immediately, and not the following day when everything would literally cost more.
The 1st October 2023 saw a new twist in Japan’s tax law, shunting a bunch of the burdens for freelancers on the person who writes the invoice. I don’t pretend to understand a lot of this, because I have never earned enough money to have to pay British VAT [Sorry – Ed.], but I get the impression that it is a massive faff for anyone who has to do it, and entrepreneurs end up having to set aside multiple days each month to collect tax on the government’s behalf.
Okura and her collaborators, Spinnauts and the character designer Nonoa, are clearly distressed about a new avalanche of paperwork that will only make it harder for them to do their jobs. A very enthusiastic rabbit tells the other animals that everything will be just fine, but it’s plain to see that Okura’s sympathies lie with the dejected illustrator-snake, who frets his customers will refuse to pay the extra money on his invoice, and pass the expense on to him instead. It seems like twisting the knife to point out that in the anime business, he’s unlikely to ever earn the £54,000 that would oblige him to complete the paperwork.
Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article first appeared in NEO #236, 2023.
Forty-three years ago on this day in anime history, the impact of Gundam first became truly apparent at a riotous launch event. See my article over at the AlltheAnime blog.
“The posters were gone by 10am. By midday, Tomino estimated the numbers were pushing 15,000, which threatened to turn the event into a riot. Ever since the Anpo Protests over the controversial US-Japan Security Treaty (an event later referenced in the opening unrest of Akira), ‘public demonstrations’ had been illegal around Shinjuku station. Enough Gundam fans had now gathered to risk attracting police attention, and Tomino fretted that an injury in the crowd could attract exactly the wrong kind of media attention. His ‘new anime century’ risked dying before it could even begin, with future events shut down as too dangerous.”
Tales of skulduggery, cross-dressing and… er… stamp-collecting, as I talk to the History Hack podcast about the brief moment in 1895 that Taiwan was an independent republic… or was it? Just one chapter from my new book, Rebel Island: The Incredible History of Taiwan, out now in the UK.
This isn’t the first time I have boggled the people at History Hack with tales of Taiwan. You can also hear my archived interviews about The Pirate King of Taiwan and the historical importance of two obscure shipwrecks.
The picture shown is one of the hastily created Republic of Formosa postage stamps: “whether it represents a dragon or a squirrel or a landscape or anything else or even which is the right way up we have not been able to discover,” according to the Stanley Gibbons Monthly Journal. It is, of course, the tiger of the republican flag.
Articles about the late Michael Bakewell struggled to contain his career high-points. He had, after all, been the BBC’s first Head of Plays, appointed in 1963 to add a touch of class to broadcasting. He arrived at the television wing after almost a decade directing radio for the “Third Programme”, and continued to oversee radio adaptations of Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and the acclaimed radio version of The Lord of the Rings.
Bakewell was a hands-on director, often taking a partial credit for the scripts. Surviving footage of him at work shows him pushing his actors to wring every nuance from their words, vitally aware that in radio, words are often all they have. In the mid-1970s, shortly before his radio triumphs with Holmes and Frodo, Bakewell was roped into an unusual job, replacing the audio of a Japanese television programme with believable English dialogue.
“We thought at first the thing was undubbable,” he told Nationwide. “The only way to get it at was to do it in what I can only describe as, kind of, English Oriental tradition, somewhere in between Fu Manchu and The Goon Show.”
The programme was The Water Margin, based on the manga by Mitsuteru Yokoyama, itself inspired by a classical Chinese novel. An entire generation of British children grew up listening to Burt Kwouk’s cod-philosophical voice-overs, and puzzling at some of the weirder churns of dialogue made to match the lip-sync. NTV’s Monkey soon followed, making Bakewell the go-to guy for difficult Asian dub-jobs.
A few years later, he was hired by Manga Entertainment to oversee their early cartoons for grown-ups, often punched up with questionably racy dialogue. His output was sometimes dismissive, giving trash like Dark Myth and Mad Bull 34 little better than they deserved, but also with some real gems among the classier releases. Roujin-Z, with an ADR script from George Roubicek, was a superb job, as were Bakewell’s English audios for the Patlabor movies. Even his throwaway projects have often gained a certain cachet – Cyber City Oedo 808 has come to be something of a classic because of its sweary dub, scripted by John Wolskel.
Budget cuts at Manga coincided with Bakewell’s brush with bowel cancer, leaving much of the later-period 1990s Manga Video dubs either bought in from America or flung together at a lower-rent outfit. In semi-retirement, he turned to writing, leaving a clear mark on Manga Entertainment’s style and library in its heyday. Anime News Network lists literally dozens of anime dubs to his credit, entirely unmentioned in his mainstream obituaries.
Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article first appeared in NEO #235, 2023.
Two months after this column (NEO #232) covered the lack of marketing material for Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron, suddenly we are overwhelmed with press images.
I am not a fly on the wall of US meetings, but I can well imagine that GKIDS went to Ghibli and said “Okay lads, you’ve had your fun, but the American press is going to get super-tired with only having one publicity image. You’d better give us something sharpish, or we’re not going to have any publicity at all.”
Ghibli have come back with pictures that are fated to become iconic anime posters, with titles like Girl Buttering Toast, Old Ladies Looking at Tins, Man with Giant Moustache and Bunch of Happy Blob Things.
No harm done. Boy and the Heron is a box office success in Japan, and some coverage is even (gasp!) revealing its plot, which I think should be a new game of trying to explain a Miyazaki film badly. “It’s Back to the Future retold with a castle full of man-eating parakeets.” Or “it’s about a man inside a heron, but not in a dodgy way.” And in turn, this makes it possible to do Art books and illustrated chapters, and film guides and so on.
Magazines like NEO have some pictures they can hang their Boy and the Heron puff-pieces on for now. But Ghibli-level obstructionism is increasingly being felt behind the scenes, on the collectors’ editions that risk becoming a lot less collectable. Some readers may already know that many years ago, Ghibli refused to allow Optimum to put a commentary track on Spirited Away because they don’t care for third-party opinions (in this case, mine) on official releases. That’s fair enough, and is their right, but experiences over the last year or so have suggested that other extras are getting increasingly hard to approve.
I don’t just mean in the anime world. Last month, a licensor refused to allow an article to be added a manga volume explaining some of the intricate folkloric references it contained. This was, apparently, because the contract specified that the work had to appear in English exactly as it had been in Japan, with no extra material, even though it would make no sense to non-Japanese people.
I sense that a lot of these proclamations are coming from licensors who are trying to make their own lives easier, like the person who refused to allow me to write a book-length freebie for a well-known anime because she didn’t want to have to read it all.
She asked if I could write less. Be less extra. Which means you get less extras.
Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article first appeared in NEO #234, 2023.
“Ran is a ‘Child of Impurity’, a warrior with the power to exorcise monsters, but only by taking on their curses himself. As a result, he is a toxic figure, shunned by the villagers he defends, doomed to a short life-span when the accumulated poisons eventually overwhelm him. And he has acquired a travelling companion, the perky young bard Torue, who sees in Ran the perfect material for a song cycle. Bereft of inspiration, she hopes to follow him around until a ‘story’ presents itself.” Shelley Pallis, All the Anime.
A nice review up early for Yusuke Osawa’s Poetry of Ran, out today from Titan Manga, and translated by Motoko Tamamuro and me.
After a giant kaiju threaten to destroy Japan, the guardian spirits of the nation, known as ‘Yokai’ appear before the young boy Kei… They tell him he is the descendant of the legendary monster slayer Watanabe no Tsuna, and may be the only person who can stop the catastrophe. Great Yokai War Guardians is the epic manga adaptation of the hit movie!
Out today from Titan Manga, the first volume of Yusuke Watanabe and Sanami Suzuki’s manga based on the film, The Great Yokai War. The English script was translated by Motoko Tamamuro and I wrote a translator’s afterword in the hope of explaining some of the weirdness, but it was not included in the book, so here it is instead below:
A “night parade of one hundred demons” is a popular theme in Japanese folklore. There is a belief that supernatural beings march through the street at night and anyone who encounters them will perish if they do not have religious protection. Often, these beings are referred to as yokai, a name deriving ultimately from the first and last characters of the Chinese yao-mo-gui-guai (“phantoms-monsters-ghosts-apparitions”) – a catch-all title first used in the middle ages to refer to supernatural creatures.
There are two major schools of thoughts regarding the yokai. One is that they are all gods and those that have lost their respect and status have become regarded as demons. Another is that both yokai and gods have existed from the dawn of time, but that those that gain worshippers are upgraded as gods.
The centrepiece of the first volume of Sanami Suzuki’s manga Great Yokai War: Guardians is not a scene of apocalyptic urban destruction, but a grand conference of all the world’s apparitions, spirits and supernatural beings, playfully and punningly named with a combination of the terms yami (shadow) and summit – a Yammit. At this Shadow Council, we see a who’s-who of monsters, including a Gorgon, Dracula and Cyclops, familiar to Western readers.
But who is Backbeard? Is he some sort of piratic misprint? An eye in the middle of a dark circle, from which a bunch of tentacle-like limbs branch out, he is, in fact, a Japanese creation, first appearing in a 1965 manga by Yukihiko Kitagawa and Yoshio Okazaki. By 1966, he had been co-opted by Shigeru Mizuki’s Spooky Ooky Kitaro in Shonen Magazine, now introduced as the commander-in-chief of all American monsters. Often an adversary – he makes several attempts to invade Japan in the course of Mizuki’s stories – he appears here as a craven foreign dignitary, trying to make a swift buck on the back of Japan’s latest media obsession with the supernatural.
Backbeard in fact, was supposedly killed off in an early issue of the Kitaro manga, but kept returning because Mizuki found his unique appearance so compelling. He is immortalised today in one of the bronze plaques that decorate Mizuki’s home town of Sakaiminato, a permanent addition to Japan’s own mythology of monsters.
Shigeru Mizuki (1922-2015) is a crucial figure in the history of Japanese ghosts and monsters, not only cataloguing folktales from all around Japan, but inventing many of them himself. His works have become so ingrained in the Japanese psyche that one often has to go to his own publications, such as the magisterial Compendium of Japanese Yokai (1994) to work out which ones are his, and which ones belong to the nation.
It’s through the works of Mizuki that Japanese children often first encounter Nurarihyon, the old man who invites himself into your home and takes charge; Yuki-onna, the temptress who waits in the snows to entice passing travellers; the one-eyed, one-legged Ippon-datara that trample-hops onto people on one day of the year; or the zashiki-warashi urchins that haunt storage spaces. Here, we see them all banding together at a peace summit… sorry, yammit, in order to discuss a terrible tectonic event.
The silly humans think it’s just a natural disaster, but it’s really a mass haunting, of all the sea creatures who died during the forming of Japan millions of years ago. In the wake of the Tohoku earthquake of 2011, it is one of many media allusions to Japan’s modern traumas, leavened with a grand monster party, and a pre-teen hero who can save the day.
In an early scene, we see the young boys getting a fortune from a temple kiosk. Omikuji or fortune telling is common in Japanese temples and shrines. Worshippers draw a stick with a number on it and then open a drawer to find the paper with that number on it. In this manga, they draw a stick with the unlikely number 8 million (八百万). Traditionally the Japanese believe a god resides in everything and the expression ‘8 million gods’ means a myriad of various gods that exist in this world. What it signifies in this scene is that the protagonist ‘wins’ all the gods, but as far as he is concerned, all he is getting is the short end of the stick.
Grand Yokai War: Guardians ran in Shonen Ace magazine in December 2020, a few months ahead of the 2021 release of the film of the same name, itself a sequel to a 2005 movie that was based on a novel by Hiroshi Aramata, itself inspired by the multiple monster works of the 1960s. By this point, it is impossible to work out who came up with what, although the Daiei-Kadokawa conglomerate did its best by roping in as many creators as possible as producers. Sanami Suzuki’s manga retains the central motif of a young Japanese boy who discovers that he is the distant descendant of Watanabe no Tsuna (953-1025), the medieval samurai who wielded a sword with the ominous name Onikirimaru (the Demon Slayer).
The manga alludes to a popular legend that modern-day Watanabe family members do not take part in the Setsubun cleansing festival, in which each February Japanese households cast beans into the air to banish demons. Watanabes, it is said, have no fear of demons entering their houses, and need not bother, although tellingly, this story appears only to have arisen in the last few years. Could this, too, be a modern media myth, already sinking into the common ownership of Japanese folklore…?
The Translators
“At the time of his death in 1993, Booth was already famous for having written one of the best-ever books about travelling in Japan, The Roads to Sata (1985)… With a degree of nerdish delight, I discovered that This Great Stage of Fools has an entire section of anime reviews, with Booth according the creators of the 1970s and 1980s a degree of respect that he refused to grant the purveyors of V-cinema.”
Over at All the Anime, I write up a posthumous collection of journalism by Alan Booth.
The Official Schoolgirl Milky Crisis Blog 