Sakyo Komatsu, the science fiction author best known for Japan Sinks, has died aged 80. In lieu of an obituary, I give you the entry from the upcoming third edition of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, for which I substantially upgraded Takumi Shibano’s entry on Komatsu from the previous edition. You should be able to access the draft text here.
My obituary of Toyo’o Ashida, a crusader for animators’ rights and the legendary show-runner on the old Fist of the North Star TV series, is now up on the Manga UK blog.
Mark Blumenfeld, who apparently died in May, led a troubled life. He had over a thousand friends on Facebook, although it speaks volumes that few commented when his cousin announced his death. For my part, I waited several days to write this obituary, unsure of whether this was yet another stunt, or “regeneration”, from someone who regularly purged his Friends list and changed his identity. The facts I repeat here are true to the best of my knowledge, although I never had much confirmation of any of them.
I met him at university in Osaka, where he was known to his fellow students as the Prince of Darkness. He coveted the image of a comic-book villain, lurking at the sidelines in a black raincoat, surveying the crowd with the glowering air of a Jewish Terminator. He had few friends, and had the unerring habit of losing those that he made. When reminiscing with him about our classmates, I found myself faced with a long list of slights real and imagined, people who had wronged him, and fellow students who seemed to have insulted him unawares. He alluded in conversations to childhood illnesses and teenage ostracism, setting up a script for his life of exclusion embraced, and a simmering resentment directed towards in-crowds that he would never have really wanted to join.
He finished his education with an LPT1, a powerful qualification in the world of Japanese, where a bachelor’s degree is rated as a mere LPT2 and a high school diploma as LPT3. Getting an LPT1 is not impossible, but it is the mark of a superior intellect: an ability to grapple with one of the world’s most difficult languages, at a level reasonably describable as fluent. It was, to some extent, the only proof that Mark ever had that he really was as smart as he thought he was. Coupled with computing experience that favoured his obsessive, focussed nature, he seemed to have had a brief and successful career in information technology, although by the time we met again, he claimed to be making a living from online poker, which he fit in around caring for his elderly parents.
After 15 years, Facebook brought us back in touch in 2009, coincidentally when I was heading for New York on samurai business. We met up in Chinatown, where I found him lurking outside my hotel, tormenting passers-by with a toy sonic screwdriver. Both of us were fatter than in our salad days, but he was twice his previous weight, supposedly due to the medication he was on. He swayed as if already drunk (he wasn’t), and only seemed to listen to half the things I said. “It’s my happy pills!” he trilled. “So much better than when I haven’t got any!”
He was ebullient and oddly charming. A passer-by asked us for directions and he invited her to dine with us, kissing her hand as she scurried away… though I was sure he’d almost won her over. We sank a crate of Tsingtao Beer at the Grand Sichuan restaurant near Manhattan Bridge, and he told my wife that it was the first time he had left his apartment in months. He addressed the waiters in slurred and gabbled Japanese, seemingly unaware that this was sure to leave them unimpressed.
In the restaurant, he presented me with a signed Haruki Murakami book, which, he claimed, he had been saving for me for the last decade. I had, apparently, brought Murakami to his attention by enthusing about Hear the Wind Sing in 1992. I had no memory of this, nor much appreciation of the passion that would acquire it, stand in line to get it signed, and then sit on it for ten years pending a possible meeting with a chance acquaintance.
He found an outlet for his frustrations in the world of Doctor Who fandom. He loved the Doctor’s Edwardian eccentricity and off-world Britishness, but also saw in the Master, the Doctor’s dark half, some symbolic re-enactment of his own inner turmoil. He agonised for days over whether to leave his apartment to attend a New York fan gathering, worried that they would think him “weird”.
“Trust me,” I said. “It’s a Doctor Who event. There is no way you will be the weirdest person there.” Continue reading
I’ve written an obituary of Osamu Dezaki, director of Golgo 13, Aim for the Ace and Black Jack, among many others. It’s up online at the Manga UK blog. Not something I was expecting to have to write this morning, but when is it ever?
Dezaki was one of the few animators working in the Japanese business who had a readily identifiable style. You could always tell you were watching a Dezaki anime, regardless of the subject, thanks to his “Postcard Memory” cutaways.
I always enjoyed his insistence on taking things seriously — even comedy. This attitude even cost him work, such as the time he refused to direct a school drama about boys falling in love with other boys, because the gayness wasn’t real enough, and the realness wasn’t gay enough.
I’ve written a short obituary of the voice actor Kan Tokumaru, over at the Manga UK hub.
Kihachiro Kawamoto, who died on 23rd August, was a world away from what most fans consider to be “anime”, and had conspicuously little to do with the cel-based industry that dominated Japanese animation in the twentieth century. Kawamoto made his living on what he called “horrible” jobs in advertising, while scraping together a little money so that he could make art films in his spare time. While Osamu Tezuka was charming the media and dominating the airwaves, Kawamoto was renting out town halls so he could show his short films to passers-by. But when Tezuka died in 1989, it was Kawamoto who took over his chairmanship of the Japan Animation Association – a position he held for the next 21 years. His tenure served as a reminder of how truly broad the animation medium can be. In Kawamoto’s case, it embraced claymation, paper collages, stop-motion, and stop-motion’s distaff cousin: old-fashioned puppetry.
Dolls were Kawamoto’s first love. He wrote a magazine column about them during the US Occupation period, when young Japanese girls were forced to make do and mend with their worn-out toys. In the 1950s, he fell in with the maverick animator Tadahito Mochinaga, newly returned from China, where film had been in such short supply that he had taken to shooting puppet shows one frame at a time so as not to waste footage. This method, of course, turned Kawamoto’s dolls into stars, as part of the multiple award-winning Beer Through the Ages (1956) a 12-minute compilation of adverts celebrating the half centenary of the Asahi Brewery.
“Dolls are children’s toys, or things you dress up and display,” he told Jasper Sharp at Midnight Eye. “Puppets, or marionettes, are things that act. This is a crucial difference. There’s no such thing as doll animation.”
Kawamoto learned how to make such “dolls that act”, journeying to Czechoslovakia in the 1960s to study under the international master of puppets, Jiri Trnka. This was not as easy as it sounded – travel restrictions on the Japanese had only just been lifted in time for the Tokyo Olympics, and Kawamoto had to bend the truth by claiming to be coming to interview Trnka for a Japanese newspaper.
Under Trnka, Kawamoto began making his own short, stop-motion films, often influenced by Japanese mythology and theatre. He became renowned for his ability to use motion and posture to imply emotion in puppets whose expressions were otherwise unchanging. He remained resolutely small-scale, making films that scooped festival awards, but rarely travelled beyond the tiny circuit of festival aficionados. It is only in the last few years, with the release of a number of his shorts on the DVD Kihachiro Kawamoto Film Works, that a wider audience has stood the remotest chance of seeing his idiosyncratic, meticulous works of art.
In Japan in the 1980s, he became known as a puppeteer once more, producing two long-running adaptations of classics: The Romance of the Three Kingdoms and the Tale of the Heike. While foreign audiences were lapping up Akira and Legend of the Overfiend, Kawamoto’s puppet shows were all over Japanese telly. In 1990 he returned to Czechoslovakia to make Briar Rose, a darkly shaded reimagining of Sleeping Beauty. The culmination of his work came in the form of the feature-length stop-motion film, The Book of the Dead (2005), which finally brought him a degree of international recognition, scant years before his death.
Jonathan Clements is the author of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade. This article first appeared in NEO #77, 2010.
This article is now hosted on the Manga UK blog.
Payut Ngaokrachang, who died on 27th May, started off drawing backgrounds for puppet shows touring the countryside in his native Thailand. He drifted into animation with Haed Mahasajan (1955), in which a traffic policeman swayed with the moves of a temple dancer, and eventually causes a pile-up when he is distracted by a passing woman’s loose dress.
Payut’s cartoon came to the attention of the US Information Service, a public relations agency set up by the Eisenhower administration to push the American way of life in opposition to Communism. USIS gave him a 10,000 baht bursary (about $400), and the chance to spend six months studying animation with either Disney in America or the recently established Toei in Japan. Payut chose the latter.
Along with “Mr Keith” from the US embassy, Payut hired Tokyo animators led by Taiji Yabushita to make a 14-minute colour cartoon, The New Adventures of Hanuman (1957). Intended for screening at the US embassy in Bangkok, Hanuman drew on the Indian myths of the titular white-faced Monkey God, but depicted him under attack by red-faced monkey invaders who rush out of the jungle. A metaphor for the red menace of Communism in South-East Asia, the film was unreleased in Japan, but nevertheless brought in funding that bolstered the infant anime industry.
Payut was soon back with more American money, this time from the South-East Asian Treaty Organisation, to fund The Bear and the Children (1960). A much more heavy-handed parable, it featured a hulking Soviet bear chasing a pig-tailed little girl, clearly intended to be Chinese. The evil bear goes on to pursue children wearing the national costumes of Thailand, the Philippines and Burma, who must unite to defeat it.
Yasuo Otsuka, then a rookie animator on the project, but destined one day to be a stalwart of Studio Ghibli, recalled in his autobiography the interminable meetings in a smoke-filled room between the Japanese, Payut and his American associates. A “Mr White” from the Tokyo embassy kept insisting on “reshoots”, seemingly unaware that the animators would have to go back to scratch on every scene he wanted changed.
Payut returned to Thailand, where he would make the first Thai cartoon feature, The Adventure of Sudsakorn (1979), made on a gruelling schedule that almost blinded him. In later life, he trained Thai animators subcontracting for foreign studios, and bewailed the rising domestic popularity of Japanese cartoons, lamenting that even his own granddaughter preferred them. In a strange turn of karma, he received money from the Japan Information Centre, yet another “cultural outreach” office, to make My Way (1992). This was a different kind of propaganda, posing as an anti-AIDS cartoon educating the youth of South-East Asia, but presumably attracting Japanese funding because of the consequences to Japanese sex-tourists if the disease continued to spread in the region.
Payut will be remembered as a giant of Thai cartooning, but his involvement behind the scenes of Japanese animation is a little-known element in his long and fruitful career.
Jonathan Clements is the author of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade. This article first appeared in SFX Total Anime #3, 2010.
Yoshinobu Nishizaki, who died today, was a colourful and controversial character in the anime world. Born as Hirofumi Nishizaki in the old samurai town of Aizu-Wakamatsu, he rebelled against his traditionalist family by founding a jazz club. By his late twenties, he had moved into music production, but suddenly switched careers to become an office manager for the “god of manga,” Osamu Tezuka.
Nishizaki claimed that he had fallen in love with Tezuka’s comics, particularly the future trilogy of Lost World, Next World, and Metropolis. Joining Tezuka’s studio, Mushi Production, Nishizaki threw himself into legal and operational work, and scored what he hoped would be a landmark success when he sold the rights of Tezuka’s Marvellous Melmo to a TV channel. However, ratings were a disaster for the series, which attempted to turn sex education into a kids’ comedy, and Nishizaki found himself taking the blame instead of the credit.
As Mushi Production drifted towards bankruptcy, Nishizaki came to resemble the first mate on a sinking ship. Industry gossip associated him not only with the departure of many animators, but with the disappearance of company property. When Mushi’s doors were shut for good, Nishizaki somehow sprang back into business as the owner of Anime Staff Room, a company that appeared to use talent and materials liberated from the beleaguered Mushi Production. Nishizaki even managed to walk away from Mushi with intellectual property. One of Nishizaki’s jobs at Mushi had been to register copyrights, and it appeared that although both Wansa-kun and Triton of the Sea bore Tezuka’s name as creator, their ownership had somehow been assigned to Nishizaki. Depending on who you talked to, Nishizaki was either a canny accomplice who dutifully kept Tezuka’s people working through a legal loophole, or a traitor who broke Tezuka’s heart.
The anime business suffered its worst crisis since WW2 at the turn of the 1970s, with multiple studio collapses, a change in the value of the yen, and a recession brought on by the rise in Middle Eastern oil prices. Nishizaki likened the period to “a winter struggling towards spring,” particularly after neither of his liberated properties recouped their production costs on broadcast. Tezuka, perhaps, had had the last laugh by not telling him a vital truth – that even Astro Boy had been produced at a loss, in the hope that merchandise and foreign sales would make up the shortfall. With no foreign sales forthcoming and reduced public interest in merchandise, Nishizaki was dead in the water.
But Nishizaki fought on. His most famous creation came in 1973, when he and two other Mushi refugees dreamt up a sci-fi quest narrative, Asteroid Ship Icarus, in which a crew of teenagers crewed a space vessel built within a hollowed-out asteroid. After the manga artist Leiji Matsumoto was brought in to refine the idea, this gradually transformed into Space Cruiser Yamato, in which a group of Japanese heroes embarked on a desperate mission across the cosmos, in a ship built from the hulk of a WW2 battleship. Eventually broadcast abroad as Star Blazers, the serial became a long-running franchise, and would eventually become the subject of a bitter court battle between Nishizaki and Matsumoto, as each claimed to be the true creator.
In the 1980s, Nishizaki changed his company name from Office Academy to Westcape Corporation (Japanese: “Nishi-zaki”), under which he became the executive producer of The Legend of the Overfiend, the first and most notorious of the “tits and tentacles” genre that repurposed animation for erotic horror. Despite soaring success in multiple foreign markets, not even the Overfiend could rescue Nishizaki’s fortunes, and he would file for bankruptcy in 1997.
Shortly afterwards, he was incarcerated for a potent cocktail of cumulative offences: he had been smuggling illegal firearms into Japan while already on bail for possession of narcotics. He consequently spent much of the first decade of the 21st century in prison, and only recently returned to form with a new animated Space Cruiser Yamato movie, Yamato Resurrection. Ever one to look for a gimmick, he infamously focus-tested the ending with an audience of fans.
When I wrote the biographical entry on Nishizaki for the Anime Encyclopedia, I commented that he could sometimes seem to be a one-hit wonder, constantly returning to the Yamato as his only trusted source of revenue, and becoming increasingly spiteful in his claim to own the idea. But I also suggested that Nishizaki’s greatest, as-yet untold story was his own autobiography: surely a tale fraught with enough scandal, drama and adventure for any TV series?
Nishizaki died as he lived, in a manner that was both odd and suspicious. The 75-year-old producer reportedly fell from a boat, itself called the Yamato, not far from the harbour of Chichijima in the Bonin Islands, about 150 miles north of Iwo Jima. It is difficult to imagine that he is really gone. There are sure to be several figures in the anime industry who surely wonder if this is not yet another larger-than-life chapter in his life, and if Nishizaki might not suddenly reappear next week leading a band of pirates, or having discovered the fountain of youth. Some might even suspect it is a last-ditch moneymaking scheme: an attempt to encourage old-time enemies to speak out against him, all the better to return from the grave armed with libel suits.
Still, as the news spreads through the Internet and it appears not to be a cruel hoax, we are left with the news that 2010, anime’s annus horribilis, has claimed yet another high profile figure. It is all the more ironic that Nishizaki should die at sea, even as the publicity machine gears up for the film that will now be surely seen as his final epitaph: the live-action Space Battleship Yamato movie that will have its official premiere on 12th December.
Unlike many anime figures, Nishizaki never published his autobiography. He did, however, write a brief memoir for the inaugural issue of My Anime magazine in 1981, in which he acknowledged that he was a volatile figure in the industry, but that his intentions had always been honourable.
“I have made many mistakes,” he admitted. “But I have no regrets.”
Jonathan Clements is the author of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade.
Takeshi Shudo, who died yesterday, was a scriptwriter on some of the best-known anime of modern times. After a stumbling start in scripting, he would eventually become the first recipient of a prestigious anime screenwriting award, and would go on to establish the dramatic voices of some of the most-watched anime characters of the early 21st century.
The son of an assistant prefectural governor, Shudo was born in Fukuoka, and spent his childhood in Sapporo, Nara and, eventually, Shibuya in Tokyo. His knowledge of this latter location would eventually be put to use in his scripts for Idol Angel Welcome Yoko (1990, Idol Tenshi Yokoso Yoko), in which a pop star masqueraded as an anime superheroine. But his road to anime was a rocky one, and encompassed a false start in live-action.
After flunking his first set of university entrance exams, the teenage Shudo picked up his sister’s copy of Scenario magazine, which intrigued him with its “how-to” articles on screenwriting. He was still only 19 years old in 1969 when he sold his first script, an episode of the long-running live-action ninja-cop TV show Oedo Dragnet, a.k.a. Oedo Untouchables. However, his script was pilloried, not least by Shudo himself, for its “surfeit of unconvincing emotions,” and no further work was forthcoming. He drifted through a number of sales jobs in Japan and Europe, before a meeting with the prominent screenwriter Fukiko Miyauchi gave him a second chance, writing “Sly Coyote”, an episode of the anime series Cartoon Folktales of the World (Manga Sekai Mukashi-banashi), broadcast on 18th November 1976.
After working on some other serials for Dax International, he moved to Tatsunoko Productions and then Ashi Pro (now known as Production Reed) in the 1980s, where he was an instrumental writer on several new serials. Although both Idiot Ninja (Sasuga Sarutobi) and I’ll Make a Habit of It! (Ch? Kuse ni Naris?) were based on works by manga creators, Shudo put his mark on them as lead screenwriter, coining catchphrases and the comedy business that would become his trademark. In 1983, his work on these shows and others would secure him the first Anime Grand Prix Screenwriting Award, an honour that would later be conferred on the likes of Kazunori It? and Hayao Miyazaki.
Shudo’s most enduring influence was arguably his creation of Fairy Princess Minky Momo, one of the first of the new generation of “magical girl” shows, refashioning the Japanese folktales of Momotar? for an audience of young girls. Particularly successful in France and Italy, where she is known as Princess Gigi, Momo was able to transform into an adult version of herself, taking on various jobs in the grown-up world. Other series that featured his work included Legend of the Galactic Heroes and Martian Successor Nadesico.
Shudo also worked as a novelist, largely on books spun off from anime shows. He wrote many of the Goshogun novels, nine volumes of the fantasy series Eternal Filena, and the first two books that novelised the Pokémon series. Pokémon was Shudo’s most identifiable work for modern audiences. As with his the successes of his youth, it was not his personal creation, but he still injected many recurring tropes and comedy elements that would come to define the series. He wrote the screenplay for Pokémon: The First Movie (1998), one of the best-selling anime videos of the decade in many territories, including the UK, where it sold over 360,000 copies.
On 28th October 2010, he collapsed in the smoking area of the JR Nara train station. He was rushed to hospital for emergency surgery, but died several hours later from a subarachnoid haemorrhage. At the time, he had been working for the companies Gonzo and Dogakobo on a new cheerleader “character project” called Cheer Figu!, although its precise nature (anime, computer game, manga?) remains unclear.
Shud?’s death deprives the anime world of yet another of its creators, in a year that has already taken the lives of several prominent figures. Moreover, it further diminishes the dwindling population of 20th century anime screenwriters. The Anime Grand Prix for Screenwriting was only awarded for seven years in the 1980s, and four of its recipients have already passed away, including Susumu Takaku (1933-2009) and Hiroyuki Hoshiyama (1944-2007).
Jonathan Clements is the author of Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade.
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