After the Kobe earthquake

I’ve written about this before: but today is the eighteenth anniversary of the Great Hanshin Earthquake, and I’m thinking about what was lost.

I was in the office when I heard that a huge earthquake had hit Kobe around a quarter to six in Japan’s morning.  With the Internet in its infancy and mobile phones still beyond most pockets both in terms of cost and size, all of us at Anime UK relied on email, chat forums and the Press for news. It was hard to get in touch with anyone in Kobe because communication lines were down and power was out. For several days fans in the USA and UK wondered if Ghost In The Shell creator Masamune Shirow, whose studio was in the area, had survived the disaster.

It was several days before I heard from my friend. He and his pregnant girlfriend had been planning their wedding. She was a Kobe girl; they loved the town and were planning to live there. She and the baby were lost.

So today I’m thinking about a child who would have been eighteen this summer, graduating from high school, one child among a host of lost children and lost families. Because that’s how disasters and tragedies happen, one life at a time. When we hear about wars and earthquakes and famines, they aren’t distant events that have nothing to do with us. They’re one man mourning one woman and one child, or mourning all his family; one child without parents or siblings, facing the world alone; one old person with nobody left.

So when you hear about another disaster far away, please do whatever you can. Whatever you can will not bring back the dead, but by acknowledging our common humanity, it will help the living.

When someone is mentally ill, it’s so easy to attribute every problem they have to mental illness. We label people so glibly, and then just read off the labels instead of listening to the individuals we’ve stuck them to. #loony follows them everywhere, and when people see it, they assume it prefaces and influences everything else.

My friend – let’s call him K, because there are Kafkaesque and Kavanish echoes here – has suffered from depression for many years. He manages it with the help of his excellent GP, without medication. He holds down a regular job and has a completely normal life. He’s just someone with a common chronic illness. There’s a lot of it about.

K also suffers from physical problems which keep him in constant pain. Whether you’re mentally ill or not, constant physical pain will get you down. Yet NHS professionals who should know better want to treat K’s pain as a by-product of his depression.

K prefers to keep regular medication to an absolute minimum, so when his GP suggested mindfulness therapy he decided to follow it up. His GP made a referral to the local mental health team, the only gateway to access such therapies in K’s NHS trust. A therapist K had never met phoned and refused to discuss mindfulness therapy. Instead, he wants K to go into group therapy for his depression.

K is already managing his depression. The problem he can’t manage is his constant physical pain. This no doubt contributes to the depression, but is otherwise completely unrelated to it. If the depression goes, the pain will still be there. If the pain goes, the chances are the depression will be reduced.

I repeat: we label people so easily, and then just read off the labels instead of listening to the individuals we’ve stuck them to. A girlfriend had the same kind of problem with a totally different set of doctors a few years back. They kept telling her the symptoms she was reporting were purely because she was overweight. They told her to lose weight and the symptoms would probably go away. She found a doctor who believed in listening to the patient rather than making assumptions, and was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

I wish the NHS was more willing to listen now, but it’s still staffed and run in the same old top-down, we’re-the-greatest, doctor-knows-best fashion. It’s not a resourcing issue. All the money in the world can’t fix arrogance.

People with mental illness, or weight issues, or any other problem, walk around in the same kind of body as anyone else. They have the same degeneration, the same vulnerability to accident and disease. When someone says “I’m in constant pain” the proper response isn’t to decide they’re depressed and sign them up for whatever therapy you think appropriate; it’s to listen and believe them when they tell you where the pain is, then treat that.

The 150th birthday of the London Underground last week triggered thoughts of two more 150th birthdays: the 150th birthday of the Victoria Embankment next year, and the 150th birthday of modern manga last year.

My first thought was how short a time, relatively, that is. 150 years is only just over two lifetimes. That’s outside the personal memory of the oldest living human, but it’s within their reported memory. Someone aged 75 today may remember their grandparents talking about their great-grandparents.

Yet, because most popular history was transmitted orally, much has been lost. These three events are remembered because they involved the well-connected, but the first was an unlikely candidate for historic status. The accidental collision of an innovative expat intellectual and local artists hungry for the new was not considered of any weight beside great public works that changed the face of one of the world’s mightiest cities. Nobody could have predicted that a few sheets of paper would prove so influential.

Japan Punch, which appeared irregularly from 1862 to 1887, was just one of the ventures of Charles Wirgman, a British artist/journalist who also taught Western-style painting and ran a photography business with the romantically chaotic Felix Beato. Wirgman’s entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography acknowledges its influence on expatriate society as well as the Japanese press; yet the notion that its memory, let alone copies, could survive two and a half lifetimes would probably seem laughable to its creator. It was a magazine for the new and growing expat community in Japan, a fanzine for the bright and well-connected: an amusing ephemeron, nothing more.

And yet… a Japanese war baby like Hayao Miyazaki, born into an intelligent, affluent family in 1941, could have had a grandparent aged sixty, born in 1881, who saw someone reading a copy of Japan Punch in childhood, or found one among the effects of an older relative. Such tenuous chains are easily broken by time, undocumented and forgotten, but sometimes they hold strong and fast. Wirgman’s little magazine had an influence beyond anything he might have imagined. Japanese mangaka and fine artists still hold an annual ceremony at  his Yokohama graveside to commemorate his contribution to both comics and fine art.

The Victoria Embankment is the subject or background of millions of photographs. To the tourists and journalists who take the photos it’s part of historic London. Yet the solid ground they stand on today was the moving water of the River Thames just over two lifetimes ago. Sir Christopher Wren wanted to build a great quay “from the Tower to Blackfriars” as part of his reconstruction of the City after the Great Fire of 1666, but nothing came of the plan. It wasn’t until 1864 that construction on the Embankment commenced, sweeping away centuries of history to remake the path of the river. It was completed in July 1870, while Japan Punch was still in publication.

If you want to see the river’s edge that Charles Wirgman would have known while he lived in London, walk about 100 yards back from the present river’s edge to the watergate at York Stairs, built in 1626. London’s only surviving watergate was as familiar to generations of Londoners as Charing Cross station is to Londoners today. Here those who had money for the fare, like Samuel Pepys, who lived a few yards away, could hail a boat and travel along or across the Thames.

The Londoner who was so influential in the creation of manga left his hometown in 1857, and died in Yokohama in 1891.  Wirgman never travelled on the London Underground or saw Princess Louise open the spacious new embankment named for her mother. Yet his flimsy little magazine stands beside them, living in memory, changing history, two and a bit lifetimes on.

Hayao Miyazaki turned 72 years old yesterday. Born in 1941 into the chaos of a world-spanning war, his career has been devoted to making beautiful statements of his belief in peace, harmony and respect for other life forms. Another such statement is expected in his next movie, due out in the summer of 2013.

My first encounter with his work was in 1989, when I saw the movie he made a year earlier, Tonari no Totoro (My Neighbour Totoro.) It became, and remains, my favourite film. It took me on a journey to Japan, where I had tea with Miyazaki in his own studio, Buta-ya, and met Toshio Suzuki and the team at Studio Ghibli. The immediate outcome was my book about Miyazaki, the first book in English devoted to an individual anime director/auteur.

But there was another, subtler outcome of my first encounter with Totoro. That evening in 1989, where I started watching a videotape in a first floor flat in East London and ended up in a different world, was an object lesson in the power of narrative structure. In lesser hands, the almost eventless, conflictless story would have made a beautiful film for small children. Writer-director Miyazaki made it an elegy for the ages, a summary of the human condition as part of the natural world that both accepts and celebrates its fundamental fragility. It’s a film in which Death, never mentioned, never discussed, is front and centre, the fulcrum of the plot, the ultimate antagonist.

Miyazaki once said: “… if we try to make an adventure story with a male lead, we have no choice other than doing Indiana Jones. With a Nazi, or someone else who is a villain in anyone’s eyes.” But what if your plot revolves around the ultimate Man in Black, the one opponent who can and will outgun everyone? And what if your framing narrative is entirely rooted in early childhood?

Generally speaking, Western culture is afraid to talk about death, and especially afraid to talk about death to children. It wasn’t always so; my childhood in an immigrant Catholic community allowed me to see and understand death’s processes and consequences. The faith of my fathers celebrated death as the gateway to ultimate fulfilment.

Miyazaki, coming from a different tradition, takes another route. His narrative frames death, not as a battle we can fight, or as a door that opens only one way, but as a dance in which humans take their turn with all other living things, a journey as simple as the passage of the wind through grass. The girl protagonists, if such a term can be used for a story in which there is no conflict, are aged around five and ten, and their mother is ill. She’s been in hospital for a long time. Over one summer in the country, they learn to fear that she might never recover. Then another and even more terrible separation is threatened. The situation is resolved when the power of Nature, personified in the magical figure of Totoro, reminds the girls that to everything there is a season, and that instead of wasting time on rage or fear of what we cannot change, we should live in the moment we are given. The end credits depicting the change of nature through time give us a final, uplifting set of images of the joy that will come for the children – without denying death its due, but without giving it primacy over the delight of life.

One can profitably consider the structure of the short comic strip (yonkoma in Japan) and the different ways it is used by different cultures and artists. Typical Japanese strips involve a first panel setting up the situation, a second panel developing it, a third panel in which an unexpected event occurs and a fourth panel showing the effects of the event. No resolution or conclusion is required. The situation may be comic, tragic or neutral, but it doesn’t require an “outcome”, simply an observed moment.

In the hands of some directors, the children would strive to help their mother overcome her illness, and her recovery and return home would be framed as a victory. Miyazaki highlights the innocent stupidity of such an approach through an attempt by the smallest child to take some nourishing food to her mother in hospital. Having been told by all the adults around her that eating nourishing food is the way to grow strong and healthy, she reasons that it’s all Mother needs to enable her to come home. But however strong you are, however healthy, the time will come when your life ends, like the life of the food you eat.

Internet discussion of the role of death in My Neighbour Totoro has included speculation that both girls die in the story, that Miyazaki was inspired by a genuine Japanese murder case, that Totoro is a God of Death and that the Catbus is a ferry to the Other Side. Many commentators have expressed horror that such a terrible message could be conveyed in a film for innocent children.

I think they’re missing the point. As Philip Pullman observes in The Amber Spyglass, each of us is born with our death. Every living thing, from the snail and the grass stem it crawls up to the mighty cedar tree, from the sun that sets so magically over the fields to the little girl running along the road in the dying afternoon light,  from the merry old woman who welcomes the girls to the village to the children in the village school, every living thing will die. This is not dark. This is not terrible. This is merely a fact, as simple as the fact of life.

For those who don’t have a religious framework in which to discuss death with children, My Neighbour Totoro provides a wonderful starting point: a life-affirming view which doesn’t deny reality, but puts it into context. In the world Miyazaki creates for My Neighbour Totoro, there are no victors or vanquished, no more or less important forms of life. There is love and loss and sorrow and joy.  The point of being alive isn’t fighting death, or fearing death. It is living.

By refusing to frame his narrative as a conflict, or a struggle, or a story with an easy resolution, Miyazaki acknowledges the infantile foolishness of the fairytale tagline, and gives us something stronger and truer. They didn’t all live happily ever after. They just lived. Until The End.

Tetsuwan Atom on TV

A stunning Atom toy from Takara

Sennin Buraku – late night anime from 1963

Eightman the manga

Eightman the anime

Eightman the merchandise

Wanpaku Oji poster

Like Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, Astro Boy has more than one birthday. In fact, Osamu Tezuka’s little robot  goes one better.  Her Majesty has two birthdays, one official and one physical. Atom/Astro has four. There’s the “official” birthdate in his manga storyline, 7 April 2003. Then there are three physical dates: the date of his debut as a character in manga in 1951, the date of his debut as title character in his own story in 1952, and the date of his anime debut, New Year’s Day 1963.

Yes, Astro Boy turns 50 today – that is, unless we consider his “official” birthday to be the date in June 1963 on which he first appeared as Astro Boy in the US version of the anime series. But in any event, this is his 50th birthday year, his golden anniversary.

It’s also, in a sense, the golden anniversary of anime onTV.

As many people (myself included) have pointed out, Tezuka’s groundbreaking series wasn’t the first domestic animation on Japanese TV. That was an anthology show called Three Tales (3-tsu no hanashi) screened in January 1960. But it was the game-changer, the show that made Japanese children want to race home and switch on the TV every week, the show that convinced other artists and other studios to dive into the uncharted seas of making animation on a shoestring and hoping that merchandise and subsidiary rights would be enough of a lifebelt. By the end of the year, even the mighty Toei, home of top-quality movie animation and previously disdainful of the TV market, had joined the race.

What a year it was for anime! Six more TV series followed Tetsuwan Atom/Astro Boy.  Tezuka’s puppet animation Ginga Shonentai (Galaxy Boy Troop) hit the screen in April. Made in collaboration with the Takeda Puppet Troupe, only one complete episode of 92 is known to survive. Sennin Buraku (Hermit Village,) also screened in April, was aimed at adult fans of Ko Kojima’s still-running gag manga. More robot adventures for children appeared in October when Mitsuteru Yokoyama’s mighty Tetsujin 28-go (Gigantor) shook the screens. Kazumasa Hirai and Jiro Kuwata’s  Eightman followed in November, with a new take on the idea of the cyborg which would eventually influence Hollywood movies like Robocop. Later that month Toei’s first anime TV series, Okami Shonen Ken (Wolf Boy Ken) seasoned Edgar Rice Burroughs with a dash of Rudyard Kipling, offering an action-packed alternative to robots and cyborgs. Before the year ended, hit manga Ciscorn Oji (Prince Ciscorn) by Fujiko Fujio (A) brought the American West to Japan’s livingrooms through the animated adventures of a perky young Native American hero and his cute friends.

The influence of the manga market was obvious. A series based on a popular comic was more likely to attract audience share and therefore advertising and sponsorship. The other great asset of a regular TV slot, its function as a half-hour advertisement for spinoff merchandise, was also fully exploited. Hit manga were already merchandised heavily and there was no reason for anime to ignore such a clearly signposted goldmine.

Another interesting and often overlooked fact is that late night anime for adult viewers was firmly established as part of the anime mix. Most anime was made for juvenile or family audiences, then as now, because that’s where more money is spent on toys and spinoff goods; but a clear awareness that animation can appeal to all age groups is on record in 1963′s TV schedules.

Theatrical animation also had a good year, with three major movies, all from Toei: Wanpaku Oji no Orochi Taiji (Little Prince Fights The Eight Headed Dragon,) Wanwan Chushingura (WoofWoof 47 Ronin,) and the first of eight theatrical features revamped from the Okami Shonen Ken series, which appeared on 21st December with the others following throughout 1964 and into 1965. This set a lucrative and tempting precedent for future rights-holders with a popular TV franchise to exploit, and others have followed Toei’s lead, all the way up to Hideaki Anno with his constant revamps of Evangelion.

Fifty years ago today, anime lit a joyously inventive and absurdly underfunded rocket under the small screens of Japan. That’s cause for celebration, official birthday or not.

Happy Golden Jubilee, Atom. Happy New Year.

Kotonoha no Niwa

Makoto Shinkai announced the release of his next anime movie on Christmas Eve. It will be a love story set in the present day, but based on the ancient Japanese concept of love as “lonely sadness”. From the information on his website, and the title (Garden of Words or Garden of a Thousand Pieces of Words,) it seems that the concept of words and meanings will be central to the story.

Shinkai’s previous works have been about loss, longing, the spaces between people and the crushing impact of the everyday world on the innocent dreams of youth. They are all stunningly beautiful and his authorial voice is so strong and distinct that some critics hailed him as “the new Miyazaki” based on a career total of less than three hours of film. This will be one of 2013′s most interesting releases.

©Steve Kyte 2012

Signing off for a few days to eat, drink and be merry. I wish you all a peaceful, joyful whatever-you-call-this-season, and a happy New Year.

49 years ago today, two movie premieres marked the end of a golden year for Japanese animation. Toei debuted two features: WanWan Chushingura (Woof Woof 47 Ronin aka Doggie March) and Okami Shonen Ken (Wolf Boy Ken.) The first was in line with the rest of Toei’s anime production, a big feature with high production values; the second was a spinoff edited from Toei’s first anime TV series, which had made its debut less than a month earlier.

The day before, 20 December, a new anime series began airing on Fuji TV. Ciscorn Oji: Susume Ciscorn (Prince Ciscorn) was based on a manga by Moto Abiko, one half of the Fujiko Fujio manga duo. Made in claymation, it only ran for 14 episodes, but it was part of the tide that changed the face of anime. (It was also criticised in some US sources for its depiction of Native Americans, although given how invading America treated native America that seems a little harsh. Cartoons, however goofy, are generally far less damaging than real-life land theft and murder.)

There had been plenty of animation on Japanese screens since the war ended, but very little of it was locally made.  This was partly because the Japanese television market was too small to support local production, and partly because American imports dominated.  American shows had already covered their production costs at home, and so could be sold overseas at rates that undercut new local productions: but that wasn’t the only reason. Occupied Japan was a huge social remodelling project, and American TV and movies, carefully selected to show America as the perfect society, were part of the plan to change the mindset of the Japanese people. Selling programmes to Japanese cinema chains and TV networks at low prices wasn’t only good business, it was supporting democracy and modernisation.

The Occupation ended and TV sales grew, but foreign imports were still far cheaper than new Japanese productions. The early 60s saw experiments with short animation on TV, and anime was doing well in the cinema, but it appeared that newly-created animation was simply too expensive and too time-consuming a method for success in TV series.

It took a comic artist to stand the process on its head and apply the lessons of American animation. Osamu Tezuka was a huge fan of both Disney and manga. He’d grown up before the war, reading heavily-merchandised Japanese comics such as Norakuro by Suiho Tagawa. He’d made money from merchandise based on his own work, and he’d seen how Disney used its lavish productions as selling tools, creating a circle that had audiences buying toys and books based on the characters they loved, which in turn kept them coming back to the movies and TV shows. The key was regular exposure to the characters. The weekly TV series functioned as an extended advertisement for the spinoff products. If you make your series cheap enough to get it on TV, and work hard enough to keep it there every week, you tap into a vast subsidiary market. It worked for Disney; Tezuka believed it could work for anime.

That belief gave us the modern TV anime industry. 1963 wasn’t the year it began, but it was the year it really took off. From New Year’s Day to 21 December, Japanese animators were changing the face of their industry.

Japan Post has a wonderful series of postage stamps devoted to anime heroes and heroines. I’ve posted images from a number of these in the past because they’re just so damn gorgeous.

The latest issue, due out in Japan on 23rd January 2013, is all about the World Masterpiece Theatre series Alps no Shojo Heidi (Heidi, Girl of the Alps). It’s the nineteenth set in the Anime Heroes and Heroines collection and it keeps to the same high standard as its precursors, with beautiful full-colour images from the anime. Just look at the sledging scene with those adorable bunnies in the snow!

The show itself, first screened in 1974, is of considerable interest. Directed by Isao Takahata for Zuiyo, it showcases the work of many future superstars including Yoshiyuki Gundam Tomino, Toyo Yamato Ashida and Takahata’s longtime friend Hayao Miyazaki. It’s a reasonably faithful and very entertaining version of Johanna Spyri’s classic novel. It won worldwide acclaim, with dubs in many languages including at least five from the Indian subcontinent, several dialects of Chinese, Castilian and Latin American Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese, Albanian, Afrikaans, Arabic, Icelandic, Persian and Turkish, as well as the usual European versions.

Studio Ghibli hosted an exhibition on the series at its Mitaka museum in 2005/6. Even the BBC has picked up on Japan’s enthusiasm for Heidi as part of  a passion for all things Swiss. The anime had a beautiful new DVD and Blu-Ray release in Japan just over a year ago – well worth hunting down. If it’s a little too pricey, these pretty stamps will set you back just ¥1500.