You've likely already heard the rumours — forget what you think you know about The Hunger Games franchise since it's pretty darned blatantly sourced from better film Battle Royale (2000).
Thing is, that's in turn based on Kōshun Takami's 1999 novel, and there's a manga series of Battle Royale that was published from 2000 to 2005, illustrated by Masayuki Taguchi.
But let's get back to the cinematic outing.
This violent, often wildly hilarious — and disturbing — gem is p'raps
not quite so obscure now, thirteen years on, as when it was first
released in Japan.
Battle Royale would've made a far more fitting obituary for its director Kinji Fukasaku
rather than its lesser sequel three years later — which in fact his son
Kenta polished off after the director's death at age 72.
You certainly couldn’t take style, content and inspiration any further a
field from Fukasaku, Sr.'s earlier adventure schlock-romp Legend Of 8 Samurai.
So clear your frazzled Hunger Games brain.
It’s a not-too-distant future.
Japan is again a fascist state. An
arbitrarily-chosen bus full of high school kids are knocked out with
sleeping gas, kidnapped, then shipped on to an isolated island — where
they’re informed by their embittered former teacher Kitano ('Beat' Takeshi Kitano) that the only way they will leave said island is by killing all their classmates — or by ending up in a body-bag themselves.
In order to enforce this mandate, each student is shackled with an exploding collar, à la Wedlock,
and Kitano punctuates the students’ plight with a well-aimed penknife
to one of the girl’s foreheads, thereby launching a battle for
self-preservation.
Last week, after twelve years in this country, I did something for the
first time that's apparently quite the lure for English teachers in
Japan, mostly because of the bonus-extra cash — going on a school camp
during summer vacation.
In this case it was a three-day affair, attempting to teach a bunch of
junior high school girls I'd never before met, without any idea of their
English language level and no access to a PC, whiteboards, textbooks or
a photocopier.
The lessons were conducted on the tatami-matted floors of their shared
rooms at an inn near Yamanaka Lake, and my particular group of nine
included the rowdiest and more stubborn members of the entire camp. I
had one kid constantly questioning everything we did—sadly in Japanese
rather than the language we were supposed to be practicing—along with a
grumpy scowler, a girl who thought she was a bird, rivalries, and mood
swings galore.
There were tears almost as often as there was laughter.
To top things off, one of the Canadian teachers had a meltdown, locked
herself in her room, and refused to teach—meaning the other four
instructors inherited that class as well.
Joy.
Being stuck teaching 13-year-olds from 6:00 am to 8:00 pm every day had
me climbing the walls—and fired up to do something creative. Like drink a
lot of beer from the convenience store located a kilometre away down a
road in the middle of a tiny village with no streetlights.
Just did an interview with the very cool people @ Madman Entertainment in my hometown Melbourne—with their opinions on all things Japanese including anime and Akira Kurosawa. It's up at Forces Of Geek.
Here's a sample or two:
"Australia has had a long history with Japanese cinema, TV and anime
even if we didn’t always realise it at the time.
"For many years TV has
been a window on Japanese culture through shows like Monkey Magic, Shintaro, Star Blazers, G-Force and Astroboy; and also culturally adjacent shows like Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers.
I think this has made Australia more receptive to seeing media from
Japan.
"Also, for cinema, the growth of the Japanese Film Festival over
the years demonstrates the popularity of the cinema here."
...and...
"The most ubiquitous name is certainly that of [Akira] Kurosawa. His breakthrough film Rashomon
[1950] was so well-regarded that the first Foreign Film Oscar was
created just for it. He gave us samurai films and helped inspired
countless spaghetti westerns.
"The Hidden Fortress and Sanshiro Sugata even helped shape Star Wars."
Recently, I've been doing my best to mimic a literary ostrich since I've
had my head buried deep inside assembly of the next novel.
Trouble is I have trouble picturing a big bird with a hardback and a pair of spectacles, wrapped in Harris tweed.
And I say assembly, because this brute not only deconstructs 1930s
detective noir/pulp and 1960s Marvel comic book lore, but renovates them
together as a conjoined tome over 100,000 words in length — stitched
together by 35 images from 28 artists.
It's the way comic books, after all, work in the real world.
Bryan Hitch's perception of Captain America in 2009 was far different from Jim Steranko's in 1969. Then compare and contrast John Buscema's chunky-thug idea of Conan the
Barbarian in 1980 with the lithe, laddish figure originally put out by
Barry (Windsor) Smith a decade earlier in 1970.
But now I'm geeky nitpicking. If I haven't lost you already, I swear
I'll try harder, there are some pretty pictures still to come, and a
bunch of other people take the verbal reins.
For now, suffice to say, this train of thought (the wayward one about
comic book art) inspired me to ask artists from Australia (Paul Mason), the UK (Harvey Finch and Andrew Chiu — see picture at right), Italy (Giovanni Ballati), Russia (Saint Yak), Spain (Javier 'JG' Miranda and Carlos Gomez), Canada (Fred Rambaud), Mexico (Rodolfo Reyes), Chile (Juan Andres Saavedra — see picture above), the Philippines (Hannah Buena) and Argentina (Maan House),
amongst others in Japan and America, to get involved drawing characters
and events from the book — and then let their hair down for a
rambunctious tête-à-tête together here.
All in all?
Putting together the novel has been like taking Lego and Meccano and
making the pieces function together as a futuristic-retro superhero romp
that mixes and matches 1930s Art Deco architectural lines with the
gung-ho Soviet formalist propaganda style, twisted into '60s pop art
sentiment and the huge influence of Jack Kirby.
Anyway, Who is Killing the Great Capes of Heropa?will be
published via Perfect Edge Books some time around September, but what
I'd like to share with you over the next couple of months of this column
are the insights and opinions of some of the fascinating, talented and
truly cool visual artists I've had the opportunity to touch base with —
while attempting to keep the bulk of these within Flash in Japan's obvious perimeters: focused on, well, the Japanese archipelago.
If interested, you can read Part 1 of this interview @FORCES OF GEEK.
He's a fox, he wears a Zorro mask, has 'Zoro'
as part of his name (we'll
forgive the missing 'r'), the blighter gets up to mischief, he
unleashes belches and farts, and even has his nose shot off by a
laser...
How was I ever going to be able to resist Kaiketsu Zorori, aka
Incredible Zorori, a character created by Japanese writer/illustrator
Yukata Hara, a man who also apparently wrote a tome called The Famous Fried Chicken Primary School.
To be honest, I was all set to do something this month that segued into a
surreal Japan, the twisted lives of geisha and/or a warped afterlife,
to coincide with the publication on October 16th of my new novelOne Hundred Years of Vicissitude.
But my daughter Cocoa just got back from the public library with her
latest batch of the adventures of her hero Zorori, and I of course sat
down to read over her shoulder. Surreal it is - comic adventures through
a world populated by madcap animals and oddball beasties.
Cocoa has a lot to get through, and you can read more about Zorori @ Forces Of Geek.
When I was a wee tacker growing up in Melbourne, my dad picked up this second hand tome called Myths and Legends, published by Paul Hamlyn way back in 1959.
The illustrators were the insanely cool Alice and Martin Provensen, and
it turns out that Martin was also the originator of the first Tony the
Tiger character for Kellogg’s - an iconographic '50s feline that
decorates my fave coffee mug these days.
About five years ago, I started writing for an American magazine called Geek Monthly and, a few issues in, they showcased a relatively new artist/illustrator named Scott Campbell, alias Scott C.
To me, his images were akin to the Provensens, channelled via Blackadder writers Richard Curtis and Ben Elton, and then stretched to the point of surreal hilarity by Dr. Seuss.
I was busy hacking together a novel at the time (Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat) and my publishers at Another Sky Press asked if I'd decided yet who I'd like to get to do the cover artwork.
That was now a cinch - all I had to do was track down and ask Campbell
if he'd be interested. After some crap detective work, I did so, and he
agreed in an instant, very few questions asked, and turned out a way
cool couple of goats.
I always wanted to interview Scott in order to find out the buried
treasure beneath his easy-going artist facade - and I finally did so
this last month, on the back of his fantastic new children's tomeEast Dragon, West Dragon, which my six-year-old daughter Cocoa loves as much as me, by the way.
Last weekend — after nearly driving myself to madness — I finished off my second novel (as I crowed about in undignified fashion below!) and on Tuesday, signed it to a new, rather cool publisher called Perfect Edge Books.
Yep, it goes without saying that I’m still over-the-moon at the present time, if somewhat exhausted, and to celebrate I quaffed a little saké.
Just a smidgeon, I promise.
Which brings me in a celebratory mood to this month’s Flash in Japan over @ Forces of Geek, and thereby to one of my favourite Japanese myths - which also revolves around saké, as all the good ones do.
I actually did the research on this subject a few years back, for an article on nihonshu (saké) in the pages of the late, lamented magazine Geek Monthly.
That was how I stumbled upon the tale of a monster with a taste for the hard stuff, especially rice wine.
In my new novel, One Hundred Years of Vicissitude, I decided to nick some bits of my old research and stick them into the story, albeit padded out with dialogue, and (hopefully) a bit more fun.
The monster myth was one of them.
So, let’s jump straight into the unedited, raw manuscript I just finished - there might be a typo or two at this stage.
Well, by the time you read these words, the silly season is well and truly over (two months is fair enough time to lay it to rest), and over here in Japan we started 2012 with a bang: on January 1st there was a fairly hefty earthquake that shook Tokyo, just to ring in the new year in an oh-so-special special way.
Fortunately – this time around – there were no fatalities, tsunami or major damage.
Anyway, without further ado, I decided to get off my buttocks and do a mini round-up of some of the recent Japanese movies winging over your way.
You can over-analyze (or ignore) the article @ Forces Of Geek.
As I mentioned in the first part of this article back in December, Japanese food isn’t just about the sushi.
Or the fugu.
There’s a whole lot more, starting with the biggest meal of all – that consumed by... the sumo.
Sumo is one of Japan’s more internationally famous sports, probably because the spectacle of two exceptionally plump men – in a nation of exceptionally skinny people – wrestling one another, clad only in loin-cloths is, well, fascinating.
Sumo wrestlers would be nothing without their diet, though we do dangle the word “diet” here in an ironic sense.
Chanko-nabe is the food of the sumo. It’s a huge, simmering hot-pot that is chock-full of meat, fish and vegetables, best mixed with soy sauce, but sometimes also blended with mirin, miso, sake, and dashi stock (shavings of dried skipjack tuna mixed with edible kelp).
Leftover broth is often then consumed with a hefty plate of noodles.
It’s as highly nutritious in protein as it is gut busting, and is the principle dish gorged by sumo wrestlers to extend their hefty waistlines and add to already-impressive girths.
Some wrestlers enjoy the concoction so much that they quit the ring and instead become the chanko-cho, or chief chanko chef, for their wrestling stables, and eventually open their own restaurants – often with sumo memorabilia from their workhorse days adorning the walls.
READ MORE @ FORCES OF GEEK, with commentary from Japanese DJ/producers DJ Wada, Jin Hiyama & Lili Hirakawa.
As outlined here a couple of entries back, I recently slunk back to Tokyo after three of the most über-intensive days’ traveling in my life, down in the grand old capital city of Kyoto.
Despite a decade living in the newer capital (Tokyo) I'd never actually been to Kyoto before - as inexcusable as that sounds—and it was one of the best jaunts I’ve had in recent years.
At the same time I’d also started to attack a new novel, which has the current title of One Hundred Years of Vicissitude. This is, I stress, the interim title only and - yes - it is partially a cheeky reference to Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (shhh), though the main character in the novel is a centenarian and there’s a lot of change going on. If I get a letter from Señor Márquez or his lawyers I’ll probably consider also changing the name of the bugger.
Concurrently in my other job (teaching English) I’ve been yacking with a lot with students and friends about a famous 1,000-year-old Japanese tome called The Tale of Genji (源氏物語 Genji Monogatari), and have been itching to run something about it with my mates at Forces of Geek.
Anyway, as they conspire to do, these various things got together and chewed out my brain a bit, resulting in a novel that’s shaping up - in the early stages at least; I’m only up to page 67 - as partially an inane travelogue.
I’ll probably shaft some of the passages, ditch others, find a ghostwriter, and rewrite the remainder. By the way the ghostwriter reference is a pun since a dead man narrates the story. One Hundred Years of Vicissitude is possibly going to be a five percent sequel/prequel of my other novel Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat - and 95 percent something else entirely.
At the moment, in the existing manuscript, this is a section/riff that gets across the whole background of The Tale of Genji so I thought I’d snatch that and share it with you, instead of writing up a fresh article from a journalistic perspective.
To be honest I also hope you don’t mind plodding through to uncover the historical morsels. This is barely edited and unnaturally long-winded stuff at times, plus I’ll probably toss out some of the dialogue/asides if I end up using it in the novel - at all. If curious and/or at all interested, you can read more @ FOG.
Licca-chan (リカちゃん) was born on May 3, 1967 to Orie Kayama, a Japanese fashion designer, and Pierre Miramonde, a French musician. Her papa Pierre apparently liked his wife's family name (Kayama) so much that he adopted it as his own surname.
Licca’s favorite books are Anne of Green Gables and A Little Princess – both extremely popular girls’ titles in Japan and themselves made into anime series. As it turns out, Licca-chan not also loves dogs, eating Häagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream and reading the manga series of Doraemon, but also likes cross-dressing and role-playing.
For instance there's Choro Q Licca, aka Race Queen Licca (who has her own racing car) and quite a few Hinamatsuri (Doll's Festival) Licca-chans worth up to ¥289,000 (US $3,750).
Then there’s bridal Licca, Chukyo Women's University High School Licca-chan, fast-food chain Mosburger Licca, the über-tanned Loco Neo Licca, Super Doll Knight Licca, and rollerskating Licca-chan; back in the ‘90s there was even Street Licca – who was a DJ in pink Converse runners carrying a très cool Rough Trade record bag – as well as a special ice-skating Licca for the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympics. And in 2001 a pregnant adult version of Licca-chan was introduced to coincide with the birth of Aiko, the daughter of Crown Prince Naruhito and his wife Masako.
I think it’s high time that I talked up kanji in this wayward blog.
While I’d like to assume that most people know precisely what I’m on about, I guess I should throw in a morsel for those people not so interested in things Japanese: In case you don’t know, kanji is the stuff you see on scrolls and painted in big black letters on banners – logographic Chinese characters used in the modern Japanese writing system.
Sometimes in movies you see people dabbing big brushes in ink and artily doing strokes across washi paper.
Kanji is grammatically flexible – it can twist itself into nouns and adjective and verb stems – and personally I have a delight/despair affair with the beasties. It’s a bugger to remember the thousands of characters and their various pronunciations, let alone acquire the talent to reproduce the multitude of lines.
To make things trickier, a single kanji may be used to write one or more different words, and deciding which one depends on context, intended meaning, use in compounds, and/or sentence location.
While I’ve loved the simpler Japanese katakana lettering since I was a kid (when I first saw neon Tokyo signage through the eyes of Cubby Broccoli’s film crew in the Sean Connery-James Bond flick You Only Live Twice), I’ve had a more cautious, developing relationship with kanji that probably started with Akira Kurosawa’s Ran in my early 20s.
So the funny thing is that kanji, not katakana, made such a big impact on the novel I published last month – which is based in Melbourne, Australia, not Tokyo, Japan.
The first completed treatise of what’s now known as Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat was completed in 1992, while I was living in Richmond, an inner city suburb of Melbourne, and there was nothing Japanese about it whatsoever.
But when I moved to Tokyo in 2001, the seepage began to set in.
I wrote up a redux of the decade-old tome the following year – and thereafter again let it sit pretty, collecting dust, for the five years leading up to 2007. Then I did a major reboot, was accepted for publication through Another Sky Press in the U.S., and rewrites and editing took the better part of the next three years.
Somewhere along the line inserting kanji into the text became a big part.
As I mentioned, in 1992 there was none, not even mention of our protagonist Floyd's tattoo fuyu (‘winter’) – probably because I didn’t get it myself until 1994 in a particular winter of discontent; that’s something Floyd and I share, aside from drinks.
Likely the kanji settled itself in my brain 15 years later, after I’d watched in excess of a dozen Akira Kurosawa movies on the trot (all within one week) at the beginning of 2010.
While I do love Kurosawa and would readily volunteer myself to sit through this process another time round, there was a reason for my committed viewing: an article I was writing for Australian magazine Filmink to celebrate the centennial since the great man’s birth.
In Kurosawa films there’s occasionally kanji that dominates the screen all by itself – accompanied by a sparse, minimal score by a composer like Fumio Hayasaka or Toru Takemitsu – and it's powerful stuff even if you can’t understand what the devil it says.
So in Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat I decided to do a Kurosawa and throw in meaningful kanji, some of which isn’t even explained in the text – meaning that anyone who scoots through this piece will have a wee bit more insight than anyone having read the book.
IF VAGUELY INSPIRED, YOU CAN READ MORE OF THIS ARTICLE @ FORCES OF GEEK.
I’ve also had a great relationship with Production I.G over the past six years or so thanks, chiefly, to Francesco Prandoni at the International Operations division.
We’d done stuff together before on Tokyo Marble Chocolate and Mamoru Oshii’s Assault Girls, and two months ago, just before the earthquake kicked this country in the stomach, I had the absolute pleasure of working again with Francesco on the English subtitles for a brand new anime feature from Production I.G.
It’s called Drawer Hobs (Tansuwarashi たんすわらし in Japanese), and what it lacks in the action/mecha quotient the story more than makes up for with a playful sense of humour and a refreshing, quirky and whimsical look at contemporary life in this city – giving even more clarity post-tremblor.
Plus it has a range of oddbod kids that reside in a chest of drawers and do such offbeat chores as checking earthquake safety (ironic), cooking up feasts, drinking beer, and wild girls’ makeovers.
But the power here is not just in the visual content or the surreal nature of the yarn – both of which are superb, by the way. It’s the real people involved here who take the venture into lofty territory.
You can read more about I.G's plans for world domination @ Forces Of Geek.
This past week something special ended for me, and while I wouldn’t quite put it in the same league as the final episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xena: Warrior Princess or Battlestar Galactica, it still feels like a kick in the gut and has left me feeling strangely down in the dumps.
I’m talking about the 49th episode of anime series HeartCatch PreCure!, which was broadcast on Sunday morning here in Japan. HeartCatch is the seventh version of the long-running girls' concept created by the “mysterious” Izumi Todo – actually none other than an alias for the creative types at Toei Animation.
I've known all along that production house Toei reinvent their Pretty Cure anime series every February, and that they'd done so seven times already since 2004, so I could see the writing on the wall for this particular incarnation from the moment it started in February, 2010.
Each year there’s a new super-team of Pretty Cure girls to battle baddies and dress in glitzy new ways, taking the baton from Sailor Moon but at the same time making that predecessor seem underplayed.
You can read more of this rambling yarn and about the end of HeartCatch @ the Forces Of Geek site.
If the image (left) doesn't grab you straight away, take my word for it - as cheap as it sometimes is.
This was was an interesting series. I always love my Production I.G stuff, and it's great to see it getting the attention it deserves outside Japan.
The complete first season was released overseas towards the end of last year by FUNimation Entertainment in the USA, and it's also out through my fave chaps at Madman in Australia.
I did an interview with the series' character designer and chief animation director, Toku Okubo, back in 2009 for the late Geek Monthly magazine, and it went something like this (well, actually, a lot like this since I just cut and pasted):
Sans Wikipedia, you’d be forgiven for not immediately guessing when the Sengoku Period took place.
So let’s indulge in a quickie history lesson here.
Also known as the Warring States era, the Sengoku Period covers a time of dramatic political and military flip-flop that gripped then-divided Japan, from the middle of the 15th century to the beginning of the 17th, when shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu took charge.
Think something akin to the barbarity of Europe’s Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), minus the religious hogwash but with occasional earthquakes added into the mix, and you may begin to get an accurate picture.
357 years, two months and six days after the peace treaty that ended the European equivalent of complete chaos (in other words, on July 21, 2005, just to save you wearing down your fingers), Japanese videogame producer Capcom - the makers of similarly rough-and-tumble games like Street Fighter, Captain Commando and Resident Evil - released Sengoku Basara (戦国BASARA, aka Devil Kings) for PlayStation 2.
Obviously the game’s specifics revolved around the mayhem of the Warring States period, and it starred three real-life historical warlords as the central cast: Sanada Yukimura (once dubbed the #1 warrior in Japan), Date Masamune (nicknamed the One-Eyed Dragon, for obvious reasons.), Takeda Shingen (the Tiger of Kai), and Oda Nobunaga (the Devil King himself), a man who conquered much of Japan before committing seppuku in 1582.
Given the ever-popular combination of the slice-and-dice action format with samurai iconography (it sold 1.2 million units in Japan alone), this baby was always destined to reach screens other than PCs, and play on machines dedicated away from games - which is where veteran anime studio Production I.G (of Ghost in the Shell franchise fame) became involved.
Their resultant series, released on TVs here in Japan from April [2009], is not directly based on dusty facts from antiquity, but sets its sights on “paying homage to history” - which gives them plenty of leeway to be creative, especially in the character stakes.
Think contemporary brooding flair and surly, somewhat streetwise youth-culture antics that rest at home in the 21st century living room, rather than the blank, honor-bound rural rigidity probably present four centuries ago.
“It also has a high-octane story arc and fantastic action throughout the whole series,” assesses character designer and chief animation director, Toku Okubo. “I think we’ve created a whole new genre that didn’t exist before!”
While this is Okubo’s first major foray into character design, he previously worked on key animation on Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, as well as on the Ghost in the Shell TV series and Immortal Grand Prix, and was the animation director on several episodes of Blood+.
Also on board for the I.G ride is director Itsuro Kawasaki, who helmed the Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle movie and did episode directing chores on Ghost in the Shell and Noir on TV. Scripting the armoured descent into anarchy is Yasuyuki Muto, responsible for the movie Afro Samurai: Resurrection, costume romp Le Chevalier D’Eon, and ninja-actioner Basilisk.
Okubo’s own involvement, however, had quite unusual origins.
“Everything started when the producer, Tetsuya Nakatake, held an in-house competition to establish the character designer for this new series. I‘d worked as a key animator many times, but never designed the characters for any project thus far. I thought this was going to be a good opportunity, and I took on the challenge.”
Luckily for us he was successful, as the character designs here are sensational - although Okubo is keen to pass around the plaudits.
“Each artist added his personal touch in creating the spectacular animation for each character’s fighting technique,” he raves.
“And the background art is beautiful. It perfectly matches with the colour palette used for the characters, and this gives a distinctive realism to the animation as a whole.”
The action here is as vital as the rapidly changing story and the range of unique characters involved, and Okubo is quick to make his pick of the cream of the crop of historical figures at play in the series.
“Takeda Shingen,” he blurts out. “He’s a real dandy, and he can fill the screen by just being there.”
With Okubo himself doing all the cast compositions, Shingen most certainly does - it helps when your own design god goes to bat for you.
Here's the opening montage to the series; you'll have to pick up and watch the rest:
“Sometimes I sing ‘Danger Zone’ in the bathroom. I like the music from Top Gun. When I was a child I dreamed of becoming a fighter pilot, and to this day Top Gun is my favorite action movie. But this is not bathroom music,” laughs Takashi Watanabe.
“Hmm. I think jazz house, because of swing and the punchy hi-hat accents and R&B horn riffs.”
As DJ Warp, Watanabe usually spins far harder techno and tech-house tunes.
Toshiyuki Yasuda, who makes music under his own name as well as doing vocoder crooning as Robo*Brazileira, jumps at the opportunity to answer this one. “Coleman Hawkins’s ‘Body and Soul’,” he cites.
“It never repeats the same riffs or theme throughout the tune, so I feel fresh and stimulated each time I listen to it - which is important for it, isn't it? Although actually no music is really the best, I think.”
“I like deep and dark minimal because it makes me erotic,” suggests Rie Kurihara (better known as veteran DJ/producer Ree.K), and then she goes one step further and debunks the idea in agreement with Yasuda.
The rest of this article is onlineHEREat Forces Of Geek.
Two weeks back for my hack Flash in Japan column over at Forces of Geek I did a feature story on a bunch of cool, talented and rather diverse musicians based in this country (Japan), asking for the feedback on a swag of hotch-potch questions.
We ended up with far more material than we could run in one sitting, so we called that Part 1; without much further ado here’s Part 2 - kept nice and relatively simple - with the further feedback from Masaya Kyuhei, aka DJ Q’hey, Tsuyoshi K, alias producer Cut Bit Motorz, Akiko Kiyama, Ko Kimura, Takashi Watanabe (aka DJ Warp), DJ Wada (Shuji Wada from Co-Fusion), Tatsuya Oe (Captain Funk), Jin Hiyama, Toshiyuki Yasuda and Lili Hirakawa.
Luckily none of these people objected to my more obscure, self-indulgent queries—which this time around all related to that most essential of topics: anime and manga.
To be honest it’s quite probable that, if you live outside Japan, you haven’t yet heard of Ryoji Arai or of the animated TV series Sukima no Kuni no Polta (Polta: A Country Between The Worlds).
My hope is that some day everybody will get the chance.
First regarding the TV series: Polta’s initially short run on Japanese national broadcaster NHK in 2006 generated such a hugely positive response from critics and TV viewers alike in this country that it prompted production company Aniplex to generate a new batch the following year; it’s been on repeat in various time slots ever since.
While ostensibly aimed at kids no taller than most people’s kneecaps, Polta is such a gamely surreal romp that it comes across as deliriously upbeat and gloriously quirky all at once – due in no small shrift to the original character designs by Ryoji Arai, a man rightly considered the best kids’ book artist in Japan, and a one-time winner of the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award in this field.
“I was really surprised!” Arai says now of that honor, which he won in 2005 for the book Refrain Refrain.
...the rest of this interview/story has just been chucked up on the way cool Forces Of Geek website, on which I'll be doing a monthly column from now on. Just clickHEREwith your mouse thingy to read more - then go explore the that site.
Big thanks to Arai-san for his time, plus Yoko on translation chores.
“For me, namazake is the best kind to drink, and I’m so into Kikusui.”
So declares apprentice manga artist Eiko Magami as she refers to Funaguchi Kikusui Ichibanshibori, a canned, non-pasteurized and undiluted nihonshu.
Turns out that 99% of sake on the market has been pasteurized twice - once straight after brewing, and another time after a decent maturation period or just prior to shipping.
Namazake, like a fine wine, has not; it continues to age in the can.
“Kikusui was released in 1972, and it was the first attempt at this kind of sake at the time,” advises Ryoko Takano at Kikusui Sake Co., Ltd., which takes its name from a Noh song concerning a 700-year-old mountain hermit, and is based in Shibata in Niigata. “This is our long-time best seller because of its fresh fragrance derived from a first-pressed and non-pasteurized method, and its full-body taste derived from the undiluted process.”
The rest of this rather wayward (and much longer) homage to one of my favourite Japanese brews is going to be published through Geek Monthly in its November issue, with feedback from DJ/producer Ken Ishii, anime writer/director Satoshi Kon, and Death Note director Shusuke Kaneko - plus an extended mix of the story will be published in book-form next year. I kid you not.
