Interview with Jonathan Clements, Part 1

By: Paul Jacques
Date: Monday, January 31, 2005

In our line of work you get to meet many people; Some commercial, with a view to making a buck; Some clever, with a view to making an observation; Some self styled “otaku” with view to boring the crap out of anyone who will listen; Some passionate, with no greater wish than to share their insight. Occasionally you meet some someone who defies classification, because they are, put simply, part of the fabric of anime & manga in the West. In January I had the good fortune to track down such a man, and with the audacity of the innocent (OK, slightly tainted), put some very impertinent questions to such a figure.



Some of you may have known him as the man who was contributing editor for Newtype USA; Or perhaps as the ex editor of Manga Max; Maybe as the biographer of Confucius? Most will know him as the co-author of the definitive book on anime, Anime Encyclopedia (sic). However he is known, everyone who does KNOW him agrees on one thing- what he doesn’t know about Japanese media entertainment probably isn’t worth asking about. He is a man young in years, old in wisdom, an industry veteran and the consummate professional. He is a writer, editor, author, biographer, scriptwriter, translator, TV presenter and all round good egg….. Jonathan Clements.



Part 1: In the beginning

It was about a year ago that I first ran into Jonathan. After that meeting I vowed to get an interview with him at some point in the future. Time passed, JC’s restraining order against me lapsed, I pulled a few strings – thanks to Hugh@ADV - in order to get some quality question time with Mr Clements. He has a reputation for telling it like it is, so if you want it straight, he’s the man to ask. So playing Devil’s Advocate, I popped the questions that are good, bad and downright ugly in order to clear BS, debunk some anime urban myths and dust off the truth. Grab a cold drink, hold your favourite plushie for comfort (you’ll need it) and read words you’d normally pay good money to see. Join me, as I spend an evening gathering words from the wise…….



AoD: You have a considerable talent for languages...

JC: I’m not sure my Greek teacher would agree with you! I barely scraped my A-Level.



…is that how you got into manga and anime, or was it the other way round…. how did it all lead you on a road to your chosen career?


JC: Japanese came first. I went to university to do a combined degree in Chinese and Japanese, and that year I found a copy of Frederik Schodt’s Manga Manga. The first manga I ever saw was Grey, by Yoshihisa Tagami. I bought it because there was an endorsement on the back from Harlan Ellison. When I got back to England from my year abroad in 1992, Anime UK magazine had started up and I started selling articles to them about anime. Within a year, I had my first translation contract. I was actually late for my final Japanese translation exam because I had been in a studio in London recording KO Century Beast Warriors. It certainly beats “I overslept” as an excuse. I missed my graduation ceremony to direct my first anime dub.







AoD: What were those early Japanese titles?

JC: The first anime I ever saw was Marine Boy, and there’s a little tip of the hat to that fact in the Marine Boy entry in the Anime Encyclopedia. I used to rush home to see Mysterious Cities of Gold, Ulysses 31 and Dogtanian, unaware that these titles were linked by the common factor of Japanese animation. My all time favourites are several Gainax productions, the Patlabor TV series, Grey, and Kiki’s Delivery Service.



AoD: I heard a story (from a man in a pub), that in your early days as a translator, you plied your trade in the Sex shops of Soho? Would you care to elaborate?

JC: There are a lot of assumptions about anime erotica, such as, for example, the supposedly self-evident statement that anime fans buy it. Actually, they largely don’t. Hentai sells far too many copies for that. I went into every sex shop I could find and asked them if they had any Japanese cartoons. This was back in 1997 when I was working on the Erotic Anime Movie Guide. None of them had any. Their policy was, if you have made the decision to cross over the line and come into a sex shop, why would you be happy with “just a cartoon”. Look, they would say, we have “real” porn. So the sex shops weren’t selling it either



AoD: During those early years, the choice of available titles was pretty sparse and very sex oriented. Would you say that this had a negative effect on its popularity?

JC: You’re talking about the mid-to-late 1990s, when actually less than 25% of anime in the UK was 18-rated (the US equivalent would be an “R”). The media perception, however, based largely on the Urotsukidoji press-pack, was that anime was a cavalcade of depravity.



Did this have a negative effect on its popularity? Hell, no. The sales figures for erotic anime outstripped all but a handful of titles. At the time, Urotsukidoji was selling in the tens of thousands, and UK anime convention attendance barely reached 500. The press was writing articles about how anime fans were perverts, but anime fans couldn’t possibly buy it all. They would have to buy a hundred copies each! And I’d already found that the sex shops weren’t selling them. In fact, they were being sold in the high street, to members of the public. 30,000 British men bought Urotsukidoji, in places like Tower Records. And somehow the British newspapers contrived to make this the fault of the Japanese.



I was hired last year by a Japanese trade organisation to do an in-depth analysis of the British anime business; we’re talking hard figures, not convention hearsay. I had to find out exactly what sold, and to whom. And I discovered the supposed “scandals” of the 1990s had no appreciable negative effects on UK sales. Right up until Pokemon and the Animatrix, both of which skewed the figures, 19 of the 20 best-selling anime in the UK were from just one company, Manga Entertainment. And the bulk of the titles comprised the ones the press had complained about.



AoD: I understand you worked for the BBC as an Asian linguist and writer, what horizons did that open for you?

JC: I was a translator on the Godzilla: King of the Monsters documentary, transcribing about 18 hours of interview footage with directors, writers and actors from the golden age of Japanese cinema. Then I worked on a series called Japanorama. They put me on a retainer so they could call up in the middle of the night and shout: “We’re interviewing Keiji Nakazawa in three hours! Tell us who he is and what questions we’re asking him!” I found myself working as a kind of double agent on that one. I had Tsuburaya Studios emailing and saying: “Someone called Jonathan Ross wants to come and piss about in our studio. Do we want to let him?” I had to explain who he was, and that he wasn’t one more gaijin coming to laugh at them, but someone who genuinely had an affection for their products.



My most recent association with the BBC has been on the Strontium Dog audio dramas starring Simon Pegg. I wrote both of them for the Big Finish company, who later sold them on to the BBC.



AoD: Back in the early 90’s, anime & manga was very niche, what was the thinking behind trailblazing this new genre with “Anime UK” and “Manga Mania” publications? How did it start and what went wrong at the end?

JC: Well, you’re asking me to comment on the aims of two other people, Helen McCarthy with Anime UK, and Cefn Ridout with Manga Mania. Helen wanted to tell people about this wonderful anime thing she’d discovered; she was a fan who wanted to make more fans. Cefn Ridout was working at Dark Horse UK, and saw a niche to exploit the company’s ownership of the Akira manga in a magazine form.



“At the end” of course, Cefn went back to Australia, Anime UK was betrayed by its backer, who simply stopped paying people, and Helen ended up as the editor of Manga Mania. When she left, the magazine was renamed Manga Max. That’s where I came in. This is a long story, and I can sense your eyes are already glazing over…



The publishers, Titan offered me the editorship, but weren’t prepared to pay for manga in the magazine. I told them that they could have an anime magazine without a manga in it, but we would have to take it up market to compensate. I wanted to create a magazine that the industry read, that was literally ahead of its time. Which it was; there are seven-year-old articles from Manga Max that you could print tomorrow and would still be fresh and interesting. We had the kind of magazine that could print a rant column from Hayao Miyazaki, that had Toren Smith on the letters page, and that had Pioneer demanding to know how we knew their Japanese release plans ahead of their English office. We had Frederik Schodt interviewing Masamune Shirow!



But the magazine needed American distribution to survive, and Titan insisted on shipping it by ship. By ship! We would scoop Animerica by two months, and then the magazine would have to sail across the Atlantic before anyone could read it. My conscience is clear. I made good every penny of my budget (my managing editor complained that I kept detailed accounts, since “If the boss finds out, we’ll all have to do it!”), and I found a team of writers who could do things they were asked to write about. We had animators, novelists, scriptwriters and games designers writing our reviews. They knew what they were talking about.



The explanation that I was given by Titan for the cancellation of Manga Max was that their staff at the time were not adequately equipped to market or distribute an international anime magazine. They claimed they would put the magazine on “hiatus” until they had “sorted these problems out.” There’s a lot more that happened, but basically, I think they found out the hard way that while they thought the magazine could be run by a trained monkey, it wasn’t as easy as it looked.







AoD: You co-authored the “Anime Encyclopaedia”. How did you go about organising such a daunting task?

JC: The Anime Encyclopedia (I’m obliged to use the American spelling as it is an American book) was a very enjoyable nightmare. When it was published, it was bigger than every other English-language anime book combined. The index alone is larger than some other books on anime. But there is something quite addictively exciting about discovering new stuff, working out which title fits which Japanese show, and so on. I had to write a massive spreadsheet of alternate titles in Japanese and English, annotating source material until Helen and I were able to divide up the work and write the book. I worked as hard on the Anime Encyclopedia as I had on Manga Max, maybe even harder. But the Anime Encyclopedia is a much more enduring monument, and of course, I get royalties from it, which I never got as a magazine editor.



We had some good people on the book as well. When covering Japan, it makes a big difference having a Japanese-speaking editor like Peter Goodman at Stone Bridge. And we hired Fred Patten to check the manuscript, who worked way beyond the call of duty. He’s say things like. “I thought your Giant Gorg entry wasn’t up to scratch, so I’ve taken the liberty of writing my own.” Mere money wouldn’t thank him enough, so I dedicated my Confucius book to him.



After the AE, I wrote the Dorama Encyclopedia with Motoko Tamamuro. I’m actually even prouder of that. The Anime Encyclopedia broke new ground, introduced several hundred titles that had never been discussed before, and consolidated our knowledge of the industry, but the Dorama Encyclopedia opened up a whole new field in Asian Studies. It’s the book I’m proudest of, along with Pirate King.



AoD: You are one of only a handful of people to be honoured by the Japanese (Japan Festival Award ) for “outstanding achievements in furthering the understanding of Japanese culture”, how did you feel about receiving this honour?

JC: Pretty damn good! The award was specifically for editing Manga Max. Titan had fired me two days before the awards ceremony, so I got a peculiar kick out of it.



AoD: A hobby (nay pleasure) that you make a living from: Are you still able to just kick back and enjoy something without having your critical eye engaged? Has this blunted your enjoyment at all?

JC: I’m not easy to impress, if that’s what you mean. Many anime producers work on a 24-month product cycle. They figure that they can sell the same stuff every two years, and nobody will be around long enough to notice. Sadly for them, I do notice, and I call them out on it. But if you’re a thinking anime fan, that’s what you want. You want someone who knows where this stuff has come from. If you want some breathless idiot enthusing about how “kewl” it all is, well, there are plenty of places you can find that.



AoD: How has the medium changed over the past ~20 years? Have the Japanese made any discernable concessions to Western tastes?

JC: I think the Japanese like to think they have. It doesn’t always work out. Look at Golgo 13. That was an attempt by the Japanese to give us what we wanted. They reverse-engineered a few action movies, and decided that Western viewers were all obsessed with sex and death. So I guess they got our number.



AoD: During your work you have travelled extensively, this and your language skills has given you an edge over other people’s interpretations of Japanese entertainment. In your view are there elements that get lost in translation?

JC: Oh, don’t get me started. I gave a whole seminar about this for the Master’s in Translation students at the University of East Anglia. The thing that most people miss is that it takes a lot to be a translator. You need to speak Japanese, yes. You also need to be able to write English. And if you’re good enough to sell your own work in English, why on Earth would you take McJob money to translate Magical Princess Fluffy Tosspot?



The thing that is missed more than anything else in the translation world is how many times translators get things right. The most heroic translators in the business are the ones that you never see people talking about. People like Jack Wiedrick and his staff at Newtype USA, who anonymously translate hundreds of pages, all so that fans in a chat room can pretend they read it all in Japanese.



If there's anything that gets on my nerves at the moment, it's the plethora of translations that simply don't translate things, apparently with the consent and approval of large sectors within fandom. Don't people feel ripped off when they buy Haibane Renmei in 'English' and it's still called Haibane Renmei? What kind of translation is that?