Tag: Jonathan Clements

November 30, 2015 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. Shigeru Mizuki, who died today, was one of the most enduring and influential creators in the manga tradition. His career arguably pre-dated manga itself, in the chaos of the post-war period, when the young Mizuki arrived back in Japan with the world’s most unimpressive CV. Maimed in an American attack on a […]

October 28, 2015 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. Moving to a new town and a new school, sparky teenager Tetsuko Arisugawa (“Alice”) is still getting used to her new surname after her parents’ divorce. Dad is a charmer but a loser in life; Mum is a flaky author with a habit of dramatising their private life for profit. Meanwhile, her […]

October 25, 2015 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements. Rayna Denison chooses her title with robust caution: her new book, Anime: A Critical Introduction, is an introduction for and occasionally about critics, examining the arguments and materials with which readers can approach Japanese animation. Her new book is part of Bloomsbury’s “Film Genres” series, although she swiftly establishes cast-iron criteria for […]

October 13, 2015 · 0 comments

By Jonathan Clements It’s 24 April 2072 and you’re listening to Radio Free Mars, a pirate radio station broadcasting in ten languages to independent operatives all over the red planet. Our mad European-accented DJ Mr Martian is at the ready with traffic reports, complaints about the chair-warmers at city hall, some old-time tunes and handy […]

October 1, 2015 · 0 comments

by Jonathan Clements. There are, famously, more Christians in Iraq than there are in Japan. That’s in spite of a flourishing of interest among the samurai lords after 1549, some of whom converted to Christianity, took Christian names like Francisco and Augustin, and welcomed the exotic foreign contacts of “barbarian” missionaries. For a time, Nagasaki […]