Kmye Chan: Not Just a Flash in the Artistic Pan

Unless you’ve had your head buried in one very deep sandbox, you’d have noticed that Japanese art, film, music and fashion has had a huge impact on the stylings of its Western brethren. 

With this in mind I occasionally yack with foreign musicians and creative types about the influence of Japan on their own art, and this month I placed the spotlight on French artist Kmye Chan, with whom I’ve been liaising about a potential book cover (it's called Planet Goth and will be published in 2014 with Kmye's 'Dancing Puppet' painting, left, on the front).

The artist's name itself was a giveaway: Kmye CHAN.

Chan in Japanese is an honorific suffix originally used for babies, but these days employed to refer to anyone with an endearing quality, be the individual a super-cute grandmother or a zany seal (look up Tama-chan online for one example).

Kmye is an amazing painter, someone who has taken the obvious influence of manga and rendered it anew in a style also reminiscent to me of American comic book artist Steve Ditko. 

Who are your favourite manga artists, and which stories did you most enjoy as a fan?

“My favourite would easily be Yukito Kishiro — reading Gunnm [Battle Angel Alita] was a turning point in my drawing life. Both the artwork and plot were something completely new and out of this world, so far as my fifteen-year-old self was concerned!

“I love Ai Yazawa (Paradise Kiss, Nana) for her bittersweet shōjo characters and quirky linework. Graphically, I am also always amazed by Kaori Yuki’s art... When I started drawing, her work was my ultimate reference since I collected her manga and art books! And last, but not least, in my teenage years I was a massive Rurouni Kenshin fan [by Nobuhiro Watsuki] — this series still occupies a sweet spot in my heart and I happily read it over and over again.”

So you obviously would you say you’re more influenced by shōjo (girls) than mecha (giant robot) manga. Are the two compatible?

“That being said, I have read and loved my share of mecha/kaiju manga: Neon Genesis Evangelion has been a staple in my manga collection. Of course, both are compatible — they are different but both equally enjoyable. I would actually love to see a mecha manga storyline drawn with a typical shōjo manga style. That would be an interesting twist!”

“My artwork is undeniably more influenced by shōjo manga — you can see this in the flowing clothing and hair, the highly detailed, decorative style that is typical of shōjo has always been something I have been fascinated with. There is something inherently beautiful about it, where shōnen manga style [aimed at teenage boys] in general is more focused on reflecting action and movement.


READ MORE OF THIS INTERVIEW @ FORCES OF GEEK.

All Roads Lead to Nihonbashi (日本橋)

 It's funny how you can live in a place for a decade and miss a lot of what's right there nearby.

It's autumn, the weather's been glorious here in Tokyo (here read cool that the scorching summer we just went through), and the leaves are starting to turn colour-wise.

A couple of days ago I was on tight writing deadlines, but it was superb weather again so I decided to skip out and finally go explore the area in central Tokyo around the Nihonbashi, literally Japan Bridge — which was built a century ago in 2011, but rests on what has been a vital conduit spot for this city since the 17th century.

And I'd never even seen it before now except in ukiyo-e woodcuts by Hiroshige.

Japan Bridge is also the setting and title for a 1956 movie — Nihonbashi — by the great Japanese director Kon Ichikawa.

Ichikawa's first film in colour tells a riveting yarn of two geisha fighting for control of the Nihonbashi area, along the way brushing kimono with ghosts, murder, infanticide and flying daggers.



Read more of this piece and glimpse a swag of additional images @ Forces Of Geek.

International Artists Yack About Japanese Anime

In last month's Flash In Japan we set the stage by asking a few upcoming international artists to tell us their thoughts on Japan—from manga through to the country's culture—and you can read Part 1 here.

These people are all young, pushing the perimetres of comic book and sequential art along with visual stills, and they're ones I worked with closely in the development of an upcoming noir/comicbook novel, Who is Killing the Great Capes of Heropa?, out later this year through Perfect Edge Books.

So, for the merry month of May we're continuing our insightful yack, this time focusing on that bastion of global fascination: anime.

"Japanese animation is always years before any other country, and of course I absolutely love it," says Spanish artist Carlos Gomez.   "Overall? I think the best animation is seen in movies—like Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira."

"I don’t think an '80s child in the West didn’t get exposed to anime in one form or another," agrees Gomez's Australian peer Paul Mason.

"I recall Astro Boy and Voltron being my favorites as a kid—though I can’t say anime really influences my work directly in themes, I enjoy the Japanese flair in terms of the animation frame rates: The fast action speeds create such a high impact, plus I’ve always admired the camera selection choices and framing methods utilised in some of the better anime action films. The Warner Bros West/East animation co-production Batman: Gotham Knight had some fantastic example of this, and the storytelling approaches that the Japanese directors used, and the illustration/compositional choices within the segments, really hooked me. I think the marriage of Batman’s mythology and persona, with the Japanese flavour, really suits the ronin/samurai tradition, thinking and visuals of the character."

Spaniard Javier 'JG' Miranda (see Bullet Gal picture at right, from Who is Killing the Great Capes of Heropa?) isn't quite so enamoured—not really. "I don't usually watch anime, mainly because I think the animation in the widespread series—such as Naruto, Bleach, even Dragon Ball—is a bit lacking due to the huge amount of work that a single episode needs, and the scarce time they have to prepare it. However, when talking about Studio Ghibli or some OVAs, you see the amazing quality these studios can achieve. That said, I have been a real fanatic of Dragon Ball, Dominion Tank Police, Slayers, Rurouni Kenshin..."


READ MORE @ FORCES OF GEEK.

STAR TREK: Darkness in Japan

With the new Star Trek movie Star Trek Into Darkness scheduled for release in the ’States in May (but not till August here in Japan), I thought it timely to flick back to a spot of “research” I did prior to the screening of J. J. Abrams’ first reboot of the franchise in 2009.

Research telling me, at least by May four years ago, that only one in seven citizens of Japan had heard of Star Trek.

I knew this then because I finished personally quizzing 60-odd people.

The margin of error was (and still is) completely open to contention, since I interviewed people only in Tokyo, my test subjects were limited to anime production staff, students of English, techno DJs and musicians, and the ages stretched from 15 to 72. 

I’ve since had arguments with a bunch of people, all foreigners, who contest the findings (well, they've argued and I've thrown up my arms in surrender), but they have yet to do similar research and I guess mine still stands up okay.

Apparently there was a Star Trek boom in Japan in the ’70s — the evidence is there in online artwork and blogs — but either most people forgot by 2009, or I picked the wrong target audience.

The one-in-seven figure was itself a stretch, since two inclusions in the ‘yes’ category confused Star Trek for Star Wars. One time, when I asked the ongoing main question (“Have you heard of Star Trek?”) my tipping-the-scales 72-year-old English student Hashimito-san declared “Of course!” — and thence proceeded to enact a spritely air-lightsaber cut-and-thrust routine.

Read more of this article @ Forces Of Geek.

Got'cha, GATCHAMAN! G-Force is Go!

Last month, I got to be a gaijin extra (think a refugee running amidst fire and rubble) on location for the live-action movie adaptation of 1970s anime series Gatchaman, aka Battle of the Planets, or G-Force.

I'm not sure if it's because I'm Australian, but this doesn’t mean too much to me.

The Japanese obsess regarding the 1972 anime Kagaku Ninjatai Gatchaman (Science Ninja Team Gatchaman) created by Tatsuo Yoshida (Casshern, Speed Racer) and most Americans I know are wild about the repackaged and slightly Westernized 1978 version Battle of the Planets.

While I dug the earlier Speed Racer, I was far more into Yoshiyuki Tomino's Mobile Suit Gundam from the same period — which grants me an excuse to stick in a picture here that I took in October of the 115-foot RX-78-2 Gundam statue in Odaiba.

Still, I was acquainted enough with this other series minus Gundam (the storyline goes that G-Force — a fistful of kids dressed up in bird costumes — protects Earth from planet Spectra and other attacks from an international terrorist conglomerate of technologically advanced villains), to think this would be a hoot, and grabbed the chance.

It was being shot outdoors in the evening in the expansive ruins of a huge abandoned paper mill in Takahagi-shi in Ibaraki, about 2 hours from Tokyo — and under 100 km from the leaky Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

This place was wild — a photographer's dream (if we weren't otherwise preoccupied).

READ MORE @ FORCES OF GEEK.

2012 Round-Up + Gerry Anderson

Which brings us to the end of another Year of the Dragon, which is actually my year of birth — and what a year it's been here in Tokyo, as well as elsewhere I'm sure.

Over at Forces Of Geek, head-honcho Stefan asked us to submit our Best of 2012 lists, which I did and I'm going the put an excerpt of that list here:

Best Movies of 2012
The Avengers, The Dark Knight Rises, Rust and Bone, The Master, Django Unchained, A Letter to Momo, Evangelion 3.0, Helter Skelter and Dead Sushi.

Best TV Shows
Smile PreCure!, Sekai no Hate Made ItteQ and Kamen Rider Wizard.

Best Song
Si Begg — UFO Original Soundtrack

Best Blu-ray/DVD Release
Captain America and The Dark Knight Rises.


You can check out a whole wad of other cool contributors' ideas for the greatest bits and pieces of 2012 over at Forces Of Geek, so take the time to investigate.

It's been a great twelve months for me personally, with the publication of my second novel One Hundred Years of Vicissitude (a surreal/slipstream/noir account of Japan from 1929 into the near-future), finishing a third novel (the comicbook/noir Who is Killing the Great Capes of Heropa?), and having a few short-stories published via Shotgun Honey, Pulp Ink 2, Crime Factory, Weird Noir, Solarcide and Off the Record 2.

Next month there's another anthology I get to be involved in, and it's called All Due Respect, from the rather respected noir short story website run by Chris Rhatigan.

In the American and Japanese summer (winter in Australia) in 2013 we should also have out the anthology I'm doing with Another Sky Press, called The Tobacco-Stained Sky — which focuses on the noir/dystopic, near-future Melbourne explored in Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat.

More news as soon as I know.

Closer to home — ie. here in Japan, this month I also got to be a gaijin extra (think refugee running amidst fire and rubble) in the new live-action Gatchaman movie, aka Battle of the Planets.

It was filmed at an amazing, abandoned paper mill in Takahagi-shi, Ibaraki, the temperature was about 1°C, and there were aliens galore (getting coffee, as in this picture). The movie should be released next year.

Music-wise I just released (yesterday) my latest Little Nobody EP through IF? Records ('Behind the Meme Claw'), with remixes from Detroit legend Alan Oldham (DJ T-1000) and Sydney's Biz and Sebastian Bayne, and I remixed David Christoph's track 'Sandman' for We Call It Hard Records earlier this month. I've additionally had the chance to remix Chicago's Lester Fitzpatrick, and that'll be out on vinyl in 2013.

The melancholy thing was winding it up with news yesterday of the death of the great Gerry Anderson, the man behind such landmark series as Thunderbirds, UFO and Space: 1999, along with one of my favourite sci-fi movies, Journey to the Far Side of the Sun (1969). Thunderbirds is equally huge in Japan — I picked up my ready-made Eagle Transporter at a very cool toy emporium in Akihabara — so I know a lot of people here will be sad as well.

I just wrote a piece on the man for Slit Your Wrists! magazine, but check out the incredible visual set-shots from Space: 1999 and UFO over at Gavin Rothery's site.

Reading-wise, it's been a superb year.

While I tend to gravitate towards old loves like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and the '60s Marvel comics scripted by Stan Lee and Roy Thomas, writers that've made an impression over the past 12 months include Josh Stallings, Shuichi Yoshida, McDroll, Nigel Bird, Paul D. Brazill, Guy Salvidge, Yukito Ayatsuji, Tony Pacitti, Julie Morrigan, Chad Eagleton, Gordon Highland, Chris Rhatigan, Jay Slayton-Joslin, Gerard Brennan, Liam Jose, Chad Rohrbacher, Heath Lowrance, Dan O'Shea, Ed Kurtz, Kristopher Young, Patti Abbott, Matthew C. Funk, Julia Madeleine, Caleb J. Ross, Phil Jourdan, Michael Gonzalez, Craig Wallwork, A.B. Riddle, Andrew Nette, Haruki Murakami, Tony Black, Richard Godwin, Mike Miner, Erik Arneson, Joe Clifford, Court Merrigan, K. A. Laity, Carol Borden, W. P. Johnson, Benoit Lelievre, Luca Veste, Renee Asher Pickup, Dakota Taylor, Jessica Taylor, Laramore Black, Richard Thomas, Jonny Gibbings, Mckay Williams, and Martin Garrity.

I've probably missed someone vital, so apologies in advance!

Art and comics-wise you can do no better than check out Drezz Rodriguez (who does El Cuervo), Michael Grills (Runnin’ With a Gun), Nathan St. John (Baja), Marcos Vergara (La Mesa Habitual), Andrew Chiu, Harvey Finch (Logar the Barbarian), Denver Brubaker (The Tales of a Checkered Man), fellow Aussie Paul Mason (The Soldier Legacy), Giovanni Ballati, Saint Yak and Dave Acosta.

Anyway, enough rambling. Have a great new year, all the best for 2013 whatever you're doing and wherever you are, and as they say here in Japan: よいお年を (yoi otoshi o!). 

Undervaluing the Great Kiichi Nakai

If we had a “Most Underrated Japanese Actor” category here, 51-year-old Kiichi Nakai would easily qualify - although the guy has been nominated for, and in fact, won a swag of Japanese Academy Awards, including best actor.

He also happens to be the son of the late Keiji Sada, one of Japan’s more venerated stars of the silver screen before his untimely demise in 1964 at just 37 years of age.



As an actor himself, son Nakai blossomed as the sensational focal-point of Fukuro no Shiro (Owl’s Castle, 1999), possibly Japan’s most underrated, must-see silly ninja movie. I love Owl's Castle for the story, for the action (even with its CG hiccups) and mostly for Nakai at his over-acting, endearing best.

I even ended up nicking an image and using that for the cover art of one of my Little Nobody LPs in 2009, the long-windedly titled I Have Become So Many People I Don't Know Who I Am (this is a quote from the movie). By the way, that's a free download, so go grab it if you want.

While he was nominated for his role of the principle ninja in Owl's Castle, Nakai had previously won the Japan Academy Best Supporting Actor award in 1994 for the drama Shijushichinin no Shikaku (47 Ronin), directed by the late, great Kon Ichikawa.

  Five years ago, Nakai sparkled in his supporting role in the high-profile Takuya Kimura (SMAP) vehicle Hero, for director Masayuki Suzuki, and he was also the mad, somehow sympathetic bad guy opposite Mansai Nomura in Onmyoji 2.


You can read more about Kiichi Nakai in my article @ Forces Of Geek.

APOCALYPSE THEN: How B-29 Bombers Burned Tokyo

I think I've mentioned here (several times over) that during the past year or so I've been immersed in the writing of my second book, this time with the focus on Japan from 1929 on.



One Hundred Years of Vicissitude is a blend of historical novel, surrealism, a mystery and noir; there's fantasy and a wee bit of romance in there as well, and I'm always ready for a hardboiled moment or two.

Included in this mix is an homage to classic Japanese cinema by the likes of Akira Kurosawa, Seijun Suzuki, and Satoshi Kon, along with actors Toshiro Mifune and Meiko Kaji.


There are nods to manga and comic books, medieval potboilers, Melbourne, Lewis Carroll, and Osamu Tezuka - along with the only visit to Tokyo by the Graf Zeppelin, saké, an eight-headed dragon, the sumo, geisha, James Bond, the Japanese Red Army, and a lot of other wayward stuff people might expect of me.

Also included is a pivotal dramatic tipping point, one that relates to the fire-bombing of Tokyo in March 1945.

Not long after I first arrived in Japan in 2001, I remember an elderly student, a child in that firebombing of the evening of March 9th and the morning of March 10th, 1945. He recounted a story that the Kanda River ran red. Whether from blood or the reflection of the fires all around, I was too timid to ask.

For the novel I ended up doing a lot of research into that fateful night. After doing so, I abridged several pages to put together a three-page summation. I toyed with this as the prologue for One Hundred Years of Vicissitude - but ditched the notion and instead integrated most of the facts and figures into survivor Kohana's diatribes about the event, early on in the story.

Coincidentally, I was writing up the fictional account here in Tokyo this past March, around the same time as the 67th anniversary of the aerial strike - though I was too immersed in the yarn to notice.

Disclaimers out of the way, let's start with the B-29. You might recall the one from the opening credits of the Watchmen film, emblazoned with "Miss Jupiter".


The American B-29 bomber had every right to call itself a ‘Superfortress’, since the contraption was a flying stronghold.

This was the largest aircraft inducted during World War II, a four-engine beauty flaunting a dozen 50-calibre M2 heavy machine guns mounted in five turrets, and one 20-millimetre cannon in its backside. All that was missing was a catapult.

While the plane’s length doesn’t ring so impressive - 99 feet, or just over 30 metres - the wingspan was 141 feet (43 metres) and it had an area of 1,736 square feet.

The bugger weighed in at 33,600 kilograms, prior to cramming in its particularly lethal payload.

The B-29 pushed the throttle to 357 miles per hour and it had a flight ceiling of 12 kilometres - making it practically immune to ground-based anti-aircraft fire and enemy fighter planes such as the Mitsubishi A6M Zero, which flew slower and lower.

I don’t know how you feel, but all these facts and figures bamboozle me.

In a nutshell, this was a huge thing that was well armed, flew higher and faster than anyone else, and carried a lot of bombs.

“The success of the development of the B-29 is an outstanding example of the technical leadership and resourcefulness which is the American way of doing things,” U.S. Major General Curtis LeMay wrote in the foreword to the airplane’s Combat Crew Manual, which also includes Disney-like cartoons and useful tidbits like what to do in case of snakebite.


YOU CAN READ THE REST OF THIS ARTICLE @ FORCES OF GEEK.