Jonathan Clements's Blog, page 28

The Society of the Mysterious West

I was a teenager when I first met her, an old lady with too many bags of shopping, who I helped up the stairs at the faculty of oriental studies at Cambridge.

"What are you doing here?" she asked when we got to the top. I had hair down to my waist and pixie boots on my feet, so I probably didn't look like I should have been there.

"I'm looking for Carmen Blacker," I replied.

"Oh," she said. "That would be me. You're not Jonathan Clements, are you…? You can't be…" I had been expected a...

Year Zero

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Practical Archaeology.

Against the Clock.

Against the Law.

On Planet Raster, the history books and archives only go back 54 years. There are only a few stars in the sky, and a totalitarian government suppresses knowledge by splitting families, assigning random names, and ruthlessly hunting down evidence of the past. Benny Summerfield is arrested, shovel in hand, as she literally digs for clues.

Government inquisitors have mere hours to decide whether Benny is mad or a dangerous revolutionary...

Foundation and Empire

Lovely evening yesterday at the Japan Foundation for the book launch of Admiral Togo: Nelson of the East, where I discussed Togo's odd relationship with the British, from his teen years when he stood in samurai armour, wielding a sword and facing up to a warship, through his student days in Kent aboard the training ship Worcester, up to his run-ins with British vessels on the China Seas. Most notoriously, his sinking of the British registered transport Kowshing in 1894, which was captained...

Tōgō at the Movies (1923)

From Admiral Togo: Nelson of the East, by Jonathan Clements. Available now in the UK and soon in the US.

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Tōgō the former samurai was brought face to face with a development of the new age – the motion picture. La Bataille (in America, Danger Line) directed by E.E. Violet, was the international star-studded epic of its day, the tale of the Japanese Marquis Yorisaka (Hayakawa Sessue) who suspects his wife of having an affair with the English captain Fergan (Felix Ford). The vengeful...

Clementaries

There has never been a better time to write about film. In the ten years since the coming of the DVD, there have been some truly marvellous opportunities for the critic, largely caused by the presence of all that memory space on the disc, and the search for added value. The commentary track is not a recent invention. They were available on laser discs beforehand, and sometimes transferred to VHS. Somewhere in my office I still have a "collector's" VHS of The Usual Suspects that dials down...

The Good Life

Kei is wearing outrageous trousers, with a plaid pattern sure to induce a migraine if I watch too hard. He stares at his golf ball intently, and then out towards the distant 18th hole as if planning a big project. But those days are gone.

"I got into anime in 1988," says Kei. "That's a generation ago. My son wasn't even born then, now he's in college. But twenty years is enough, you know? I've done the late nights and the lean years. I want to enjoy myself now. I want to get out. I want…"...

Tōgō in America (1911)

From Admiral Togo: Nelson of the East, by Jonathan Clements. Available now in the UK and soon in the US.

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The Americans were even more overwhelming in their reaction, leaving Tōgō taken aback at their enthusiasm and their energy. The pushy welcome began on the night that the Lusitania docked, when Tōgō found a midnight reception committee determined to whisk him onto land before dawn. Soon after, he faced a gesticulating, yelling wall of journalists and photographers, from whom his...

Structuring Absences

From 1990 to 1992, I lived in a world without television. The first year was in Leeds, living in student digs, getting up to speed in Chinese and Japanese. Then, I was in the Far East in the days before the internet, when a simple question and answer to distant correspondents was a two-week round trip by aerogramme. Snippets of news drifted in, spied in arcane newspapers, mentioned in letters from home. Isaac Asimov died. So did Freddie Mercury. And entirely without my realising, the Soviet ...

Rah Rah Rah

Teenager Ayato Kamina believes that he has grown up in the last city on Earth – Tokyo, protected by its defensive shield from an alien attack 15 years earlier. But Tokyo is really under alien control, its citizens are dupes of the invaders, and the "creatures" that are assaulting it are actually the human resistance trying to break through.

No, this is not a manga. This is a novel based on the first five episodes of a 2002 Japanese cartoon, itself a derivative respray of Neon Genesis...

Johnny Chinaman: Admiral Togo and the British

Free lecture at the Japan Foundation, Russell Square House, 10-12 Russell Square, London

7th July 2010, from 6.30pm

Launching his new biography with an illustrated talk, author Jonathan Clements will examine the turbulent relationship between a Japanese war hero and the people of Britain. Feted as the 'Nelson of the East' after his victory over the Russian fleet in the battle of Tsushima, Admiral Tōgō Heihachirō (1848-1934) returned in triumph to the UK, where he had studied as a youth at ...