Tom Smith interrogates pop star Suga Shikao about his favourite anime.
Suga Shikao is an ambassador of contemporary Japanese pop. With his guitar fine-tuned in the ways of funk and pop-rock music, and a mind capable of writing some of the most thought-provoking, insightful lyrics to hit Japan, he left his job as a salaryman to take on the Japanese music world, and came out as its crowned king.
Suga has fifteen albums under his disco-infused belt, all of which have debuted in the top ten – a record for a Japanese male solo artist. His songs have become part of Japan’s national curriculum, and his lyrical and song making skills have powered hits for Japan’s biggest pop groups, including KAT-TUN, Arashi and SMAP. Throw in two sold out concerts in London and you can see that these strong words of praise are not unfounded, nor payment for having my large face plastered in the music video to Yakusoku (Promise), his latest single at the time of writing.
While Suga is no stranger to the charts, he also maintains a close relationship with anime and Asian film, with several of his songs finding their way into titles such as the Boogiepop series, the Death Note and Dark Water films, and many more. I caught up with the star during his busy schedule in London to quiz him on his absolute top three anime titles. After much deep thought he whittled his list to the following:
xxxHolic
The xxxHolic series, adapted from CLAMP’s manga of the same name, follows troubled youth Kimihiro Watanuki as he contends with a daily curse; he can see spirits, and they’re drawn to him like he’s a piece of scrumptious human-shaped candy made especially for phantoms. Things get all the more bizarre when his path crosses with that of the owner of a shop that grants wishes.
Suga Shikao’s song ‘19sai’ acts as the opening theme for the entire first series – a track that initially put him on the radar for many Japanese music fans outside of Japan. Other Suga songs present in the franchise include ‘Sofa’, ‘Kazanagi’ and ‘Adayume’, plus ‘Nobody Knows’ from the currently unreleased second series; xxxHolic: Kei.
“xxxHolic contains strong Buddhist overtones,” states Suga. “I like that kind of theme, it’s not just for Japan, it’s something an international market can enjoy, too”.
Jonathan Clements goes back to the future with Masaaki Taniguchi’s Time Traveller.
“The fans have an image in their head of what the Girl Who Leapt Through Time ought to be,” says director Masaaki Taniguchi. “So I have to respect what has gone on before. Of course, it is a different story. The core of the story will always be boy-meets-girl, framed somehow through a time leap, so that’s the essence. But I think in this version I’ve also captured the things that make the story interesting: the pain of remembering, and the universal beauty of things. I hope that resonates with all audiences, even though times change.”
There have been a dozen different versions of Kazuko’s story, from its original incarnation as a sixties sci-fi tale, through TV serials and movie versions, manga incarnations and republications of the novel with different illustrations. In the 2006 animated feature The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, directed by Mamoru Hosoda, Kazuko Yoshiyama was a free-spirited spinster, mourning the passing of a love that could never be. But even then, there was a sense that Kazuko’s forbidden love was reasserting itself in her mind – or at least a forgotten promise to a forgotten figure.
Masaaki Taniguchi’s live-action version is both a reboot and an end to the tale. In it, Kazuko Yoshiyama is reconceived as the kind of person that the original high-school do-gooder was likely to become: a single-minded bluestocking. She has kept her maiden name, but has an eighteen-year-old daughter, Akari (Riisa Naka), the product of a doomed liaison with a globetrotting photographer. Moreover, she has been diligently experimenting in the laboratory, and is on the verge of recreating the magical elixir that permits travels in time.
Kazuko’s scrapbook of her infant daughter bears the name “Akari Hasegawa”, implying either a broken marriage or that the Kazuko of 1988 truly expected to be Mrs Hasegawa before long – promises, or broken promises, still loom large in Kazuko’s mind. “I had to have someone for Kazuko who could give that sense of a smouldering flame of love,” says Taniguchi. “An inexperienced actress would never have been able to convey that, which is why I went for [Narumi] Yasuda.”
As Others See Us
The Girl Who Leapt Through Time has become such a fixture of Japanese teen fiction because it so artfully allegorises the threshold of adulthood. Very soon, the teens who experience each new variant of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time will find themselves blundering into the future they could never have imagined, and yearning, with just a touch of sadness, for their lost youth. Yasutaka Tsutsui’s original story, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, was first serialised in 1965. For the Kazuko of the 2010 movie to truly be the original Kazuko, she would need by now to be a retired old lady in her sixties. It is fairer to assume that if this is a sequel at all, it is a sequel to the 1972 TV series, or the 1983 movie starring Tomoyo Harada.
Original author Yasutaka Tsutsui, when asked to comment on the production, sent something more like a poem: "Half a century from the original work, A daughter wanders in the strange Showa era. Re-experiencing the love that was her mother’s, As the story turns into one of reincarnation."
Combining the attention to technological and geographical detail of Gunsmith Cats with the music and design aesthetics of later Bee Train classics such as Noir and Madlax, the anime Gunslinger Girl carves its own niche into the sub-genre of “girls with guns”. Yu Aida, who first created it as a manga series in 2002, drags in such disparate influences as La Femme Nikita, Leon: The Professional, The Bionic Woman, Battle Angel Alita, Ghost in the Shell and Italian seventies crime films such as The Valachi Papers, combined with a recurring focus on troubled youth fighting a government’s battles.
In a near-future Italy where political crime has returned to the levels of violence last seen in the 1970s, supposed government charity the Social Welfare Agency operates as a front for a wet-works division, partnering experienced combat professionals with crippled, often orphaned girls rebuilt as cyborgs. These girls and their handlers are referred to as “fratelli” or siblings, as their cover is often as brother and sister. However, the antiterrorist training is complicated by the emotional demands of the young girls, exacerbated by the need to use a combination of drugs and brainwashing to enable them to deal with both the prosthetic augmentation and the orders to kill. The stage is set for realistic drama on all fronts, be it political or personal.
In keeping with all great anime and manga, the emotions and the characterisation are at the core of Gunslinger Girl, balanced with decent action scenes and the incredibly rare flash of panty to keep less-demanding fanboys happy. Italian politics, crime, domestic terrorism, chauvinism and class tensions are all accurately rendered as details in the wider narrative. Guns, cars, clothing, and food are all correct and present. The girls are the heart of the story, and each comes with a heartbreaking back-story and present conflict. The handlers are also shown to suffer emotionally from the job, except where they refuse to engage, while even the opponent terrorist group is well-characterised: humans of different beliefs rather than simple villains.
Gunslinger Girl: Il Teatrino can be watched by those unfamiliar with previous iterations, as the first episode acts as an effective re-statement of the core of the series. Whereas the first series was produced by the Madhouse studio, this sequel passes the baton to Artland, who bring a more traditional approach on the design and art front, but retaining the importance set by the original’s soundtrack, a fine mix of classically-inflected pieces and better-than-usual J-Pop. Artland’s secret weapon, however, is original manga creator Yu Aida, brought onto Il Teatrino as head writer. This allows this version of the series to aim as high as the manga series for that fine blend of characterisation, emotion and action.
Andrew Osmond traces the links from Miyazaki’s Laputa to the works of Jules Verne.
In his proposal for the anime classic Laputa - Castle in the Sky, the director Hayao Miyazaki wrote that he wanted to set the story in a time when “machines are still exciting and enjoyable, and science does not necessarily make people unhappy.” The machines would not be mass produced, but “possess the inherent warmth of handcrafted things... The vehicles are a diverse collection of hand-built, eccentric inventions.”
This vision is expressed in Laputa’s brilliant title sequence, where we see great fleets of dirigibles, galleons hoisted aloft by propellers, and shoals of flying islands. The images purposefully recall old illustrations. Parts of the sequence make use of “hatching,” tight parallel lines giving an antique texture to the pictures. The style and subject scream Jules Verne, the pioneering author of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1869). Verne, too, envisaged marvellous craft in the air or sea, his dreams drawn by great illustrators such as Edouard Ridou and Leon Bennett.
If you’ve wondered what Laputa’s title sequence would look like at movie-length, then seek out The Fabulous World of Jules Verne. This is an extraordinary 1958 Czech film by the fantasy director Karel Zeman, who used fake scenery, mechanical props, stop-motion and real actors. Zeman also mimicked the “hatched” illustration style, overlaying his screen images with lines and pin-striping his film’s costumes, decor and models. A zeppelin is flown by a pedalling pilot; divers drive deep-sea pedalos with handbells; there are war-camels on roller-skates! (There’s an anime in the last one...)
Laputa is also linked to several Verne-derived anime. The oldest is a TV version of 20,000 Leagues, which reduces the story to forty breathless minutes. Made for the American studio Rankin-Bass around 1972, it was animated by Japan’s Top Craft studio, which made Miyazaki’s Nausicaa a decade later. (Top Craft’s co-founder, Toru Hara, later produced Laputa, Totoro and Kiki’s Delivery Service.)
Miyazaki wasn’t involved with 20,000 Leagues, but he made a lighter submarine adventure in “Treasure under the Sea,” an episode of Sherlock Hound (available as a box-set from Manga Entertainment). Actually, the mini-sub in the story is incidental. Miyazaki is far more excited about drawing giant guns and battleships blasting things (and you thought he was a gentle Totoro!). A lot of the imagery gets reused both in Laputa and Miyazaki’s later Howl’s Moving Castle, but “Treasure under the Sea” is a splendid knockabout in its own right. The story was shown on a double bill with Nausicaa in Japanese cinemas.
The best-known Verne anime, though, is Nadia, The Secret of Blue Water. This 1990 TV epic by the Gainax studio was inspired both by Verne and Miyazaki, using bits of a story that Miyazaki had pitched in the 1970s, but reinterpreted by director Hideaki Anno. As such, Nadia is a fascinating link between Laputa and Anno’s subsequent Evangelion. Nemo and the Nautilus figure prominently, but the most striking character is the titular black heroine, who first looks like a sunny Miyazaki-esque girl, but has a troubled and tortured soul worthy of Nemo himself.
Summer Wars director Mamoru Hosoda talks to Andrew Osmond about samurai, grannies and the internet.
In Summer Wars, the main character is a boy, the shy maths prodigy Kenji. Do you prefer telling a story through a male or a female character?
It depends on the story. But this time I might prefer the boy's point of view because my last film (The Girl who Leapt through Time) was about a girl and its story was told through her eyes.
Love Machine, the artificial “villain” in the film, seems to have the personality of a violent school bully, who loves beating other people up.
I think he’s more like a little child than a violent bully. He might not have the intention of doing harm to other people or to the world. He was programmed to study and grow by himself. His curiosity and longing for knowledge brought the world into chaos.
You show the internet as a wonderful place where people can communicate and work together. Do you think that people have unfair prejudices against the internet?
Anything in this world has both good and bad aspects. But, do you think our world has become worse and more uncomfortable after the rise of the Internet? We cannot imagine how much more convenient and comfortable our lives have become in this IT era. I think considering the Internet as just a bad technology is nonsense today.
In Summer Wars, young and old people can all work together successfully. Are you optimistic that different generations of people can communicate?
I'm very optimistic about that. Following on from the previous question, the Internet itself has played a great role in cross-generation communication. Thanks to the Internet, I can have more opportunities to talk with lots of people who are younger and older than me than ever before.
Also, in Summer Wars, you seem to say that “old Japan” (the country’s samurai history) and “new Japan” (the virtual computer world) can exist together, and they can make each other stronger. This is different from other anime, in which Japan's old traditions are being threatened by modern Japan.
Every director has his/her own way of seeing and describing a world. But more than anything, I always try to make a film which says our world is beautiful and worth living in. I think that's the reason Summer Wars is a little bit different from other anime.
Do you feel that “old Japan” and “new Japan” can exist together?
Yes. Definitely.
Sakae, the great-grandmother, is an amazingly strong and vivid character in the film. Is she inspired by a real person?
Every character is inspired by people I know, I like and respect. Sakae is inspired by lots of people; maybe they include my great-grandmother, my grandmother and my mother.
Can you say a little more about Sakae (the great-grandmother character) and what values she represents? In particular, I was thinking of the speech she makes to the family, which is very moving.
What Sakae wants to say is: hold tight as a family; help each other; never leave any family member lonely and hungry. Isn't this a kind of common sense all “mothers” have all over the world?
Finally, the computer avatars in the film are mostly cute and funny. If you had to choose an avatar, would you choose a cute one?
I think I would choose a very cute one hoping girls would get interested in my avatar.:)
Mamoru Hosoda's Summer Wars is out now on UK DVD and Blu-ray from Manga Entertainment.
Matt Kamen wanders the philosophical wasteland with Casshern Sins.
Casshern Sins is about redemption. The hero – if you can truly call him that – wanders an abandoned wasteland, plagued by amnesia, unaware that his own actions led to the collapse of civilisation. Humanity is all but gone, and their robot heirs are faring little better. Survival is a burden at best, made worse by a plague known as ‘the Ruin’ infecting organic and inorganic alike. Except, that is, for Casshern himself. Clad in gleaming white and seemingly in perfect health, a legend has formed that eating his body will grant rejuvenation and immortality, making him a dark messianic figure in this future wilderness.
Casshern Sins is one of the deepest, most engaging anime series of the year. The art style belies this fact – after all, the superflat designs of the characters and the world they inhabit bring to mind the frantic Gurren Lagann or Dead Leaves, while those who know of its origins as a 1970s kids’ series might be expecting something equally mainstream, full of robot fights and a positive moral at the end of each episode. Well, the ‘robot fights’ part is at least accurate – with a lead character prone to violent, superpowered rages, the series has action to spare, but that’s not really what it’s about.
In the original 1973 series, Casshern was Tetsuya Azuma, forced to modify his body into a cybernetic fighting machine in order to combat the evil robots created by his father. In Sins, Casshern is a robot from the start, human in appearance only, and questioning his outlook on life and reason for existing. His travels give the series an almost picaresque air, each episode encapsulating a different viewpoint on the human experience.
Luckily, Casshern isn’t entirely alone. His loyal canine robot from the original series, Friender, is reimagined here as an mistrustful outcast, who eventually joins forces with Casshern. The innocent girl Ringo and her mysterious guardian Ohji – who seems to know more about the past than he lets on – play pivotal roles in the quest for redemption, as does the female robot Lyuze, tracking Casshern to exact vengeance for another sin of from forgotten days.
In Casshern Sins, director Shigeyasu Yamauchi and esteemed animation studio Madhouse have crafted a perfect balance of introspection and action. It’s a series that fans of the earlier incarnations will find enthralling and emotional, while remaining inviting and captivating for newcomers. If you’re tired of action anime with no substance, this is the antidote – powerful, poignant and personal – essential viewing for fans with discerning tastes!
Casshern Sins is out on UK DVD and Blu-ray from Manga Entertainment.
Matt Kamen hunts down other appearances of the anti-hero Casshern.
Any media property that survives several decades is bound to leave its mark on generations of viewers. Sometimes, those influences are easy to spot – the countless mecha shows that owe a debt to Go Nagai’s Mazinger or Yoshiyuki Tomino’s Mobile Suit Gundam, or the enduring international legacy of Astro Boy and Speed Racer, for example. For other series, the impact they have isn’t as easy to spot but is by no means any less important. Such is the case with Casshern– despite only a handful of appearances since his 1973 debut, his legacy extends much farther.
Each of the sequels has adopted a new continuity for the android avenger. First was a 1993 video released abroad as Casshan: Robot Hunter, which saw his father’s consciousness consumed by the villain of the piece. The first step into darker territory for the series, Robot Hunter saw our hero questioning whether to abandon his own humanity to save the world.
A 2004 live action movie, simply titled Casshern, brought the character back to the public eye, fronted by model-turned-actor Yusuke Iseya and directed by music video veteran Kazuaki Kiriya. Unfortunately, the film was an effects-laden case of image over substance, a vapid and vacuous mess with a confusing plot that abandoned almost everything of the character prior to his cinematic debut. While Casshern Sins also re-imagines everything the original series, it does so in a way that pays homage, rather than outright ignoring the source material.
Surprisingly, Casshern’s biggest influence would appear to be in the field of video gaming – surprising because, while the character has made a select few appearances in various titles, he has still yet to star in a game of his own. One gaming franchise that is modelled heavily on Casshern is Capcom’s mega-popular Mega Man. Early games in the series only shared the basic premise – a cybernetic saviour out to rescue humanity from rogue robots – but as Mega Man developed its own rich mythos, it introduced more nods to Tatsuo Yoshida’s 1970s antihero. Where Casshern had his pet robo-dog Friender, the Blue Bomber gained a canine familiar called Rush, who transformed into various weapons and vehicles. Casshern had assistance from the robotic Swanee; Mega Man gained the dive-bombing Beat. The later Mega Man Zero series of games took the Casshern influence even farther – waking up in a future world under robot dominion, Zero was a flashier Mega Man, with moves and design influences taken straight from Casshern.
But what of Casshern himself? Even outside of Mega Man he’s a perennial favourite of Capcom’s, appearing in several of their ‘Versus’ series games, most notably 2010’s Tatsunoko VS Capcom for the Nintendo Wii. His fighting style and elements of his backstory also influenced last year’s sci-fi shooter Vanquish, from Sega – the director of which, Shinji Mikami of Resident Evil fame, desperately wants to make a devoted Casshern game!
While that pipe dream is years away, at lest we have the latest batch of Casshern Sins to satisfy our robot-slaying cravings. And who knows – just like its famous forebear, Sins may inspire a wealth of new spin-offs in its own right…
Casshern Sins is out now on UK DVD and Blu-ray from Manga Entertainment.
There is something of the night about Andrew Osmond, as he takes on 007 and Vampire Knight Guilty…
Previously on this site, we conclusively “proved” that Vampire Knight was better than the Twilight franchise. But as the anime enters its second half, with the new title of Vampire Knight Guilty, it’s time to consider another way the series advances the vampire myth.
Roald Dahl, writer of grotesqueries for adults and children, once described how he was hired to script You Only Live Twice – not a vampire film, but James Bond’s Japanese adventure. Dahl was told there were two things he couldn’t mess with. One was Bond’s character; the other was the “girl formula.” Dahl asked what the girl formula was. “There’s nothing to it,” he was told. “You use three different girls, and Bond has them all.”
“Separately,” Dahl asked, “or en masse?”
If you think the sexual politics are a little… dated, remember You Only Live Twice has the memorable line: “In Japan, men come first, women come second.”
But Dahl’s story could equally apply to a traditional vampire film, such as many Hammer romps with Christopher Lee. Dracula, of course, is expected to devour girls with impunity. Even when Francis Ford Coppola turned him into a romantic heart-throb in the revisionist 1992 film, crossing oceans of time like a moustachioed diCaprio, no-one questions why Dracula gobbles up his true love’s best friend (Lucy) before turning to the main course, Winona Ryder.
Which leads us to Vampire Knight. One of the most interesting things about the show’s development is the brazen (by anime standards) conduct of the heroine, Yuki. Yes, she’s a demure and vulnerable lass in romantic shojo fashion, but she’s also extremely adept at getting the best of both worlds – or rather the best of two vampire pretty boys. In one scene, she can be offering herself as an all-you-can-drink bloodbank for Zero; but soon afterwards, she’s in an intimate clinch with Zero’s rival Kaname, and thinking about getting herself vampirised!
Some viewers may see Yuki as a heartless hussy, but there’s something rather refreshing about her two-timing. It brings the viewer up short to realise how pedestrian it would have been if Vampire Knight were instead about a boy and two vampire girls. For men, promiscuity is the norm in vampire tales; it doesn’t even matter if you have long teeth or short. Remember how lucky Jonathan Harker got sandwiched in a sexy female foursome in Dracula.
True, Buffy scandalously played around with Spike in later episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, subverting the Angel stuff from earlier; while the Twilight films at least pretend that Bella has a choice between her favourite vamp and a hairier hunk (“I am hotter than you,” indeed!). But Vampire Knight’s take is blithely fresh… not that vampire fantasies are ever cosily PC. Ian Fleming once stupidly suggested in The Spy Who Loved Me that all women secretly wanted to be “semi-raped”. When it comes to women, Bond’s on the side of Dracula....
Cryptkeeper Matt Kamen introduces the living and undead cast of the new action-horror series Corpse Princess
Makina Hoshimura. Poor, poor Makina – murdered with the rest of her family, her one lucky break was that she was one of the rare candidates capable of rising from the dead as a ‘shikabane hime’, the corpse princess of the title. Fed with the life force of the monk Keisei Tagami, she’s one of the few beings who can bring down standard shikabane, revenant corpses warped beyond their roles in life, and out to destroy humanity. Wielding a pair of MAC-11 submachine guns, she channels her rage into slaughtering monsters, hoping to ascend to heaven once she has dispatched 108 of them.
Ouri Kagami. A 15-year old orphan, Ouri is what you might call ‘spiritually aware’. Drawn to strange goings-on, he discovers Makina’s body after an especially brutal battle, cut all over and definitely dead – making it all the more strange when she shows up, unharmed, a couple of days later. Sucked into the hidden world of the shikabane and those who hunt them, Ouri brings a an outsider’s viewpoint to the centuries-long battle, refusing to see either the undead horrors or the corpse princesses as just cannon fodder. Optimistic and kind, if a touch naive, his caring personality grates on Makina for a long time.
Keisei Tagami. A relatively young Buddhist monk of the secretive Kougun Sect, Keisei is trained to combat the shikabane alongside girls such as Makina. Despite his serious vocation, his demeanour is light-hearted, often pulling pranks on Ouri, whom he treats as his own brother. His day-to-day duties involve running the temple orphanage. His frequent jokes are perhaps a defence mechanism to distract himself from the weight of his nocturnal duties and daylight responsibilities.
Rika Aragami and Saki Amase. This powerful monk/princess team is the toughest around – and Saki in particular won’t let you forget it! Rika is the only female contracted monk, descended from one of ten great holy families and possessing potent healing abilities, while Saki is a ten-year old girl brandishing a ridiculously oversized and decidedly lethal hammer. Both characters are fiendishly powerful, and all but the most powerful shikabane pose little challenge to them.
Akasha Shishidou. The villain of the piece, though you’ll only see him floating in the background during the early episodes. Secretly manipulating the shikabane into even more ferocious forms, Akasha was once a priest of Kougun himself, whose own tragic past and the fate of the Shikabane Hime he was partnered with drove him away from his once-unshakable faith. Exiling himself for five years, Akasha has now resurfaced, working with a group of extraordinarily powerful shikabane known as the ‘Seven Stars’, aiming towards a common goal.
Just what that goal is, and whether Makina and the other Shikabane Hime can prevent Akasha achieving it is a secret only the complete first season of Corpse Princess can answer!
Corpse Princess part one is out on UK DVD from Manga Entertainment.
If you missed the London premiere of Yu-gi-oh: Bonds Beyond Time, you can still catch it all around the country, with Kids Club screeings on Saturday and grown-ups screenings for the rest of us, in 3D at selected venues – the first Japanese animated film to get the treatment in Britain. And if you see the movie at a Picture House cinema this weekend, you will also receive this ultra-rare playing card.
PLEASE NOTE: Some venues are offering the Yu-Gi-Oh movie as part of their Kids' Club screenings, which means no admission to adults unless accompanied by an under-12! See below for screening breakdowns:
Aberdeen – Kids' Club 1130 Sat + grown-ups' show Sun 2030, Mon 1900.
Brighton – 3d for 14 May, 1100.
Bury - Grown-ups' show at 3.45 in Screen 2.
FACT Screen 1 Kids at 11:00, Adults straight after, 13:00 (both 3D)
Norwich – Screen 2 3D show for grown-ups at 11.30am. Kids at 11am
York – Screen 2 3D show for grown-ups at 11.30am. Plus kids show at 11am
Lexi – May 21 Sat kids 11.30, adults 17.30.
Bath – Sat 13.30 kids, plus Mon 2030 for adults.
Oxford – Sat 13.30 kids, Mon 2100 adults show.
In celebration of twenty years of Manga Entertainment, and our hypersonic Blu-ray release of the classic anime Akira, we have the competition of a lifetime.
The prize: one lucky winner and a friend will receive VIP tickets to our invitation-only 20th anniversary party in London on 16th June. Included in the package is travel to London by rail, a night's hotel accommodation in the city, and a Manga Entertainment prize pack valued at several hundred pounds. You'll also receive a movie pass to see Akira at your nearest Picture House cinema in July, if you've calmed down by then...
To stand a chance of winning this great prize, all you have to do is answer this simple question:
Akira takes place in the future metropolis of:
A) NEO TOKYO
B) MEGA TOKYO
C) TOKYO III
Terms: entrants must be UK residents and over-18. Closing date: 9am UK time on 30th May 2011. The winner must provide the correct answer and will be selected at random. Manga Entertainment will only supply two return rail tickets to London; hotel accommodation is for one night only: Thursday 16th June 2011. Judges' decision is final. Winner to be announced in the Mangazette on 30th May. Email your answer with your name, address and age to: comp@mangauk.com. Only one entry per address. This competition cannot be entered by any Manga Entertainment, Anchor Bay Entertainment or Starz Media employees or their families. No cash alternative.
Suga Shikao is an ambassador of contemporary Japanese pop. With his guitar fine-tuned in the ways of funk and pop-rock music, and a mind capable of writing some of the most thought-provoking, insightful lyrics to hit Japan, he left his job as a salaryman to take on the Japanese music world, and came out as its crowned king.
