I’ve tried every possible displacement activity. I’ve written all my thank-you letters for holiday gifts. I’ve put every engagement and reminder for the coming year into my new diary. I’ve even done my tax return.

Time to face the fact that I still can’t be bothered to write about the anime of 2011.

Yes, there were some nice new series. Puella Magi Madoka Magica was more than just another excuse for overage guys to lust after underage girls. There were huge robots stomping the hell out of everything in sight. Mazinkaiser SKL was as insane as you’d expect from Go Nagai, whose work always delivers exactly what it says on the tin. There was yet another kiddie-Gundam. Even though Gundam AGE has a bit more story and a bit more thought than some of the recent entries in the canon, maybe I should finally accept that the Universal Century is well and truly over. There was a pretty new Studio Ghibli movie from Miyazaki father and son, who have apparently healed their much-publicised breach over Tales from Earthsea.

But what sums up the anime of 2011 best for me is that, here in the English-speaking West, the most-talked-about title was premiered in 2009 and released in Japan in 2010.

Redline has been hailed in terms that would seem extravagant if applied to the Second Coming.  Critics have vied to lose control of their bladders in public homage. Luckily, the film doesn’t take itself nearly as seriously as some critics do. I enjoyed it. Try as I might, though, I just couldn’t ditch my sense of proportion.

It’s a stunning visual experience, one of those movies where you could watch it several times and still find something new in the pictures. It was apparently in development for seven years, thus siting its conception in 2002, well ahead of the lacklustre Andy Cheng live-action street-racing feature of the same name from 2007. Although it’s director Takeshi Koike’s feature debut, Koike’s extensive experience and the might of anime studio Madhouse ensure that it’s edited with visceral cunning and magnificently paced.

What a pity, then, that the story is the usual boy-racer fusion of Top Gun and Top Gear. Writer Katsuhito Ishii says he wanted to make a movie for rural Texas rednecks who love their cars, and he’s done it beautifully. I just can’t get excited about it: been there, done that. The opening monologue of Tetsuya Nakashima’s 2010 masterpiece Kokuhaku, delivered by a middle-aged schoolteacher in sensible shoes, gave me more chills and thrills than the whole of Redline.

When I think of the anime of 2009, it’s Summer Wars, Yona Yona Penguin and Mai Mai Miracle - all three from the same studio as Redline - that get me excited. In 2010 I loved Fullmetal Alchemist, and very much enjoyed both Hetalia and Arrietty. There was nothing in 2011 that delivered the same thrill, the sense of finding something to explore beyond the surface of the image.

Never mind. Maybe, out there in 2012, there’s a new anime that will knock my socks off. It’s happened before – not often, but often enough to keep me interested. It can happen again. Fingers crossed.

Now Digital Manga has opened a Kickstarter account to raise $6,500 to produce a single-volume English edition in the same format as their edition of Swallowing the Earth.

I’m not entirely convinced that a business should ask customers to subsidise its setup costs for professional productions. There again, I’m completely unconvinced that customers should feel they have the right to rip off published works for free and give them away to all and sundry. The publishing world is changing very fast and businesses are looking in all directions for ways to cut their costs and maximise those increasingly elusive profits.

This new form of vanity publishing, where you pay to publish someone else’s project, and (at the higher levels of contribution) get your name associated with their effort and creativity, is popping up in movies and music as well as print production. It’s a digital riff on the old theatre concept of the “angel”, a backer who chips in a contribution at an early stage in the hope that the production will eventually turn into an hit in London or on Broadway and go international.

The key difference is that angels, as well as getting a signed programme and prime seats at the premiere, also get a share of the profits in return for the risk of losing their capital completely. Kickstarter cushions the risk by guaranteeing that if a project doesn’t reach its declared fundraising target in the chosen timescale, all money is returned to the backers. So you don’t actually risk a penny.

I think Barbara is a strong enough book to make its money back and turn a profit. But I’m not a publisher, dealing with the daily realities of upfront costs and long waits for payment. This project could get a superb book onto the shelves of English-speaking readers, and I hope it succeeds.

Please spread the word – and maybe also tell the world what Tezuka book you’d like to see make its English debut? If Digital Manga succeed with Barbara I have another, much bigger project in mind – what would be your choice for the next Tezuka translation?

Snow at Nezujinja, photos & design © Steve Kyte

Logo from the #TezukaDay Facebook page

Those Brazilians know how to party, and today they’re throwing a party for the God of Manga, Osamu Tezuka. Blogs, vlogs, podcasts and websites are celebrating the life and work of the man who revolutionised Japanese popular culture in the postwar years and went on to create an astonishingly inventive body of work.

There are a number of excellent sites devoted to the man and his work in various languages. His own company, Tezuka Productions, maintains a fascinating bilingual site with links to publishers and distributors worldwide.  TezukaInEnglish.com is a vital resource, providing links to his work in many different translations as well as intelligent, passionate research and discussion from Tezuka fans.

His work is also featured on many other sites, testimony to the range and depth of his intellectual curiosity. Cybernetic Zoo records his passion for quirky robots.  He designed album sleeves for artists, including one for his longtime collaborator Isao Tomita‘s electroclassic “The Firebird”. His graphic skills were turned to many uses, like this fabulous range of fire safety posters. He worked on exhibit design, creating a character for the Suntory Whisky Museum and a host of corporate and municipal mascots, like Hanazukin-chan, mascot of the 1990 International Garden and Greenery Expo.

Artwork by Osamu Tezuka © Tezuka Productions

He inspires creative minds across many disciplines and cultures. An exhibition at the Royal College of Surgeons of England highlighted his influence on medical technology. Choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui premiered his dance work TeZukA at Sadler’s Wells this year. Kenji Yanobe takes inspiration from Tetsuwan Atom to create a series of constantly evolving works in “the ruins of the future”.

Yanobe’s work at the Osaka World Expo 70 site provides a further link. Tezuka was on the organising committee for the Expo and made many contributions to its design. And there’s another, deeper tie to Tezuka’s own inspirations and history: Japanese artist Taro Okamoto, whose centenary we celebrate this year, and who designed the Tower of the Sun for Expo 70, was the son of Ippei Okamoto, the mangaka, essayist and man about town who was one of Tezuka’s early influences. Expo 70 links one of the founding fathers of 20th-century manga with the man who revitalised manga after World War II and the Allied Occupation, and with two of Japan’s leading contemporary artists.

I had my own ‘Tezuka Day’ celebration back in 2009 when my book The Art of Osamu Tezuka: God of Manga was published. Writing that book was one of the best experiences of my life; not only did I get up every morning and go to work with a genius, but I met so many fascinating, creative and inspiring people, all influenced by this most remarkable man.

You’ll find many ways to celebrate Tezuka Day. I’d suggest reading one of his manga – a few now available in translation, many more to come – or watching some of his animation. Happy Tezuka Day!

Dragonball © Akira Toryama

I tweeted a link to this picture earlier in the week: the new Dragonball stamps due out next month from Japan Post. I’ve mentioned other releases in the same series before: yes, this is a series, an ongoing homage on sticky-backed paper to the role of anime in Japan’s pop culture.

It’s not the only such tribute paid by Japan Post to one of the nation’s best-known exports. I thought it would be fun to post a slideshow with a selection of Japan’s postal tributes to its animation and comic superstars. (You can judge any otaku’s old-school credentials by how many characters they recognise.)

The Anime Hero/Heroine series started in 2005. It’s produced in co-operation with the Association of Japanese Animations, established by studios and companies to promote the production and marketing of Japan’s animation worldwide. The Dragonball sheet, available in Post Offices all over Japan from 23 January, is the seventeenth issue in the series.

Japan Post also releases other anime and manga related stamps, as well as a host of stationery items. “God of Manga” Osamu Tezuka was commemorated on Japanese postage stamps in 1997. Current anime craze K-On! not only has stamps devoted to the anime, but also a set depicting the real-life school on which the high school in the anime is based. Characters and shows without a Western fanbase – Hyotanjima, Anpanman, Norakuro - remind us of how much we still don’t know about anime and manga, especially older material.

When Shonen Sunday and Weekly Shonen magazines celebrated their 50th anniversary in 2009, two sheets of stamps showed a selection of characters from each magazine in full colour. (Black and white art works for manga, but most postage stamp designers avoid it like the plague.)

Other forms of animation and character merchandising are not forgotten. Godzilla and Gamera both featured on the second sheet of the “Japanese Movies” series released in 2007. The Transformers movies got their own commemorative covers in the same year. Videogame Resident Evil (Biohazard in Japan) got its own stamps in 2006. Hello Kitty has appeared on many stamps, featuring with her boyfriend Daniel as a Heian princess in July 2008 and most recently starring alongside Astro Boy (Tetsuwan Atom) in the PhilaNippon 2011 commemorative series.

Comic characters from other lands are also stuck on Japanese envelopes. Snoopy got his own stamp sheet in 2010, Peter Rabbit appeared on two sheets this year. The sheer inventiveness of Japanese stamps, with their varied shapes and colours and their beautiful sheet design, is a visual delight. It’s often hard to break the elegance of the design and put the stamps to their intended purpose.

Photographs and memories, as that Jim Croce song reminded us, recapture moments that would otherwise be lost in time. Film does it even better. The Internet combines all three into a primordial soup of memory – less than total recall, with the distortion even the best lens imposes, but still a remarkable way to recapture at least the shape and echo of things we thought lost forever.

Otaku News just republished an interview I did with them in 1999. The editor said, when he asked me if it was OK, that he thought much of the material was still relevant today. Reading it again, I was amused at some of my own pronouncements.

On the Internet: “… it’s made everyone into an instant expert and enabled a lot of rubbish to be talked on many an otherwise interesting topic. I have been very disturbed by the way the immediacy and anonymity of the net encourage the proliferation of the most appalling bad manners and bad habits, and give the weight of spurious authority to people who know very little apart from how to put up a cool looking website.”

On Gundam: “When I first saw Z Gundam I was deeply impressed. I still love Gundam, though I find one or two of the more recent incarnations less attractive. The design is good, the characters are good, and I love the basic premise – there are no aliens or demons involved, all the evil and pain and conflict comes from mankind and we have to find our own solutions.”

And on writing a book about Osamu Tezuka: “The only Westerners who could really write a great book about Tezuka-sensei are Frederik L. Schodt and Fred Patten, who knew him personally. I’d love to see them tackle that project.”

That last sentence is still true. The past is memory, the future possibility.

One might ask, as blog Manga Worth Reading did despite their support for the initiative, why a professional publisher would need to turn to fans to raise funding for a project whose only costs will be paper and printing. The biggest upfront costs – translation and origination – don’t impact reprints unless a book carries forward losses. One must, however, be glad that a remarkable book by an author whose adult works remain largely unexplored will soon be back on the market.

Over on Twitter, manga critic Deb Aoki greeted the news with a question: what other classic/niche titles would you like to see? Restricting myself to reprints of titles already translated, both in the spirit of the question and to short-circuit my usual rant about the need for an English-language edition of Tezuka’s Barbara, here are three lost masterpieces I’d love to see revived.

Of course, there are many more – what would your choices be?

Covr © Riyoko Ikeda, Sanyusha

1) The Rose of Versailles by Riyoko Ikeda, translated by Frederik L. Schodt

OK, my including this is a cheat. It was never meant for the native English-speaking market. It was published in 1983 as a teaching aid for Japanese students of English.

I don’t care.

The only quibble I have about this amazing book is that Schodt only got to translate the first two volumes. I’d like to see them reprinted as the first stage in a project to get the whole of The Rose of Versailles out in English. Until then, Kana have a nice three-volume edition in French from Amazon France or Amazon Canada.

2) Banana Fish by Akimi Yoshida

Japan’s view of New York, crooked politicians and cover-ups, the fascination of a good bad boy and what it’s like to go down the mean streets as a tourist and find oneself part of the action: Yoshida’s heady brew reminds us that shojo manga can go far beyond pretty. That’s one of the reasons why shojo translations worked such magic in the moribund English-language girls’ comic market and why I love this book so much. 19 volumes, out of print at Viz, long overdue for a revival.

3) What’s Michael? by Makoto Kobayashi

Out of print from both Dark Horse and Eclipse, and richly deserving of another outing, this charmer is an ideal gateway drug for people who don’t like manga, but adore Snoopy or Garfield – or, come to that, LOLCats. Slice-of-life observations of human-cat interaction mixed with off-the-wall fantasy and sly glances at the absurdities of 80s pop culture. Kobayashi’s funky feline made his home debut in 1984 and began English-language serialisation in 2000. He deserves another chance to strut his stuff.

The Yoshiwara set, Toei Uzumasa Eigamura

A couple of weeks ago I posted about our visit to the haunted house at the Toei Uzumasa Eigamura. In passing, I mentioned a couple of dates whose significance should be emphasised.

Toei began operations in 1951, making this the company’s 60th anniversary year. The place where the fledgeling film company began making movies, dubbed “the Hollywood of Japan,” has an even longer history. The first studio in Uzumasa opened in 1926, making this the 85th anniversary of moviemaking in what used to be a quiet bamboo forest.

Bando Tsumasaburo, image from Wikimedia Commons

Hollywood, now home of the American movie industry, had only got off the ground sixteen years before, when D. W. Griffith’s 17-minute short In Old California became the first film made there. A year later, the Nestor Film Company upped sticks from New Jersey for better weather and less restrictive local authority policies.  Hollywood’s renowned sign was only three years old (and had actually been erected to sell dreams of a different sort: an expensive real estate development.)

By the time the Twenties started to roar, movies were booming all over the world. Japan already had a number of film studios, and in 1925 an ambitious young actor named Bando Tsumasaburo established his own production company and agency in Nara, and looked for a site to build a studio.

The Bantsuma Productions studio was built in Uzumasa in 1926, when the Keifuku railway opened a new station just a few hundred yards away. The combination of cheap land, rural settings and rail access made the area attractive to film-makers and a number of major studios followed the actor-impresario to Uzumasa. Many great movies were shot there, by renowned directors including Kenji Mizoguchi and Akira Kurosawa. The town’s contribution to Japan’s movie history was immortalised on film in 2010, in Yoji Yamada’s Kyoto Uzumasa Monogatari (Kyoto Story,) a nostalgic contemporary love story laced with documentary inserts remembering old-time Uzumasa in its glory days.

Tsumasaburo sold the studio to Shochiku in 1930 and  moved to a new studio in Yatsu, near Chiba, in 1931. A Shochiku affiliate company, Teikoku Kinema, moved in, but folded in 1931. The former Bantsuma studio was used by several companies in succession, but closed down for a time during World War II due to Government restrictions. In 1947 the Toyoko Motion Picture Company resumed feature film production there under Mitsuo Makino, scion of a renowned Japanese movie dynasty. In 1951, Toyoko became part of the newly-formed Toei Company and the studio had another new name – Toei Studios Kyoto.

Toei expanded fast, moving into animation feature film production in 1956 with the foundation of its renowned studio in Nerima, Tokyo. As TV gained ground in Japan in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Toei used its expertise in historical films, and its Uzumasa sets and costume archives, to make historical dramas for the small screen. The studio also made science fiction and science fantasy shows for TV; its colourful team-hero shows were re-edited, redubbed and revamped in the 1990s to create the international franchise phenomenon Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers.

Kamen Rider 2010 © Toei

In 1975, just a year before the site’s 50th anniversary of film production, Toei Uzumasa Eigamura, or Toei Kyoto Studio Park, was opened to the public. The outdoor sets are still used for filming – Toei’s website offers prices for sixteen stages and backlot locations, including those in the park, and it isn’t uncommon to see filming going on there. The company’s link to live-action sf and fantasy is honoured with a stunning display of props, costumes and sets from dozens of hit TV series in an aircraft-hangar sized museum of tokusatsu (special effects) and sentai (team) shows.

A visit to Uzumasa is a walk back through Japan’s movie history. This year, we say “happy birthday” to the studio that started it all and to one of Japan’s leading film and TV companies.

This week is always a celebration in Britain. 406 years ago, a group of Catholics led by Guy Fawkes planned to blow up the King of England at the State Opening of Parliament on 5th November 1605. The plot was foiled: the plotters died horribly. Yet England’s fear and hatred of Catholics was so great that, even though the fear has largely receded, we burn Guy in effigy and let off huge quantities of gunpowder on every anniversary of his epic failure.

Japan has anniversaries of its own to celebrate. Two days earlier, one of its most beloved sons was born and one of its most remarkable icons made its debut. 3rd November was the birthday of Osamu Tezuka and the date for the world premiere of Ishiro Honda’s groundbreaking movie Gojira, better known to Western fans as Godzilla (because in the Fifties, American movie distributors didn’t think their audiences had evolved far enough to pronounce foreign words correctly.)

I’ve already contributed my own few thousand words to the millions written about Tezuka: the God of Manga, the father of the modern industry, the man who nailed moe in 1948 in Lost World, redrew the map of girls’ manga with Princess Knight and drafted styles and systems still used today. He would have been 83 years old last Thursday, but he died aged only 60 in 1989. That loss is almost incalculable. 99-year-old director/screenwriter Kaneto Shindo is still active, and Akira Kurosawa was working until his death at the age of 88. Since Tezuka produced over 150,000 pages of manga in 43 years, plus anime, design and other work, we might have had another 70,000 pages of manga and several more epic series and films by now.

As for Gojira, that fabulous fusion of monster myth and even more monstrous reality, in 1954 he was the perfect embodiment of Japan’s fears of a world out of control. The movie was so powerful that its  original version was shown in the USA only in Japanese-American communities. The 1956 edit, with an authoritatively American Raymond Burr as mediator and the scenes of nuclear horror removed, was released in the USA as Godzilla in 1956. Honda’s original version didn’t get a US release until 2004. In the intervening half century, Gojira had won an army of fans throughout the world.

My other half is a kaiju fanatic, so we’ve made a number of pilgrimages to sites trashed by the grey giant. My favourite is in the heart of Tokyo. Gojira stomps the city in fine style, attacking the Diet, the railways and the high-rises, and perpetrating iconic outrage on the clock tower of the Wako building in Ginza, Tokyo’s glitziest shopping district. The American bombardment had left the Wako building one of the few landmarks still standing at the end of World War II; now the Japanese fear of nuclear disaster threatened it.

Ginza has plenty to offer non-Godzilla fans. The buildings are worthy of attention, and even the tiny local police offices have their own special charm. Walk past the ritzy stores and glitzy window displays, and at the opposite end of the street from Wako you’ll find the Hakuhinkan Toy Park, home to doll mecca Licca Club 67 as well as four more floors of playtime. Under and around the railway tracks at this end of the street there’s a less pricey selection of bars and restaurants.

But for me, Ginza is forever Gojira territory. He even has his own bronze statue in the area. The perspective in the photo above is a cheat. The statue on its plinth is safe and small and friendly, but it reminds us of a time when this smart street was devastated by a force beyond comprehension. Happy birthday, Big G. Don’t let us forget.

© Steve Kyte

It was, without a doubt, the scariest thing I’ve ever done for fun. And I won’t ever do it again.

Twenty minutes on a suburban train gets you from the futuristic bombast of Kyoto’s central railway station (imagine wrapping the Death Star from Star Wars around a very big train set) to the leafy quiet of Uzumasa. The Toei Uzumasa Eigamura (or Toei Kyoto Studio Park  as their bilingual website calls it) is a 5 minute walk from Uzumasa station, though Japan Rail Pass users will need to get off 15 minutes away at JR Hanazono.

There’s been a movie studio in the area since 1926, and Toei has operated from here since the company’s foundation in 1951. The theme park opened in 1975, and although most filming is done on the separate studio lot, you can still see scenes being shot on the permanent exterior sets of the park.

If there’s anyone in your party who doesn’t care for theme parks, they can take a detour to Koryu-ji, Kyoto’s oldest temple, built during the lifetime of scholar-politician Prince Shotoku to house a glorious statue of the Buddha given to him by the Korean court. The temple complex has burned down twice, in 818 and 1150 CE, and been rebuilt twice, but the Buddha still smiles into the future, forever ageless, knowing all things pass, and hence entirely undisturbed by the horrors I endured a few hundred yards away.

The Eigamura is a wonderful place to spend a day, and there is more than enough to keep fans of Japanese pop culture happily occupied. If you’re not interested in the demos of how movies are shot or how fight scenes are choreographed, there are all the charming Showa-era and earlier artefacts and re-creations to admire. If it’s too wet to explore the streets and alleys of the lot, or stroll around in costume having your picture taken as a samurai or geisha, you can head indoors to the aircraft-hangar-sized display of costumes and props from tokusatsu – Japanese live-action SFX – shows. Most guidebooks say to allow at least two hours; this pair of geeks stayed until they threw us out at closing time, visiting and revisiting every part of the exhibitions and exterior sets. (Because, you know, there are places where 773 photos just aren’t enough.)

But we did not go back into the haunted house.

It wasn’t the modest extra admission charge that put me off repeating the experience. From the outside, it didn’t look like much, but it looked like fun. Despite the warning cones and taped-off renovations in the entrance, the exterior was slightly more tasteful than the average British or American funfair attraction. There was nothing to suggest the horror to come, although I wondered why there was a bilingual notice at the admission desk stating very firmly that guests must not punch or kick the staff. They seemed nice enough: the lady in the ticket booth was sweetness personified…

There are no fancy modern SFX here. All the shocks and thrills and screams and shivers are delivered by technology that’s been around since the Edo era and before – trapdoors, wind machines, moving floors and basic soundboxes. And actors. We mustn’t forget the actors. I won’t.

In the chilly semi-darkness, the bodies lying on the floor or chained to instruments of torture look like models. Then a cold hand grabs your ankle: a half-seen figure materialises from a wall and lurches moaning towards you, dripping blade in hand…

Five minutes in I was gripping my partner’s arm like the most shrinking violet that ever swooned in a gothic novel. Fifteen minutes later, when we emerged again into the safe commercialised theme-park daylight, I was shaking, my heart racing, my mouth dry. There was a point where I seriously considered going back the way I’d come. My embarrassment at having to tremble my way past the sweetly smiling lady in the ticket booth like a scared toddler was stronger than my abject terror – but only just.

It was nothing but smoke and mirrors, light and sound and timing, but it worked on me. My other half, manly to the core, wasn’t scared at all – or at least, not as scared as I was. He’s seen more gory movies.

The reason for that notice at the entrance, by the way, is that some visitors get so scared they hit out. The actors are extras or contract players from the studio, boosting their income when there’s no work on Toei’s films or TV dramas. Bruises mean more time in makeup; more serious injuries mean time off work.

I enjoyed every minute of the Eigamura. I even enjoyed the haunted house, in a way. But I don’t want to enjoy it again.

Happy Hallowe’en.