Andrew Osmond asks if it really is the end for Ghost in the Shell
Solid State Societyis, as of writing, the last anime instalment of Ghost in the Shell. Willthere be any more? Interviewed in 2007, Mitsuhisa Ishikawa, co-founder of Production IG, suggested the franchise could be refreshed by a switch to live-action, with Kusanagi, Batou, Togusa and the rest of Section 9 interpreted by real actors. If it was a success, the franchise could return to anime later.
In April 2008, DreamWorks announced it had the live-action rights and would make a 3D Ghostin the Shell, thanks to the enthusiasm of one of its own co-founders, Steven Spielberg. “Ghost in the Shell is one of my favourite stories,” the A.I. director told the trade paper Variety. Since then, there hasn’t been much news, except for female Shutter Island scriptwriter Laeta Kalogridis coming onto the property in October 2009. (Come to think of it, Shutter Island could be easily reworked as a GITS episode…)
As we’ve noted previously, Stand Alone Complex continues to be referenced implicitly in director Kenji Kamiyama’s subsequent works. Look at Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit, Eden of the East and the trailer for his forthcoming film, 009: RE Cyborg. We’re inclined to think Kamiyama will probably get back to Stand Alone Complex in the future, especially as Solid State Society leaves things wide open for a sequel. Failing that, surely there’ll be a reboot by another director somewhere down the line.
Either way, SSS would make an excellent last chapter. It moves the principal characters on, making clear things will not simply stay at a series status quo. As the film begins, two years have passed since Major Kusanagi resigned from Section 9. Fans will remember one of her sweetest scenes in the franchise was in the first TV episode of Stand Alone Complex, when she gently chided nervous rookie Togusa out of his insecurities. “Geez, what do you think we hired you away from police HQ for? If you’ve got time to be depressed, why not grace us with your special talents?”
In Solid State Society, Togusa is squad commander, officially in Kusanagi’s old place, and endowed with unspecified cyber-prosthetics (something he had steadfastly refrained from getting in the TV series). Section 9 has expanded, as “old man” Aramaki works to secure his future after he’s gone, while we’re fed choice hints about his past. Another character tells him, “You should think about remarrying; there’s no sorrier sight than a single old man.” Is Aramaki what Togusa will become if he’s unlucky?
The older generation’s need to secure its legacy turns out to be central to Society’s mystery story. It opens with a standard action-film scenario – vengeful foreigners plotting destruction on Japanese soil. But it then transmogrifies into a far twistier mystery, involving secret elites and stolen children, with Japan’s modern culture in the dock.
As in other Kamiyama anime, someone is trying to give society a push into a new state. One phrase dropped into the script near the end is “Vanishing Mediator,” a notion from political philosophy. It means a self-effacing agent that can move society from one state to its seeming opposite. If you think about the anime of both Kamiyama and Oshii – in which epic plots are set in motion by stringpullers who promptly die or disappear – it’s a very apposite description.
While the situation is new, Society has a very characteristic Ghost in the Shell story that purposely includes many “kisses to the past.” The story’s string-puller is called the Puppeteer, a nod to the Puppet Master in the first manga arc and cinema film. The TV Stand Alone Complex series was predicated on the Puppet Master not existing, so that Kusanagi would stay a member of Section 9. So what does it mean that the Puppeteer appears now the Major has left Section 9?
Numerous moments in Society mirror both Ghost in the Shell films by Mamoru Oshii, especially the famous sequence where Kusanagi fought a tank and communed with a broken doll. There’s a surprise return for some popular Stand Alone Complex characters (well,not much of a surprise). Conversely, Society reminds us of mortality; in the film, a key character faces death when he’s given a ghastly choice about a loved one that we know, for him, is no choice at all.
Kamiyama’s mentor Oshii directed a classic “valedictory” anime in 1993’s feature film Patlabor 2, which showed a reunion of the robot-driving police team of the title. An example from another anime genre is the 1996 film Kimagure Orange Road: Summer’s Beginning, which took the characters beyond high school, asking what happened after the traumatic end of the love-triangle which defined the source TV show.
At Production I.G, Kamiyama has continued to favour franchises that move characters on from their comfortable starting point. In the first Eden of the East film, King of Eden, the members of the Eden team are surprised to realise they’ve crossed over from counter-culture NEETs to established entrepreneurs. For a police team like Section 9, the obvious move would surely be into politics. Kusanagi for PM, anyone?
From the very outset, Iwao Takamoto (1925-2007) was torn between his parents’ birthplace of Japan, and his own homeland of America. His autobiography, Iwao Takamoto: My Life With a Thousand Characters, notes the uneasy situation in 1930s America, where Japanese immigrants were not permitted US citizenship, effectively ensuring that Takamoto grew up with a different nationality to his parents.
As a Japanese-American growing up during WW2, Takamoto’s dual ethnicity was a constant concern. He and his family were carted off to an internment camp in 1942, and spent the latter years of the war kicking their heels in the middle of the desert. As one inmate waggishly commented, if the Japanese win the war, Takamoto will be sent back to the camp, this time because he is American.
In 1945, Takamoto guilelessly turned up with a hastily drawn set of samples at Disney, where he was hired on the spot – it turned out that his ability to knock out a book full of sketches to order actually trumped the more considered portfolios of his fellow applicants. He arrived at a cash-strapped studio that had only made it through the 1940s on wartime government contracts, and which suddenly had to make money from entertainment cartoons again. His contributions included sequences and designs in Cinderella and Lady & the Tramp. There’s one intriguing aside where Takamoto brings up the subject of Yusaku Nakagawa, an animator sent from Japan to Disney to learn how things are done (and although Takamoto does not mention this, also the little brother of a famous Japanese film star). This is the same “Steve” Nakagawa who ends up a generation later working on a number of Japanese-American co-productions, including Frosty the Snowman and the ill-starred Metamorphoses, although there are allusions to behind-the-scenes skulduggery which kept his name off the credits.
In 1961, Takamoto ended up at Hanna-Barbera Productions, where he would eventually become “creative producer” – a made-up title for a series of responsibilities that, in Japan, would be parsed as character designer and supervising director. Takamoto would often be the point man who created specific looks and characters, storyboarded early shows, and then departed to set up the next project, leaving his creations to live on without him. He threw himself into work on The Flintstones, a show that had already established that it was, much to many animators’ surprise, possible to make a half-hour weekly TV show. He created characters for Wacky Races and Hong Kong Phooey, and most memorably came up with the “comedy dog” for a detective show who soon took over. Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!, with its counter-intuitive exclamation mark, is surely Takamoto’s most enduring creation, and dominated kids’ TV in America for decades. For what it’s worth, Takamoto also notes that he has always thought Scrappy-Doo was “a crummy idea.”
The autobiography itself is a work of academic brinkmanship. Takamoto died as the book was being laid out, which only adds to the sense of legacy and elegy in this excellent memoir. His collaborator Michael Mallory is deftly invisible, leaving Takamoto himself to do all the talking, in a story that spans six decades of animation, as well as tall tales of indoor archery and abuse of thumbtacks. Although of Japanese ancestry, Takamoto was never a “Japanese” animator, but his life-story only goes to demonstrate the transnational quality of the animation business – as The Jetsons is aired in Japan, in turn inspiring Tezuka to make Astro Boy, Go-Bots is made by the Taiwanese studio set up by Hanna-Barbera’s own James Wang, and Scooby-Doo ends up dubbed into Japanese under the hands of Satoshi Kato, an alumnus of Tezuka’s Mushi Production, who also worked on anime such as Berserk, Space Adventure Cobra and Tomorrow’s Joe.
In later years, Takamoto became less of an animator and more of a brand. Following the takeover of Hanna-Barbera by Warner Bros in 2001, Takamoto was wheeled out in countless public appearances at Warners stores around the world, to sign sketches and shill for merchandise. He seems to have embraced this “ambassadorial” role with great gusto, and gleefully reports his unexpected celebrity late in life, even down to the “respect” accorded him by unnamed rap stars when he appeared on The Big Breakfast.
Matt Kamen is on the casting couch for Bleach the Movie
Big-screen Bleach is big business – hot on the heels of the third animated movie, Fade to Black, American studio Warner Bros announces plans for a live-action Bleach movie. Temper the hatred for a second though: unlike the hopefully aborted Akira remake, with the right cast and an appropriate effects budget, a cinematic Bleach movie might not be too bad. So, if Warner reps are reading, here are a few casting suggestions!
Rory Culkin as Ichigo Kurasaki. Put aside thoughts of elder brother Macauley’s typecasting in the Home Alone movies and you’ll find the Culkin clan actually has some impressive acting talents. Youngest brother Rory’s first major role was as Mel Gibson’s son in the 2002 sci-fi movie Signs, and he’s since racked up a ton of critically acclaimed appearances in indie films. As for the physical challenge playing Ichigo would require, Culkin was recently cast as the new Ghostface in Scream 4, so there’s little to worry about there. At 22, he’s about the right age to still pass for a teenager onscreen, too.
Chiaki Kuriyama as Rukia Kuchiki. Kuriyama might be a bit old for the role of Rukia – she’s just hit 27, while the character is meant to appear 15 – but if Warners want to add some Asian cinema authenticity to their Bleach outing, they could do worse than adding her to the starring credits. The talented actress effortlessly pulled off ‘deadly schoolgirl’ in both Tarantino’s Kill Bill Part One and Kinji Fukusaku’s Battle Royale and, having appeared in the original Ju-On as Mizuho, she also has the chops to pull off the horror elements a Bleach movie would require.
Logan Lerman as Uryu Ishida. Lerman isn’t a household name – he’s best known for playing Percy Jackson in The Lightning Thief – but between a growing number of respectable turns in reflective dramas and bigger Hollywood fare alike, his star is on the rise. Crucially though, he also has legitimate action film skills from his role as d’Artagnan in last year’s The Three Musketeers, for which he reportedly trained for three months. Top that up with some archery, dye his hair black and throw on a pair of specs and you have a talented young actor to bring Uryu to life.
Tom Hardy as Byakuya Kuchiki. Presuming an initial Bleach movie for western viewers would adapt the Ichigo’s induction as a Soul Reaper and the eventual infiltration of Soul Society to rescue Rukia, then her conceited elder brother Byakuya would be filling the villain’s role (with the series’ arch-nemesis Sousuke Aizen saved for sequels). For such an arrogant and physically imposing figure as Byakuya, Hardy would be perfect – plus he’s already on Warners’ radar thanks to his upcoming showcase as hulking villain Bane in The Dark Knight Rises.
Quinton Flynn as Kon. The chances of a highly-merchandisable and kid-friendly character such as Kon being dropped are slim, but the snarky lion plush is likely to get a CG makeover. Flynn is already Kon’s voice in the anime’s dub – why not give him the nod for the movie, too? Failing that, Warners will probably try to get Jack Black or Ben Stiller to do another ‘funny animal’ voice....
Bleach: Fade to Black is out next week from Manga Entertainment. The Bleach live-action movie is still “in development”.
Better ideas for Bleach casting..? Shove them in the comments section and let's see who's right!
Rayna Denison "investigates" the Yebisu Beer Museum
The Yebisu Beer Museum is free, informative and it has beer in it. In a city as expensive as Tokyo, these are all serious points in its favour! Though found near the train station in Ebisu, the museum and its beer are technically “Yebisu,” a name designed to flummox language learners due to its use of the archaic, rarely-used “ye” character.
Getting off the train (JR Yamanote or the Hibiya metro), there can be no mistaking that you are in beer country. Practically every famous face from Japanese film and television graces the walls, supping one of the many Yebisu and Sapporo beer brands (Yebisu is now brewed by Sapporo). Head for the sky walk, with its airport-style travelling walkways, and you should end up in Ebisu Garden Plaza. In a further manga link, the Plaza may look familiar to die-hard Japanese dorama fans, as the Hana Yori Dango television series filmed important scenes here, including the spin-off film’s climatic wedding sequence. This should help explain why people will likely be taking photographs of the pretty ugly statuary at the top end of the Plaza when you get there.
For thirsty visitors, the beer museum is well-signposted, and you can get to it by walking down through the Plaza (there are all sorts of events at the Plaza, from Christmas decorations to outdoor film screenings in the summer months) and then turning left through the shopping mall; or, by going straight across the top of the Plaza and turning right at the signpost. You’ll know you have reached the right spot when you can see the giant beer cans guarding the entrance.
A greeter thrusts an English-language explanatory guide into your hands as you walk into the foyer. That is your first indication of the kind of experience you are about to have. The museum looks for all the world like a mix between a really posh hotel and a theatre, with a sweeping staircase and multiple layers of foyer space leading towards a tasting area on one side and the Yebisu Gallery on the other. How you know you are in a beer museum? The giant copper vat in the middle of the room!
The Gallery leads you through Yebisu’s 120-year history, from its beginnings when a group of merchants saw the profit to be made from beer (which, the museum relates, was a high class, expensive beverage in its early years in Japan). Beer would quickly become one of Japan’s most popular kinds of alcohol, with the spread of beer culture in the form of beer halls, beer trains and even beer barges coming to Japan before the advent of World War II.
During the war, all brewers were amalgamated and brands were done away with, and it was not until a wave of public nostalgia for older brands swept through Japan in the 1970s that the Yebisu brand was reborn. The museum offers a treat for manga fans at this point, prominently displaying manga alongside models of the Yebisu brand beers they feature.
The little shop on the opposite side from the Gallery has extremely nice, helpful staff, complete with all the beer paraphernalia you might expect (glasses, t-shirts, stationery and foodstuffs). Next to this, and the real destination for many, is the “tasting” bar, where you can purchase tickets from a machine that equate to beer and nibbles (1 token = 400yen). This is not the cheapest way to drink Yebisu (which you can get at most convenience stores and in vending machines), but the surroundings are nice and the staff is pleasant. It is a lovely way to escape the nearby bustle of Tokyo and relax for a few minutes while contemplating copper vats in museums. And, given the average bar prices in Tokyo, it is certainly not the most expensive way to get a drink, either. The only snag is that you need to be willing to start drinking early in the day – the last admission is 5:15pm and the Museum shuts at 7pm. However, if you want to decamp after that, there is a Sapporo beer restaurant right around the corner…
No writers were harmed in the preparation of this article. Although they might have swayed a bit.
“Nowadays it is getting difficult to create cool, global science fiction,” says director Kenji Kamiyama. “It is because reality has surpassed the future we imagined. Cool SF stories turn up just before the big bang of a new social infrastructure. This time, it was the Internet. Ghost in the Shell was the forerunner and a favourite.”
The issue of an aging population first appeared in Japanese science fiction in the early 1990s. Katsuhiro Otomo’s Roujin-Zsatirised the use of robots to care for the elderly, but around the same time in the original Ghost in the Shell manga, Masamune Shirow was depicting old people literally left out on trash heaps.
Solid State Society returns to one of Ghost in the Shell’s most important themes – the nature of the human spirit in a wired world. Directed and co-written by the Stand Alone Complex TV serial’s Kenji Kamiyama, it considers the possibility that human beings are temporary growths like leaves on trees, fated to fade and die while the real organism, society itself, lives on. It is a provocative and unsettling premise, reducing human beings to consumers and customers, mere cogs in a much larger system, which is only interested in them for as long as they are productive.
In Solid State Society, children are in short supply, while the burdensome population of retirees is increasing. Furthermore, the very technology that was supposed to make the future a paradise of easy living is keeping people alive for inconveniently extended periods, leading to Solid State Society’s “Kifu Aged” – pensioners on life-support machines, regarded by a brutal society as parasites.
Children played a crucial part in the rise of mass entertainment. Television and the post-war birthrate created the largest juvenile audience Japan had ever seen, numbers that boosted the ratings for children’s programming so high that anime became a viable and a welcome local product. Those same children became the industrious workers whose savings kick-started Japan’s economic miracle, and the harassed yuppies that presided over the bubble economy of the 1980s. Japan’s children were its greatest resource in the late 20th century, but with old age they risk turning into a new liability. The Western world faces a similar problem, but Japan will see it first.
Older Japanese are threatened with retirement in a land where there are simply not enough young, able-bodied adults to fund pension schemes. Nor are there large, old-fashioned extended families to support them. Japan never had an official one-child policy like China, but high housing prices and a high cost of living encouraged many families to stay small. A large group of modern Japanese children has grown up without brothers or sisters, aunts or uncles, or cousins. Modern anime reflects this friendless generation, most notably in the children’s show Bubu Chacha, in which a lonely child hangs out with local ghosts.
The Ghost in the Shell series has always mixed tantalising real-world issues with a science fictional spin, and Solid State Society is no exception. To a Japanese audience, it resonates even closer to home. One reason for Japan’s population predicament is its obstructive attitude towards immigration; “Japanese-ness” is not a matter of one’s place of birth or chosen allegiance, but a racially defined characteristic that is all but impossible for a foreigner to acquire. Even ethnic Koreans, some of whose families have resided in Japan for centuries, attended Japanese schools and speak no other language but Japanese, are still regarded as foreigners. Thus, when Solid State Society’s Motoko Kusanagi speaks off-handedly of a “Refugee Naturalisation Act”, she points to a chilling sign of a future Japan in a state of crisis – opening its doors to Chinese, Indonesians and other outland ethnicities. The suspects faced by Section 9 in Solid State Society have bafflingly monosyllabic names that sound alien to Japanese ears; they are blamed for Japan’s ills, but Japan desperately needs them to stay and support its economy. Foreigners are infecting Japan like a virus, altering it forever. They bring new hope, but also new tensions, and for Section 9, new crimes.
Solid State Society also taps into modern Japanese paranoia about potential enemies, particularly North Korea, the rogue state with a nuclear programme and a scandalous history of abducting Japanese citizens for use in espionage – not a creation of science fiction, but a documented fact. Between 1977 and 1983, as many as 80 Japanese missing persons cases are rumoured to have been North Korean espionage kidnappings, although Pyongyang has only admitted to a dozen. The youngest was just thirteen years old at the time of her abduction.
Solid State Society cunningly whips up a political standoff between the past and the future, asking if it is right for the old-timers (which, in 2034, means us) to dictate what their grandchildren do, and how they should behave. It shares some trends with modern green politics, which asks how as-yet unborn generations will regard us, and true to the spirit of earlier incarnations of the anime, it takes such things to extremes. “The message,” reveals director Kamiyama, “is one of reclaiming a society in which people are aware of and considerate towards each other.
Consider the roar of a waterfall. Now replace the water with crashing metal ball bearings and turn the volume up to eleven. Congratulations! You have just imagined the deafening interior of a pachinko parlour.
Believed to have evolved from the American game Corinthian Bagatelle, introduced to Japan in the 1920s, pachinko is Japan’s favourite pastime. It’s also big business, pulling in more cash annually than the domestic car industry. It has been accused of fuelling organised crime, ruining lives, and even funding North Korea’s missile programme. But what it all boils down to is the allure of those little silver balls.
A pachinko machine resembles an upright pinball table. Insert your cash, and hundreds of ball bearings (each usually worth about 4 yen, or far less than a penny) pour into a tray in front of you, which are then fed automatically into the machine. The balls are launched into play by an automatic plunger, shooting one by one from the bottom of the machine to the top, where they then cascade at thundering velocity through clusters of pins down the screen. Most of them will fall uselessly to a hole at the bottom.
The aim, by subtle manipulation of a throttle control, is to fire the stream of balls at just the right speed so that they will fall into designated scoring holes, triggering a slot-machine-like spin of three numbers on a digital screen behind the playfield. There then ensues an animated battle between the numbers to determine whether you’ve hit the jackpot, at which point thousands of balls drop into a rectangular bucket below your machine’s tray.
If all this makes pachinko sound like an exciting game of skill and action, think again. For all but the most seasoned pros, it’s simply a case of finding the ‘sweet spot’, or twisting the throttle to the optimum speed, and then not moving your hand again until home time, allowing your eyes to glaze over as the game plays out automatically in front of you. Newcomers may find a buzz from hitting their first jackpot, but in reality, pachinko parlours are depressing homes for motionless addicts: No number of flashing lights and brand tie-ups (Star Wars, Fist of the North Star, Kinnikuman, pop singers Koda Kumi and Hiromi Go, etc) will rouse the attention of the pachinko zombie.
The real skill lies in knowing which machine to pick. First of all, a shindai (new machine) is most likely to pay out, as its win average slowly drives down to the standard 1 in 400. Even this average is variable, however, as the parlour staff customise the machines during their closing hours to make them harder or easier to win on. It’s a careful balance of tweaking the odds to rake in more cash without turning customers elsewhere.
As such, the pros have ways of choosing the machines most likely to pay out on any given day, and it is common to see them queuing up before a parlour opens to get their machine of choice. And since the odds are so long, you’d better be prepared to stay at one machine till closing time.
But hang on, isn’t private gambling illegal in Japan? Unlike public-run moneyholes such as lotteries and horse, bicycle and boat racing, pachinko is legally a leisure activity. So once you’ve enjoyed a run of jackpots, what are you supposed to do with your glistening buckets of winnings?
Here’s where things go grey. Officially, you trade your winnings for prizes, much like at game centres in the UK; typical items include cigarettes, stuffed toys, cosmetics, even bicycles and DVD players. But unofficially, you can simply exchange your winnings for a token, walk to a nondescript kiosk nearby and cash it in. Authorities tolerate this borderline illegal trade since the kiosk is supposedly always owned by a company separate from the pachinko parlour, and yet mysteriously those tokens end up back in the parlour of origin. According to market research firm Yano Research Institute Ltd, about 95 percent of all winnings at Japan’s 14,600 pachinko parlours are exchanged for cash.
As you might expect, pachinko parlours tend to have links to organised crime. But you might be surprised to learn that it’s not Japan’s Yakuza that is believed to have the upper hand, but Korea’s. It has been variously reported that between 70 and 90 percent of all pachinko parlours are owned by ethnic Koreans, and ‘official’ sources report that anywhere between 3 billion and 200 billion yen (£22.7 million to £1.5 billion) flows back to North Korea annually, believed to be partly funding its controversial missile programme.
These parlour operators are not afraid to get sneaky. For one thing, they allegedly operate a ‘gambling tax’, whereby a portion of all winnings are kept by the house to pay police bribes. And they reportedly have tricks to entice newcomers, such as planting paid players at high-scoring machines; giving machines better odds on certain public holidays, when new customers are more likely to try pachinko for the first time, and worse odds on weekends, when parlours are most crowded; and adjusting the odds on a machine that is in play to make a player on a heavy losing streak win a few jackpots, to keep him coming back (this last is highly illegal and one of the few reasons a pachinko parlour might be closed by police).
And still, the Japanese love a good balls-up. According to reference site Japan Zone, the pachinko business “employs a third of a million people, three times more than the steel industry; it commands 40 percent of Japan's leisure industry, including restaurants and bars; and [has] 30 million regular enthusiasts coughing up more 30 trillion yen (£226.5 billion) a year.” The average pachinko punter parts with 30,000 yen (£226.50) on every visit.
It’s not without its cultural impact, either. In the manga Bleach, Yachiru refers to Ikkaku as a “pachinko-ball head”. Also, in the anime and manga Poltergeist Report, main character Yusuke Urameshi is a pachinko addict and, at one point, misses out on a battle with one of the Seven Demons because he is in the middle of a pachinko game. And if you were to head to YouTube and search for Nicolas Cage and Sankyo, you’d find a series of somewhat disturbing ads featuring the American action hero line-dancing with bunch of pachinko-men, lusting after a woman’s earring, fantasising about triplets, and singing about the things he loves.
So, if you can reconcile with your wallet the likely loss of cash and with your conscience the likely proliferation of nuclear weapons, give pachinko a go next time you’re in Japan. But for god’s sake, don’t forget your earplugs.
Rayna Denison on K-on! and the rise of the nichijo anime
The best thing about K-on! is undeniably the music, from the (cloyingly?) cute opening credits to the gothic-lolita inspired visuals of the closing sequence, whenever the Sakuragaoka Light Music Club performs, there is fun to be had in this series. Moreover, the show’s burgeoning obsession with dressing its female leads in costumes that shade from schoolgirl uniforms into maid costumes, provides a variety of copy-able cosplay get-ups likely to feature soon at a convention near you (if you haven’t seen them there already). By these various means, K-on! carefully walks the line between exploitation and a rather sweet self-empowerment-through-music storyline.
The series is built out of building blocks from series you have seen before – a ditzy female lead, Yui Hirasawa, who cannot keep more than one thing in her head at any given moment but who also has a savant-like ability to be good at things when the plot requires it; the shy girl Mio Akiyama; the tomboy Ritsu Tainaka and the dopey rich girl Tsumugi Kotobuki. But what these stereotypes have going for them is this: K-on! circles around the pleasures to be had from watching the activities of group of young women as they mature into adults. And the genre is more focused on the everday than on fantasies about magical girls. The series is born out of an emerging genre of anime called nichijo-kei, or everyday-style anime. Critics cite Azumangah Daioh! and Lucky Star as the start of the phenomenon.
One easy way to spot a nichijo anime is to check whether or not it is based on a 4-panel manga strip, like Kakifly’s manga for K-on! The impact of this Garfield-like origin narrative, with its shorter-than-short episodic “moments” building up over time into an story, is an emphasis more on character than plotting. The K-on! anime makes this a strength, focusing on the exceptional within the everyday of the Light Music Club’s time together – cramming for a test, performing for the first time and uncovering their teacher’s shady musical past. These moments indicate the passage of time in a way that would otherwise be lost in repeated scenes of tea-drinking and cake-eating. Indeed, the biggest repeated joke of the series is the fact that the Light Music Club hardly ever seem to practice and, yet, are successful. Yui picks up the guitar as if by magic, with Mio (on bass) teaching her the basics in one episode, and their academic advisor, Sawako Yamanaka, teaching her to do vocals in another. The others group members (Ritsu on drums and Tsumugi on keyboard) are shown performing in the first episode, barely scraping through the motions of a slow Love Me Tender. Then, miraculously, the Light Music Club are shown to be able to play the much faster Fuwa Fuwa Time and the brilliant My Love is a Stapler, a song that every teenage girl who’s ever indulged in cute stationery will recognise.
One of the other oddities of these nichijo anime like K-on! is that they aren’t usually aimed at the female audience. Instead, they tend to be made for male viewers, with K-on! originally published in a manga magazine for older boys. This may explain the tightrope walked between fan service and moments, like when we get a close-up shot of Yui’s bum as she klutzily falls over in the opening scenes of the first episode, or the boob close-up on a bikini-clad Mio when the group go for their first “training camp” at the seaside (Episode 4), and the story’s focus on female characters and their personal development. Chibi-moments are also dotted through the show, making the female characters behave in peculiarly child-like ways (particularly Yui and Ritsu, the tomboy drummer). However, these squashed-down versions of the girls are usually pretty funny, and may well have been intended to inspire protective moe feelings in male viewers. Despite this though, read from outside Japan, they do seem to take away from the achievements of the Light Music Club, who joke repeatedly about their incompetence throughout – especially about the fact that they are only good at playing music when there is a live performance to be done and records to be sold. Put all these elements together, and you end up with an inoffensive musical comedy that walks the line between musical fun and fan service, that will probably be more popular with women than men outside Japan, and which contains enough maddeningly catchy music to have you humming along for weeks afterwards.
Jonathan Clements reviews a new book on “hidden” cinema
It was a good day at Central Park Media. After several months of sneaking around and clandestine meetings, they sent in the heavies. A bunch of New York policemen and a lawyer from CPM kicked in the door of a warehouse to find thousands upon thousands of VHS tapes, stacked from floor to ceiling. Many were CPM anime products. All were pirated.
Quite by accident, I was talking to one of CPM’s staff a decade ago when the news broke, which meant I got to hear the euphoria and excitement close at hand. Jeff the marketing guy confided to me that this was by no means the first time they had uncovered such a duplication ring. They just hadn’t told anyone. Following negative publicity in the late twentieth century, when any anime industry initiative to crack down on criminals was met with internet bleating and self-entitled trolling, the US anime business had, ironically, begun to conduct its piracy enforcement below the radar. The seizure of thousands of dollars’ worth of counterfeit tapes was a matter of private celebration, but it was not widely reported.
Piracy, as Ramon Lobato notes in his new book, is as old as cinema itself, with Georges Melies’ Voyage to the Moon (1902) widely ripped off all over the world. But nobody has devoted quite the attention or academic rigour to piracy as Lobato, whose Shadow Economies of Cinema is a superb contribution to film studies. Lobato doesn’t merely rehash tired arguments of ownership and access, industry's speculative (and to him "dubious") logic of loss or fandom’s recurring doctrine of lapse; he provides hard data and persuasive models about those areas of the film world that are usually ignored. Lobato’s interest is not merely in illegal activities in the film business, but in completely legal elements that rarely get any attention. He notes that 59% of the American film market alone is “straight-to-video”, arguing that while much of this material might be crap, it’s still relevant, and forms the “invisible bulk” of the global industry. As they might say on the street – traditional film distribution is the 1%, but that leaves 99% of other stuff, that doesn’t get the newspaper coverage or the academic examination. It doesn't qualify for the Oscars and it doesn't get reviewed in Sight & Sound. But its fans love it just the same. Or at least endure it.
In fact, as Lobato argues, “informal” networks (legal and illegal) can offer distribution of films and subjects outside the mainstream -- for ethnic minorities otherwise unserved, for interests not quite mainstream enough, and... well, anime. Bleach and Naruto are heavy hitters in modern UK anime, but neither of them is actually on British television. The hundreds of thousands of discs they have shifted have been largely “invisible” to the TV-watchers of Britain, even though both were “television serials” in their native Japan. If you’re a British fan of these shows, you are watching another culture’s television below your own culture’s radar. You’re part of what Lobato calls “informal distribution.”
Statistics, of course, can be misleading. If we take just two films from the US market, we can soon see why. Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira did very nicely for itself on American cinema screens, generating a million dollars for Streamline Pictures. But Pixar’s Toy Story did a million dollars’ business every week, for six months. Lobato’s argument that something like Akira is just as important as Toy Story will be welcome news to anime fans, although straightforward financial statistics tell us that Akira’s footprint in the marketplace is nowhere as big as Toy Story’s. But sometimes that doesn’t matter. Of the cinema-goers who loved Akira. 100,000 of them came back and bought it on tape.
I’ve got my own little booth. The floor is padded, like one big mattress, and decked in leather. There’s a desk built into the unit, upon which sits a PC with a large combination TV-monitor and a keyboard. The padding continues under the desk, so that I can lay my entire frame diagonally and stretch my legs. Above the desk, another ledge houses a PlayStation 2 and a powerful desk lamp. On one wall is a hook to hang my jacket and a bag for my other personal possessions; on another hangs a large pair of headphones. A small legless chair helps me sit upright to read. My shoes are outside the booth, in a tidy little container. And piled up on the desk are the latest issues of my favourite manga, omnibus collections and magazines.
For any hardened pulp aficionado, a decent Tokyo manga cafe is nirvana. With thousands of volumes of manga available to read in a hushed and comfortable setting, they offer the ultimate way to kill an hour or two, be it day or night. Don’t fancy reading? You can surf the net, watch a movie or play an MMORPG. Or just lie back and take a nap (blankets provided). An unlimited supply of soft drinks is supplied at no extra charge, and sometimes ice cream, too. Hot and cold food is usually on the menu. Want to crash overnight? There may well be a shower.
Manga date? Grab a double booth with a mini-sofa. Movie date? Some manga cafes even have a big-screen “theatre” room. Updating your CV? Get a room with a reclining chair and print to your heart’s content.
My relationship with Tokyo’s manga cafes (or manga kissa, short for kissaten, which means “cafe”) goes right back to my first trip, when a friend took me to crash at one overnight after we missed the last train home. Next, whilst waiting a month for my internet connection to be plumbed at my very first Tokyo apartment, the local manga cafe was pretty much my office. This small, daytime-only establishment was much less well equipped – with no private cubicles, customers had to read their books on shared sofas, while the computer set-up resembled your average internet cafe. But even here, people laid out to sleep on the sofas, the drinks were free, and a hot menu was always available.
These days, I use them as a place to retreat between meetings or before gigs, to finish off a little work or, more likely, to nap. Once you have a favourite spot (mine’s the Gran Cyber Cafe above Forever 21 in Shibuya, as pictured), it starts to feel like home.
Gran Cyber Cafe is part of the B@gus chain – unlike restaurants or other businesses, chain manga kissa are usually better than small independent ones, because they offer lavish space and resources. Other chains include Manboo and Gera Gera. But at Gran Cyber Cafe, I can help myself to all the soft-serve ice cream I care to eat, safe in the knowledge that the smoking section is far enough removed as to not pollute my booth, and all within the bargain price of 200 yen (£1.50) per half hour or 1,600 yen (£12) overnight.
However, for some Japanese, kissaten actually are home. Better equipped than capsules and cheaper than hotels, manga cafes provide shelter for 5,400 homeless people around Japan, according to government statistics. Some of these so-called Net Cafe Refugees even use the cafe’s address for their post and on job applications, with some businesses offering a discounted price on their booths if paid monthly in advance, just like a cheap apartment.
Of course, this is an extreme and tragic case. While manga kissa cubicles are often comfy, the rest of us would have to be pretty mad about manga to actually want to live in one, since there’s not much in the way of privacy. The walls between booths are wafer thin, and not built all the way to the ceiling – it’s a bit like being in an open-plan office, allowing you to see into the next cubicle.
But if you’re in Japan and you want to catch up on your reading without loading down your luggage (and if you can read kanji, since the books are rarely, if ever, in English), or to take the load off your feet during a day of exploration, look out for the nearest manga cafe. And if you hear me snoring in one of the booths, remember: Ssssshhhhhhhhhh.
Solid State Society is, as of writing, the last anime instalment of Ghost in the Shell. Will there be any more? Interviewed in 2007, Mitsuhisa Ishikawa, co-founder of Production IG, suggested the franchise could be refreshed by a switch to live-action, with Kusanagi, Batou, Togusa and the rest of Section 9 interpreted by real actors. If it was a success, the franchise could return to anime later.
In Solid State Society, Togusa is squad commander, officially in Kusanagi’s old place, and endowed with unspecified cyber-prosthetics (something he had steadfastly refrained from getting in the TV series). Section 9 has expanded, as “old man” Aramaki works to secure his future after he’s gone, while we’re fed choice hints about his past. Another character tells him, “You should think about remarrying; there’s no sorrier sight than a single old man.” Is Aramaki what Togusa will become if he’s unlucky?
