Mystic action abounds in the second thrilling collection of Fairy Tail, as flame-spewing Natsu, ice-mage Gray, summoner Lucy and the rest of the gang take on sorcerous threats across the world of Earthland. The series is based on the long running manga by Hiro Mashima, and as the anime closes in on its 150th episode in Japan, it’s clearly shaping up to be the next Naruto or Bleach, delivering ongoing adventure to a devoted audience. Unlike a certain orange ninja or black-garbed grim reaper though, Fairy Tail’s roots do not lie in the pages of the famous Weekly Shonen Jump anthology.
Covering everything from the likes of Masami Kurumada’s boxing drama Ring ni Kakero to Akira Toriyama’s world-conquering Dragon Ball, Shueisha’s boys’ manga serial is – to western fans at least – near-synonymous with lengthy action sagas. However, while Weekly Shonen Jump first saw print in July 1968 and is now indisputably the top selling boys comic in Japan, it was actually preceded by almost a decade by rival publisher Kodansha’s Weekly Shonen Magazine.
First published in March 1959, Weekly Shonen Magazine has been a staple of the manga industry for almost seven decades. Generations have grown up reading it, thrilling to the adventures contained within. It’s no surprise the comic has been such a persistent success story – poring through old issues of Weekly Shonen is like turning the pages of manga history. The publication is littered with works by luminary creators – Shigeru Mizuki’s supernatural Spooky Ooky Kitaro; Kazumasa Hirai and Jiro Kuwata’s Eightman, the world’s first cyborg superhero; a whole wealth of work from the “King of Manga”, Shotaro Ishinomori, including Skull Man, Kamen Rider and Cyborg 009; Go Nagai’s Devilman; Tohru Fujisawa’s Great Teacher Onizuka; the list is nearly endless.
Unlike its upstart rival, Kodansha’s anthology often skewed towards an older audience, offering a broader range of content as a result. Though Shonen Jump overtook it in sales and exposure by the mid 1990s, Shonen Magazine has consistently featured some of the best received and fondly remembered series.
In fact, Hiro Mashima’s career as a manga creator has been entirely at the legendary title. His debut work, Groove Adventure Rave (better known as Rave Master in the UK and US) premiered in Weekly Shonen Magazine in 1999. A globe-hopping story of superpowers and a quest for mystic stones, the story ran consistently until 2005, racking up 296 chapters and spawning a 52 episode anime series in the process. After a year off, Mashima returned in August 2006 with the first chapter of Fairy Tail which, at 270 chapters and counting, is looking to smash the 34-year old artist’s previous record.
Between Mashima’s works, sci-fi street skating strip Air Gear and a fictionalised manga based on the hyper-popular girl group AKB48, Weekly Shonen Magazine is on the rise again and the people in charge no doubt have their eyes on reclaiming the top spot once more. Naruto, Bleach? You’ve been warned.
Director Gareth Evans talks to Andrew Osmond about a mania for manga
Now in British cinemas, The Raid is the hardest-core martial arts hit for years. An Indonesian SWAT team swarms up a thirty-storey slum-apartment ruled by a brain-bashing, video-eyeballing crime lord and his mangy tenants. Just about all of them are masters of Pencak Silat, the film’s martial art of choice. Cue a torrent of punching, kicking, headbanging, neck-snapping, back-breaking, head-stamping, cheek-slicing [okay, okay, we get the idea – Ed], punctuated by shoot-outs and nuked fridges. The film’s been covered in awards and rave reviews, and hailed as reinventing action cinema. And the director of this Indonesian opus is… Welsh.
It’s true – Gareth Huw Evans, take a bow. You may have heard the story; how this lad from Hirwaun near the Brecon Beacons studied scriptwriting at the University of Glamorgan, made a couple of student films, and met his future wife Maya. She came from Indonesia, and on Evans’s own account, Maya did much of the running. Seeing her husband’s career stalling, she pulled strings to get him a commission directing a documentary in Indonesia about Pencak Silat. Though new to the style, Evans was a fan since childhood of Asian martial masters: Jackie Chan, Bruce Lee, Sammo Hung…
Evans discovered his own action star during the documentary, a phone delivery man called Iko Uwais. The director claimed that when he offered Uwais an acting job, on his film Merantau (Merantau Warrioron British DVD), Uwais was sure it was a hoax. Together with stunt co-ordinator Yuyan Ruhain, Uwais worked out much of the fighting in The Raid, based on Evans’s vision of the situation. As well as his collaborators, Evans also respects his film influences. In a piece for the magazine Empire, he cites everything from Enter the Dragon to the notorious “Born Free” music video by MIA. Oh, and anime.
“When I was really young, my dad would show me things like Akira Kurosawa, and I watched a lot of the classic samurai films,” Evans remembers. “But after that, I started buying the magazine Manga Mania.” A British magazine devoted to Japan’s pop-culture, Manga Mania included articles and translations of manga serials. “I used to get it mostly for the monthly instalment of Akira, because I loved Akira, that was the first anime film I’d seen. That started the whole wave of anime, like Crying Freeman and Doomed Megalopolis… I used to buy all the videos. My friend bought the Guyver series, but I was more into Crying Freeman, the Triad stuff, the action. I love Ninja Scroll, such an awesome film. Fist of the North Star, Golgo 13 as well…”
Prepare to be shocked, dear readers, but Evans confesses he saw some of these anime when he was a teeny bit young. “Legend of the Overfiend was quite the eye-opener as a child, to be honest!” Evan laughs. “I saw it when I was probably about eleven years old.” (Don't tell the Daily Mail) “I was way too young to be watching it, but back then, none of our parents knew what anime was capable of doing. It was, ‘Oh yes, it’s cartoons,’ and it’s not, it’s absolutely not.Yeah, Urotsukidoji fucked me up big-style…” says Evans, supplying a perfect cover quote.
Manga Mania introduced Evans to Japanese cinema beyond anime. “I read a lot of the reviews and they used to hook me up with different films. I became a huge fan of Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo and Tetsuo II: Body Hammer, I was obsessed with his cinema. Then I saw an article on Violent Cop [the director debut for Japanese megastar Takeshi Kitano]. At that time I was into John Woo movies. In the review it said, ‘Kitano plays a hardboiled cop,’ and my brain must have ignored the sentence and just read ‘hardboiled.’ So I thought this was going to be like John Woo, and then when I saw Violent Cop it was completely different. It was stripped-down, it was raw, it was more realistic and people were killed with one shot to the face. There was an aggression there, the violence was hyperreal and that became a big influence on me.”
Evans is also an admirer of the insanely prolific Takeshi Miike.” I adore Ichi the Killer, Audition, Dead or Alive 1 and 2, Fudoh: The New Generation… I love a lot of Miike’s work from the late 90s into the mid-2000s. Some of his more recent work has been incredible as well, like Thirteen Assassins. I haven’t seen Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai yet, I’m buying it this afternoon! What I love about Miike as a director – and this is something I’ve tried to do a bit with The Raid – is you feel like you’re in the hands of a maniac. Miike can make a children’s movie like Yatterman [a comedy film version of a TV anime, due on DVD/Blu-ray this Monday]. When you’re watching it, there are moments in there like, “Wait, this is for kids?” You don’t know which turn he’s going to take next, you have no idea how far he’s going to push it. That’s something that excites me, when I feel I’m in the hands of somebody who’s going to push the boundaries of everything. Then I kind of get scared and that’s exciting to have in a filmmaker. It applies to Sam Peckinpah, John Woo, Scorsese, David Fincher, Darren Aronofsky…”
Aronofsky leads Evans to discuss the anime director Satoshi Kon, whose imagery was borrowed by Aronofsky in Requiem for a Dream (a shot of a character huddled in a bathtub). “Kon was just fantastic, and such a loss. The first film of his I saw was Perfect Blue and that was such a major step up for anime. I’d seen Otomo’s work and Miyazaki’s work, and those were two very different styles… and then all of a sudden Kon was making films that were just like a normal thriller, but with this incredible imagination behind them, without going into cyberpunk, or the gentle eco-friendly stuff that Miyazaki was doing. This was something completely different; it felt very cinematic and terrifying. Perfect Blue was so frightening to watch. And then Kon followed up with Millennium Actress and Tokyo Godfathers… These films are incredible.”
Did any of these anime influence Evans’s live-action? “It definitely influenced my visual style in some respects,” the director says. “They tend to be a little more stylised than we were going for in The Raid. Crying Freeman feels like a John Woo movie at times, with a lot of slo-mo. It was more the fearlessness of it I admired, the idea that nothing is going too far, that almost-recklessness that I related to. In The Raid, I kept to a line with the violence I wouldn’t go over; there were certain areas, like a moment in the first minutes with a child, that’s a bit of an audience-tester. I had to be very careful with that scene, not to tip it over the edge so I lose my audience. That was a tricky balance.”
Evans aimed for a similar balance with his portrait of Indonesia’s police in The Raid. The plot involves (small spoiler) corruption in the police hierarchy, and a major cop character has a dishonourable agenda. “What I wanted to do in The Raid was not to show all those (corrupt) guys, to just show one of them,” Evan says. “I show the actual SWAT team, and they are the good guys. We had one moment where Iko says himself that not all cops are corrupt, and another character says, ‘If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t have opened the door.’ That was an important point to make, that there’s bad in the world but there’s always good, and there are righteous cops, good guys who’ll fight for what they believe in.”
As a Welsh director of an Indonesian martial arts film, Evans gets questions about his background in Indonesia, as well as in Britain. However, he hasn’t encountered any malevolence from the Indonesian press. “I haven’t had that many weird questions yet, I’ve been lucky with that. Once or twice you get asked, why did I come to Indonesia, or why did I end up focusing on Silat, but truthfully I feel I was very lucky. I fell into this position and it’s been a blessing and I’m just excited to be there and work there.”
Indonesia is Evans’s home now, but he also sees a lot of Japan. His wife is Indonesian-Japanese, so he has Tokyo in-laws. “Whenever we see them, it’s cool because I know I’m a stone’s throw away from Shibuya and Harajuku and Akihabara!” he laughs. “I’ve always been obsessed with Tokyo, I love the lifestyle and the culture. Japan is the only place I’ve been to where it can be 2 or 3 in the morning, and I can go out to grab a drink and feel 100% safe. I’ve never felt that in another country before. Normally, you feel like the foreigner; okay, I have to be careful, be aware of where my passport is… but in Japan I feel so free, and safe.”
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.
Mystic action abounds in the second thrilling collection of Fairy Tail, as flame-spewing Natsu, ice-mage Gray, summoner Lucy and the rest of the gang take on sorcerous threats across the world of Earthland. The series is based on the long running manga by Hiro Mashima, and as the anime closes in on its 150th episode in Japan, it’s clearly shaping up to be the next Naruto or Bleach, delivering ongoing adventure to a devoted audience. Unlike a certain orange ninja or black-garbed grim reaper though, Fairy Tail’s roots do not lie in the pages of the famous Weekly Shonen Jump anthology.
First published in March 1959, Weekly Shonen Magazine has been a staple of the manga industry for almost seven decades. Generations have grown up reading it, thrilling to the adventures contained within. It’s no surprise the comic has been such a persistent success story – poring through old issues of Weekly Shonen is like turning the pages of manga history. The publication is littered with works by luminary creators – Shigeru Mizuki’s supernatural Spooky Ooky Kitaro; Kazumasa Hirai and Jiro Kuwata’s Eightman, the world’s first cyborg superhero; a whole wealth of work from the “King of Manga”, Shotaro Ishinomori, including Skull Man, Kamen Rider and Cyborg 009; Go Nagai’s Devilman; Tohru Fujisawa’s Great Teacher Onizuka; the list is nearly endless.
In fact, Hiro Mashima’s career as a manga creator has been entirely at the legendary title. His debut work, Groove Adventure Rave (better known as Rave Master in the UK and US) premiered in Weekly Shonen Magazine in 1999. A globe-hopping story of superpowers and a quest for mystic stones, the story ran consistently until 2005, racking up 296 chapters and spawning a 52 episode anime series in the process. After a year off, Mashima returned in August 2006 with the first chapter of Fairy Tail which, at 270 chapters and counting, is looking to smash the 34-year old artist’s previous record.
