Jonathan Clements's Blog, page 30

Mad in Taiwan

In the last week I have been interviewed by Chinese TV, press-passed my way behind the fences and up into the rafters at the boat launch, and chased down the street after two rival Goddess of the Sea professions with a stills camera. I've walked along a beach interviewing an eminent professor, and poked around an illegal temple to Coxinga, literally built on the shifting sands of the Taiwan Strait. I've also notched up many hours of talking headness, wittering to camera about Coxinga's...

May 4th Movement

Almost to the end of the shooting schedule in Taiwan. Sunday was a 22-hour day, but I am having a wonderful time. Full report later. In the meantime, nothing says "I love you" like an adjustable Chinese wonderbra.

My Heart Won't Let Me Say

Another blast from the past — a song translation from 1997 when I was doing rhyming lyrics for Pioneer CDs. This is from the Oh! My Goddess video series opening and closing themes. They were for the full-length versions that I can't actually find on You Tube. But you can get an idea from the 90 seconds that were actually used in the show. If you're interested in methods and tricks for this sort of thing, I did talk briefly about songs in a lecture I gave to the Department of Literary...

Coxinga

Throwing stuff in a suitcase for tomorrow's trip. I'm off to Taiwan for a week's work on a National Geographic documentary about Coxinga. We shot some footage in London a year ago, but this is the big one: much delayed, much rescheduled, but finally we're off to the place he made his home.

There's some historical consultant stuff to do for the re-enactment scenes, and then I am a talking head, discussing my long-standing interest in the man otherwise known as Zheng Chenggong, the leader of...

Somebody Wrote That?

On 4th June, the Japanese will be releasing the DVD and Blu-Ray versions of the anime Yamato Resurrection, an announcement accompanied by excitable trilling about the on-disc extras. This was because the animators made two different endings, and left it to a focus group of 4000 viewers to vote for the one that was used. This is not a problem peculiar to Japan, but endemic in a medium that constantly tries to place a statistical value on creativity itself. I'm just saying, nobody needed a...

Carl Macek 1951-2010

Carl Macek, who died of a heart attack on Saturday, was a divisive figure in anime fandom. If it ever hurt him, it was because he rejected the premise that he was not part of it himself. To his own mind, he was as big an anime fan as anybody else, someone who had put his career on the line to bring Japanese cartoons to America. He was the anime business's inconvenient truth, the man who shrugged with a smile and said that it was fine if you wanted to make your show that way, although you'd o...

Crossbow

From A Brief History of the Samurai, by Jonathan Clements — out now in the UK, and in the US in May. I love this passage because nobody knows what an ōyumi was. The historian in me says "crossbow". The science fiction author says "giant robot."

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One casualty of Japanese warfare [in the 9th century AD:] was the ōyumi or crossbow. Seemingly imported from China, the crossbow existed in several variant forms, and was in use as both an infantry weapon and as an artillery piece. In this latter...

Screening

It's ten o'clock in the morning, on a rain-washed street in London's Soho district. The clubs are dark and closed. The Thai Cottage restaurant won't open until lunchtime. The coffee shop on the corner sells early morning caffeine shots. Yes, for the London media set, this is early morning. This isn't the up-with-the-lark early birdism of sunny California. In media London, nobody's at their desks before ten. They're all out late at night partying, sorry, having meetings in popular local...

Wu-hoo!

A little namecheck for Empress Wu in today's Guardian: "Wu Zetian makes Lady Macbeth look like a pussycat, filled from crown to toe, chock-full of direst cruelty, and then some."

Rather odd that the article would appear in a series called "Great Dynasties of the World", though, since Wu's Zhou dynasty began and ended with her, and was arguably little more than an elaborate filibuster to keep out *real* usurpers. Surely the Tang dynasty that both preceded and followed it would be a better...

(Bring My Love) Right Back to Me

Because the song translations I did for Pioneer were for the music division, not the anime division, they covered theme songs from other companies, too. That is the only possible explanation for Pioneer's decision to hire me to work in 1997 on lyrics for the mad hair-metal theme to Fist of the North Star "Ai o Torimodose". I did the best I could… and you thought Schoolgirl Milky Crisis was weird.

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Shock of love! When heaven sent you it was just the start

Shock of love! Stopped me in my tracks, ...