Doraemon vs. Mobile Suit Gundam?

The latest Doraemon movie will hit cinema screens across Japan in early March, when I'm fairly certain it'll surge straight to the top in box office receipts in the very first weekend it plays.

That process is actually like clockwork every year in this country.

But despite the fact he isn’t at all well known in the Western world, this isn’t some recent-hit sensation – and the title has a history to die for (or at the very least to swoon over in gob-smacked new ways) in terms of anime.

For starters in 2002 Time Magazine dubbed Doraemon the cuddliest hero in Asia, and in 2008 the Japanese Foreign Ministry appointed him their first anime cultural ambassador.

Doraemon started out in manga form in the 1960s, fashioned by Fujiko F. Fujio – a smoke screen coined by its real creator Hiroshi Fujimoto.


It did the big switch to TV in 1973, promptly fizzled, and then was revamped by TV Asahi six years later.

Doraemon hasn’t surrendered his grip on Japanese TVs over the three decades since, or the Japanese everyman’s psyche; I swear that every person in this place can draw his happy face.

And yet while you might be forgiven for thinking this show must set some sort of TV animation record (The Simpsons is a decade younger), it in fact comes in second to another Japanese series, Sazae-san (40 years on air).

Then there are over two-dozen theatrical movies, including the latest, which is titled 映画ドラえもん 新・のび太と鉄人兵団 ～はばたけ 天使たち～, or just plain Doraemon: Nobita and the New Steel Troops: ~Angel Wings~.

Regular readers here, if you indeed do exist, have probably picked up that I’m not a fan of these squiggly “~” things that Japanese animation companies just love to use when they translate their titles from Japanese to English. I know I whine about it often enough.

But grammatical aesthetics aside, the film looks to be a wonderful piece of robot-army-invading-Earth-mayhem, and in the Doraemon universe this promises to be a hoot rather than anything bone-chilling like Michael Bay‘s disgraceful work on Transformers.


So what’s the franchise fuss all about, anyhow?

Doraemon, it turns out, is a blue, dysfunctional mechanical cat from the future (of course) who has no ears but boasts a magical, four-dimensional pouch the envy of any self-prepossessing marsupial.

He’s been sent back in time to sort out Nobita, the good-for-nothing school kid ancestor of the people who built him – but usually instead of accomplishing his task, complete madness breaks out that includes subtle, often ingenious anime references to domestic culture (Mobile Suit Gundam is cheekily alluded to in the new movie) as well as Hollywood classics like West Side Story.

The saga also has some serious psychological eccentricities: for starters, aside from regular panic attacks, our motorized feline suffers from an ongoing musophobia that stems back to the future – to a time in the 22nd century when his ears were consumed by a robotic mouse.

While the TV show focus on Nobita’s bizarre everyday family life and neighbours, the movies go for a more exotic, adventurous edge, but they’ve been a bit rear-visionist in recent years: Nobita’s Great Adventure into the Underworld (2007) may have been the 27th feature released by distributor TOHO (of Godzilla notoriety, who do on average one Doraemon flick per year), but it was in fact a rebake of the sixth – released way back in 1984.

Besides, exotic locations are nowhere near as appealing as Doraemon and Nobita themselves, their time traveling exploits and outrageous futuristic devices, their essentially whacked-out neighbourhood buddies, and an insane overriding story arc.


These have made Doraemon a smash also in China and South Korea, yet he remains a largely unknown entity in the English-speaking world – a happenstance that I truly believe to be bordering on unforgivable ignorance.

Just look at the evidence – our fave feline was voted “cool” by 19 votes to 10 (three people opted out ‘cos they didn’t know who Doraemon was) in a two-month poll at the highly esteemed Doraemon Is Cool website.

By the way, I am kidding you. Really. It’s not quite as esteemed as all that.

At least The Orb got it right. As much as I rarely champion their music, they did a very cool video clip to their track ‘From a Distance’ (on the Bicycles & Tricycles album, 2004) that tracks the printing up of a Doraemon manga – then embarks in some trippy cut-ups of characters and images from the series.




Doraemon © FUJIKO PRO

Double-O-Tokyo

Today was a scorcher, but I finally accomplished something I've been planning to undertake for way too long - yet always for some odd reason placed on the back-burner.

It was at the tail-end of primary school that I discovered that Sean Connery was a far better Bond than Roger Moore, and not via Dr. No (that joy came later).

The revelation came instead in the 1967 production of You Only Live Twice, and it wasn’t just the title-sequence that snagged me.

I know, I know—everyone says Goldfinger is better, and You Only Live Twice tends to be mauled by disgruntled critics trying to build on their largesse, but I love the film.


Catching sights of Tokyo 43 years ago are a hoot, plus there’re the clumsy ninja at the training school near Himeji Castle, and Bond’s sham Shinto wedding and equally counterfeit Oriental makeover.

Ernst Blofeld’s hideaway volcano set (erected not in Japan, but at Pinewood Studios back in the UK) and the Tinkertoy rockets are downright superb, especially for someone who grew up on Godzilla and Thunderbirds - which also happened to be a hit in Japan.

So what if I later learned that James fired blanks in his declaration that the correct temperature for sake is 98.4 degrees Fahrenheit (it's only one of many temperatures), or that his casual mid-afternoon drive to Kobe, with ill-fated flame Aki (Akiko Wakabayashi), is actually a five hour ride?


I had a minor crush on the other Bond girl in the picture, Mie Hama (as Kissy Suzuki), Bond's ring-in bride later on in the yarn, and remain mesmerized by the vocal cords of Tetsuro Tamba (Tiger Tanaka) - though I've since heard that most of Tiger’s lines in English were dubbed by another actor.

Over on IMDB they say this was the handiwork of Robert Rietty.

Oh yeah, and this nifty flick has the “Welcome to Japan, Mr. Bond” line itself that I’ve appropriated and delivered (with far less panache than Charles Gray or Tamba/Rietty) at Narita Airport on countless occasions.


And You Only Live Twice is also the reason that the month I arrived in Japan I promptly purchased the 48th printing of Instant Japanese: A Pocketful of Useful Phrases, first published in 1964, by Masahiro Watanabe and Kei Nagashima. It’s collected dust since but looks cool on the shelf, even if I’m the only one who makes the silly connection to that Moneypenny moment early on in the film.

Anyway, I digress. As usual.

So where exactly was I? Oh yeah - today's little escapade.

I had a day off and decided to walk somewhere in the vicinity of the footsteps of Connery, Tamba, Wakabayashi, and Lewis Gilbert and Cubby Broccoli's film crew - to visit the places where they shot the fifth Bond film back in 1967.


First up? The Hotel New Otani, a 10 acre oasis in Chiyoda that used to be the private garden of a 17th century daimyo but was reinvented as a hotel in 1964 to coincide with the Tokyo Olympics.

The exterior of the building was sequestered by the Bond film crew to play Osato Chemicals, a cover organization for Blofeld's SPECTRE.


Straight after visiting Mr Osato's office, Bond exits via the main entrance, and is almost murdered by a carload of hired gunsels before Aki rescues him and they dash off together in her sleek Toyota 2000GT convertible.

The hotel's extensive, gorgeous gardens were also used in some of the ninja training scenes in the film.

Other parts of You Only Live Twice were filmed outside Tokyo - in or near places like Himeji Castle, Kyushu and Miyazaki - as well as Spain, the Bahamas, and back in England.


But here in Tokyo Bond took in a dose of sumo, an onsen, a massage by scantily-clad young women, chased skirt, then was escorted down to Tiger Tanaka's private transportation hub (cue personal train) - in actual fact Nakano-Shimbashi Station, not far from Shinjuku on the Marunouchi Line.

So I trained it over there after the Hotel New Otani. It's an old station that's pretty much unremarkable; somewhat unexcited by the place, I exited and wandered the surrounding streets a bit, futilely searching for more evidence of a shoot that probably never left the station.

There wasn't much of note to be found anyway - aside from a couple of interesting old houses that were no doubt in much better shape 43 years ago... oh, and the other highlight of the day: the bizarrely sculpted and twisted Chinese Night Pub.

Happy New Year!

So, new year's the big thing here in Japan.

We stayed home and watched Kōhaku Uta Gassen (紅白歌合戦) on NHK: Sayuri Ishikawa, SMAP, Sachiko Kobayashi, huge kitsch dresses and a wee bit of sake with flakes of gold foil floating in it.

Nice.



I pinched this outline of the show from Wikipedia and just tweaked it a bit (hey, it's new year's day; I wanna go relax with the family!):

The program divides the most popular music artists of the year into competing teams of red and white. The "red" team (akagumi) is composed of all female artists, while the "white" team (shirogumi) is all male. Last night the men's team, led by SMAP's Masahiro Nakai, somehow trounced the women's team fronted by actress Yukie Nakama.

The honor of performing on Kōhaku is strictly by invitation, so only the most successful J-Pop artists and enka singers can perform.

In addition to the actual music performances, the costumes, hair-styles, makeup, dancing, and lighting are also important. Even today, a performance on Kōhaku is said to be a big highlight in a singer's career because of the show's large reach.


Anyway, the show finishes around 11:40 pm... then we had to watch these people banging a massive bell 108 times at a Buddhist temple (something called during Joya no Kane) to see out the old year - apparently according to Buddhist beliefs 108 is the number of passions and desires entrapping us in the cycle of suffering and reincarnation. So, the 108 bell chimes symbolize the purification from the 108 delusions and sufferings accumulated in the past year.

Happy new year, mates.