Jonathan Clements's Blog, page 29

Justice is Blind

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A much-loved movie icon in the 1960s, and a familiar face on Japanese TV in the 1970s, Zatoichi defined an era in Japanese period drama. The name was a pun, meaning either Ichi the Fourth-Ranking Disabled (a reference to samurai-era guilds), or Ichi the Master of the Sword. He was one of many itinerant onscreen trouble-shooters, but he was special – a blind warrior who occupied the lowest rung of the social ladder, a sometime minstrel or masseur, a lover of booze and gambling, and a...

Attack of the Space Leeches

We shall, as is traditional, have to call the show in question Schoolgirl Milky Crisis. The Japanese had left two episodes of it with the TV channel. Bigwig the producer was so important that he could only schedule the meeting during his lunch hour, which was why the opening teaser played out to the room over the sounds of him grazing on a salad.

I watched as the superheroes gathered onscreen to save the world from alien parasites. Across the table, a figure we'll call Gothboy thumbed...

Girlfriend in a Coma

Sleeping Bride is an oft-overlooked entry in the filmography of the director Hideo Nakata. Made after his two world-famous Ring movies, and two years before his acclaimed Dark Water, it seems to have been ignored by many critics because Nakata was heralded at the time as the new face of Japanese horror, and Sleeping Bride did not fit that category. It is not a horror film. It is a quirky, some might say, perversely one-sided romance, between a boy and the comatose girl with whom he falls in...

Things I Learned From Japanese Television

Rain makes you sneeze.

Any injury can be healed with a white sticking-plaster on the cheek.

Sex always leads to pregnancy.

Nothing good will come of foreign travel.

Women in white are psychos (unless they are getting married).

Old women are either mad or Kaoru Yachigusa

Every Japanese home has a spare green-ink divorce application form.

It's impossible to find a deserted roof-top from which to throw oneself.

If you have a college reunion, someone is going to have an affair.

If you have a college...

Eurovision Shouty I-Spy

Back by popular demand, the Eurovision Shouty I-Spy Game. Now something of an international fixture, and ruining the neighbours' evenings, not only in the UK, but in Sweden, Finland and Ireland. Hello to all our new players around the world.

Step One: you will probably need to be quite drunk. Step Two: The following sights will be seen during this Saturday's Eurovision Song Contest. Can you see them first? Remember to shout it out. Party hosts will need to keep score of who gets what first...

Timeshift

Fascinated by the ending of Lost, not for the story (on which I gave up years ago, somewhere around episode two) but for the decision to broadcast the finale to the UK at the same time it airs in the US. Part event television, part anti-piracy measure, the simulcast won't stop bit-torrenting, but it will presumably please advertisers, sure that at least some consumers will watch in real-time, and have to sit through the commercial breaks like mere mortals.

For modern youths, who find it so...

Togo to Go

Haus Publishing have put the first thirty pages of my biography of Admiral Togo online for free. Check it out!

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Togo Heihachiro (1848-1934) was born into a feudal society that had lived in seclusion for 250 years. As a teenage samurai, he witnessed the destruction wrought upon his native land by British warships. As the legendary 'Silent Admiral', he was at the forefront of innovations in warfare, pioneering the Japanese use of modern gunnery and wireless communication. He is best known a...

If Shakespeare Wrote Japanese TV

As an exercise, imagine a familiar storyline, after 15 minutes with a Japanese TV script editor:

Romeo Tanaka is a young business executive at Montague, a prominent Tokyo trading house. He sneaks into the latest product-launch by rival company Capulet Inc, only to fall in love with Juliet Nakamoto, a pretty marketing executive. After an initial set of misunderstandings, the two begin a clandestine affair, aided by Romeo's comedy sidekick Mercutio, who is secretly in love with Juliet's...

We Will Mock You

Perched above London's Tottenham Court Road like a misplaced effigy of Saddam Hussein is the 20-foot fake-bronze statue of Freddie Mercury, late moustachioed lead singer of Queen. His image adorns the front of the Dominion Theater, where the sci-fi musical We Will Rock You plays to a packed house every night. The second act begins with a rendition of the group's 1980s hit "One Vision," used here as an ironic attack on homogenized, dull, global media culture. In the midst of the fast food...

Clap Your Hands If You Believe in Ninja

From A Brief History of the Samurai, by Jonathan Clements — available now in the UK and in the US.

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Considering the ubiquity of the ninja in twenty-first-century popular culture, it is remarkable how fast they appear to have sprung out of nowhere in the 1950s and 1960s.

At first, they were imagined in black – the default colour of stagehands and puppeteers, whom traditional theatre-goers were supposed to blank from their sight. Ninja were proletarian heroes, peasants and underlings in the...