The season is the Japan Foundation’s most ambitious yet, with a total of nine films travelling to seven venues across England, Scotland and Northern Ireland (but not that other place) between 10 February to 28 March 2012. This year’s title is ‘Whose Film Is It Anyway? Contemporary Japanese Auteurs’, and the films have all been selected because they are directed from original scripts, not adaptations of books or manga, or TV tie-ins. We thought it was an important theme, because when you look at the list of top-grossing Japanese films of recent years, it seems to be dominated by TV spin-offs such as the Umizaru, Boys Over Flowers and Rookies films. It seemed a particularly good time to celebrate the auteur, and also extol the virtues of originality rather than tried and tested formulas – something worth remembering given the various debates that raged a couple of weeks back vis-a-vis David Cameron’s comments outlining his ideas for the British film industry as touched upon in my previous post (although it now seems these might have been slightly misreported).

Shall We Dance? director Masayuki Suo in London and in conversation with yours truly on Thursday 9 February, to introduce his most recent film I Just Didn't Do It.

The series kicks off in London at the ICA on 11 February and will run there until 16 February – the full programme of the London screenings is given here. In order to launch the season, the Japan Foundation will be holding a special event on 9 February at their Russell Square premises, with the director Masayuki Suo in conversation, talking about his filmmaking methods to mark our screenings of his last work, I Just Didn’t Do It (Soredemo boku wa yattenai), a damning indictment of the Japanese judicial system.

I’m particularly honoured and excited to be conducting this onstage interview with one of Japan’s most internationally-acclaimed directors, because as I frequently tell anyone who asks me, it was his wonderful ballroom comedy Shall We Dance? that provided one of my early epiphanies about Japanese film, which resulted in my leaving the humdrum security of office life and heading over to Japan to study its cinema (You can read the whole story in this piece I wrote for J-Film Powwow a couple of years back. I’ve never met Suo before, but I do know I love his films, and that in this particular case, they’ve had a life-changing effect on me. It still brings a tear to my eye, this beautiful film (and this is from someone who can’t bare to be in the same room as BBC Saturday night talent show Strictly Come Dancing).

The other end of auteurism - director Katsumi Sakaguchi will be talking about his film Sleep with Roger Clarke at the Japan Foundation UK on 13 Feb.

The Japan Foundation has two guests over this year, the second being Katsumi Sakaguchi, whose gritty Sleep (Nemuri yusurika), a docudrama about prostitution and sexual dysfunction, presents an altogether more challenging aspect of ‘auteurist cinema’ than Suo’s films. Chairing what I am sure will be a fascinating discussion with the director at the Japan Foundation on Monday 13 February 2012 (from 6.30pm ) is the critic Roger Clarke, writer for The Independent and Sight & Sound among other things.

I should be there for much of the first weekend at the ICA introducing the various films, so look forward to seeing you there. As for the two events at the Japan Foundation, both are free to attend but booking is essential. To reserve a place, please email your name and the title of the event you would like to attend to event@jpf.org.uk.

Yes, I know we’re already some way into it by now, but as you can probably guess by the date of my last post, I’ve not been too quick on updating this website of late. I’ve been so busy with other things, and not just Zipangu Fest; I’ve barely even really had time to think about promoting my last book, The Historical Dictionary of Japanese Cinema, yet, it has been out, I’m told, since October. I’ll be of course blogging and tweeting about any reviews as they come in, but for now the best I can really do is point you towards the publisher’s website and the info on this very site here in the Books section. I also aim to post a summary of all the reviews of Zipangu Fest 2011, similar to what I did with 2010′s inaugural Zipangu Fest, but really beyond that, I can’t promise I’m going to have much time to keep up with regular posting over the coming months.

I've not really mentioned it yet, but my new book Historical Dictionary of Japanese Cinema has been out since last October.

I also feel a bit remiss that I’ve not had time to share my ‘Best of 2011’ lists with anyone yet. I’ve always been of the opinion that it’s worth holding back on such things till the year in question is actually over, rather than trying to get in there first, say at the beginning of December. Due to print publishing deadlines, I had to get my top 5 for Sight & Sound in the midst of an extremely busy November. Hopefully my Midnight Eye top 10 will be a little more meaningful when it goes up in the next week or so, because I’ve had a little more time to reflect on things. I should also take time to mention now, as it cannot have escaped the notice of Midnight Eye fans, that the site remained in a state of suspended animation for much of 2011, and some might even have suspected that we were thinking of pulling the plug. Well, you’ll be happy to hear that there’s some heavy technical tinkering going on behind the scenes and Midnight Eye should be back in action some time in 2012 in a new and improved version. In the meantime, Tom and my ‘Best ofs’ will be appearing on the Midnight Eye facebook page, which is here, if you haven’t discovered it yet.

What with my Sight and Sound Top 5 and my forthcoming list for the Midnight Eye facebook page, I don’t think there’s much point in going over the same ground here at the moment. I think anyway, that my favourites from Japan are already pretty obvious when you look at the programme for Zipangu Fest 2011, even though we haven’t got the kind of budget to pay the major studios for the bigger films (not that bigger equates to better, of course…), so there might be a few others in my final list. And I should add, that like the previous year, I simply didn’t see that many new films in the cinema. Anyway, you can get an idea of my general feelings about ‘Best of’ lists if you look at my posts from 2009 and 2010 .

My best screening of last year, that's for sure, even if the film is almost 30 years old.

I think the best use for my look back at 2011 here is to talk about the kind of events that really stood out, about the kind of films and viewing experiences that others might have missed, rather than try and cover everything of note. In this respect, the definite high point of last year was discovering Dance Craze at Bradford Film Festival’s Widescreen Weekend last April (see my original post), screened for the first time in decades in the format in which is was meant to be seen, in 70mm on a big, big, big screen. As well as celebrating one of the greatest forms of music that this country has ever produced, 2 Tone Ska, it also marks a historical landmark in which black and white Britons first started playing on stage together on an equal footing. Coupled with it’s technical virtues, this film should be celebrated as a landmark of British cultural history, not lying unwatched on a faded 70mm print, and I pray that one bloody day before too long, someone is going to take the plunge and get this film back in circulation to be appreciated by modern audiences, and not just leave solitary voices like my own to sing its praises.

Words such as ‘culture’, ‘heritage’ and ‘legacy’ are going to come up for considerable scrutiny in the year of the London 2012 Olympics. Given how good British films were last year, there’s a particularly bitter irony to the Tory Government’s decision to scrap the UK Film Council and slash funding for filmmakers without a proven track record of box-office smashes behind them and to only make commercial films. David Cameron’s comments last week are so misguided, naïve, and lets face it, just plain idiotic, that it hardly calls for me to add to the throng of voices from the more culturally aware who have already picked them apart – I can’t say it any better than Charlie Brooker has already done, in his Guardian article “How to save the British film industry, David Cameron style” published yesterday, Sunday 15 January.

Endless choices for the British cinema-goer over the coming years, as long as it's tomato soup. A scene from one of last year's finest, We Need to Talk About Kevin, from one of our best filmmakers, Lynne Ramsay, who in Cameron's Britain probably wouldn't have a job.

Lets remember 2011 instead as a final flourish for the British film industry in which a variety of filmmaking talent nurtured under the very environment that the Tories have vowed to discard gave the world a variety of works whose quality was just as notable as its diversity. There was the success of the middlebrow Oscar-baiting heritage piece The King’s Speech at both the awards ceremonies and the box office; the surprise Summer hit of the foul-mouthed, teen-oriented TV tie-in The Inbetweeners; more challenging, critically-acclaimed though less commercially-minded quality auteur work such as Steve McQueen’s Shame, Terence Davies’ The Deep Blue Sea, Paddy Considine’s Tyrannosaur and Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights; some very British international co-productions like Tomas Alfredson’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Cary Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre and Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin; Asif Kapadia’s mass-appeal documentary Senna; international crossover cult hits including Richard Ayoade’s Submarine, Ben Wheatley’s Kill List and Joe Cornish’s Attack the Block; and last but by no means least, Mark Cousins’ monumental The Story of Film: An Odyssey series, which, for all the quibbles one might raise about its content and Cousins’ delivery, was both hugely ambitious and boasts a cultural value that will be felt for years to come, if only because of its raising the game for future TV documentary serials and proving you don’t have to play to the lowest common denominator to be popular.

Is this the kind of film you want to watch, Daily Mail readers? Because that's what's going to happen! One of last year's most commercial films from the UK.

I list all these films and apologise for any I might have overlooked, because we’re probably not going to see the likes of such a vintage year for some time now. I can’t claim I’ve seen all (or even most) of these films, but that’s not the point – many of these titles have travelled across international borders and helped in their own way in boosting Britain’s cultural profile, and more than paid their way in the process, as have so many filmmakers and performers who have made their name in similar productions that have benefited from state funding in the preceding years. No, if there’s any problem with the British film industry, it is embodied by Andrew Haigh’s low-budget indie feature Weekend, which won critical plaudits among all who saw it as well as a number of prizes at foreign festivals – yet which could barely find a screen to play on among the swathes of ‘commercial’ crap such as Cowboys and Aliens that our dear leader would clearly rather we be watching in this country.

Who decides what we watch in this country? Critics, censors, politicans? No, foreign-owned distribution chains, meaning the odds are firmly stacked against well-regarded indie films such as the Nottingham-set Weekend.

I’ve still got a few more things to say about our last year in films, but I’ll leave it for another day. I’ll just end this post by stating the obvious. It takes years and years to build up cultural and educational organisations and institutions, be they libraries, university courses, film-financing bodies or filmmakers themselves. Pulling the plug to save what in proportional terms amounts to a tiny percentage of our national expenditure in comparison with the amount lost through unpaid taxes from multinationals or bailing out the banks is just so short-sighted, because it takes a lot more money to build up the levels of expertise back again to where they were. Let’s pray that this current government actually takes some time to think about these cultural acts of vandalism instead of just trying to come up with dramatic headlines to please Middle England, before the rot becomes irreversible.

Zipangu Fest 2011 design by Michael Lomon

If you want to read the original press releases, you can find them on the press section of our website here, but if you want more basic details about the lineup, you can find the full schedule either on the ICA website or on the Zipangu Fest website.

Basically we’ve divided the programme into four sections, all of which overlap and inter-link in various cunning ways that I’m about to outline: Sounds of Zipangu, Experimental/Animation, Zipangu Retro, and Nuclear Reactions. The first section consists of two European-produced documentaries that look at Japanese avant-garde/experimental music and the traditional, religious and contemporary cultural forces that inform it, with We Don’t Care About Music Anyway… and KanZeOn both looking as good as they sound.

We Don't Care About Music Anyway... (Cédric Dupire & Gaspard Kuentz)

The latter film, which also screened over this summer at Shinsedai in Toronto and EvA in Estonia, provides the inspiration for our opening party, which features an astounding line-up of DJs and performers, not least in the form of tat2mi, the beat-boxing Buddhist monk featured in the film in his first ever London performance. The event, to be held in the ICA’s bar, boasts a live remix of the visuals by Amoeba.Av with director/cinematographer Tim Grabham (aka Cinema Iloobia).

I’ve already posted the flyer for this party just below this entry on my blog, so do feel free to circulate, won’t you!  You can win tickets for our marvellous opening screening and party via this competition on the Japan Centre website.

All of this links rather nicely with another film in this section, Abraxas, about a former punk musician turned Buddhist monk who finds himself drawn back to give just one more performance. Not only is the soundtrack by Yoshihide Ohtomo, a towering figure in Japan’s avant-garde scene who is featured in We Don’t Care About Music Anyway…, but coincidentally the film was shot in the rural Fukushima region devastated by the earthquake and tsunami on 11 March of this year.

Set in Fukushima and featuring a soundtrack by Yoshihide Ohtomo and a starring turn by Suneohair, Naoki Kato's Abraxas.

The earthquake of course can’t help but cast a long shadow over any Japan-related events this year. Zipangu Fest will be doing their bit to raise awareness and hopefully a bit of money to help those affected when we move temporarily out of the ICA on Tuesday 22 Nov for a special charity screening of experimental films at Cafe Oto in Dalston. The two Nippon Re-Read programmes, as announced previously on this website, are part of a touring programme curated by Kinema Nippon (Aily Nash and Nine Yamamoto-Masson) and cover key works in the history of Japanese experimental film from the 1960s to present.

If you’re interested in either experimental film or Japanese cinema, the Nippon Re-Read: Radical Fragments and Abstractions from Japan I & II night on Tues 22 Nov presents a unique chance to watch these works placed within an informative yet fun context at one of London’s funkiest venues (worth visiting for the okonomiyaki and decent bar prices alone). It’s only £5 to get in, although you are free to pay more as all profits will go to the Japan Society Earthquake Relief Fund, and you can also buy advance tickets via WeGotTickets. As if this wasn’t amazing enough value for money in its own right, legendary London-based Japanese psychedelic rockers Bo Ningen will also be in attendance to perform a live soundtrack to Tatsuo Sato’s surreal animated classic Cat Soup from 2001.

Experimental films and a live performance from Bo Ningen at Cafe Oto on 22 Nov

This provides me with two ways to segue back into the other parts of the programme, but I’ll take the Experimental/Anime route. Alongside Abraxas on Saturday we have the Beyond Anime: The Outer Limits programme which, to whet your appetite for Cat Soup, will provide a wonderful and revealing glimpse of the innovation and creativity in Japan’s independent animation scene. This is a truly amazing sample of works covering a wide range of ground, but I’ll say it now, Sayaka Oka’s mesmerising Melting Medama is about the closest thing to a religious epiphany I’ve experienced this year.

What eyes are made for - Sayaka Oku's Melting Medama, part of the Beyond Anime programme

On a similar tack is the Enter the Cosmos programme of three works by that maestro of cinematic abstraction, Takashi Makino. His recent film Still in Cosmos will be screened as part of Tuesday’s Nippon Re-Read earthquake appeal night, but here’s a unique chance to immerse yourself in the full experience, with Makino himself there to introduce the films. Linking back to the Sounds of Zipangu section, Makino’s films are collaborations with some of the the foremost international talents of noise and soundscape music, including Jim O’Rourke and Machinefabriek. Another connection is that both Makino and KanZeOn’s Tim Grabham have served some time under the Quay Brothers, an influence that will become all the more clear when you see the Death of Phonebook animation made by Tim (under his customary handle of Cinema Iloobia), the honorary gaijin included in the Beyond Anime section.

Shasyo, one of several of Ryu Furusawa's films included in the Beyond Anime section

On the other side of the Sounds of Zipangu musical spectrum lies the sickly sweet strains of J-pop teeny band Momoiro Clover, as featured in Koji Shiraishi’s hilariously cruel J-horror mockumentary Shirome. Watch the tribe of teen songstresses agree to sell their souls for fame and fortune, and remember, nothing about their performance is faked for the camera!

Horror also lies at the heart of one of our Zipangu Retro screenings, and I am absolutely delighted that we have managed to make this come together, in partnership with the National Film Centre of Tokyo and the Japan Visualmedia Translation Academy. Never seen before in the UK, the 1938 supernatural chiller Ghost Cat and the Mysterious Shamisen is going to shake up a few preconceptions about the development of the horror around the world during is early decades, revealing that the genre was alive and kicking in Japan long before the films of Nobuo Nakagawa for Shintoho in the 1950s. Pioneering director Ushihara went to Hollywood to study filmmaking under Charlie Chaplin in the 1920s, so it is no surprise that he kept more than one eye on other developments in American cinema throughout his career. Personally I think that with its well-deployed arsenal of kaleidoscopic lenses, double-exposures and slow-mo sequences, in the expressionistic stakes Ghost Cat is easily abreast of, if not ahead of the Universal horrors of the period. Zipangu Fest have especially arranged to get this film subtitled and available for English speaking audiences, so make sure you don’t miss it while it is screening over here – the film gets its UK premiere ahead of Zipangu Fest at Leeds International Film Festival on Tues 8 and Thurs 10 Nov, and will be playing in Bradford in December and Newcastle in March. More details as they come, but if anyone out there reading this is also interested in showing this rare gem anywhere else, then drop me a line!

Vintage chills in our UK premiere of Ghost Cat and the Mysterious Shamisen

And our second Zipangu Retro screening takes us into our final section, Nuclear Reactions. Lucky Dragon No. 5 is a little-seen work by a pretty well-known director, Kaneto Shindo. One of the most important figures in the history of independent cinema in Japan, Shindo is primarily known in the West for his two horror films Onibaba and Kuroneko (another film about a ghostly black cat!), but also for a number of films on the subject of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and the director’s own birthplace of Hiroshima, beginning with the first fictional work from Japan on the subject, Children of Hiroshima (1952) right up to his latest film Postcard (2011), realised at the age of 98. I have no idea when was the last time this film was shown in the United Kingdom, if ever, but suffice it to say, you probably won’t get another chance to see it soon. The film is a docudrama based on a real life incident in which the crew of a fishing trawler were caught in the vicinity of American atomic bomb testing in the Pacific during the 1950s. The incident is pretty well-known today, if only because it inspired the original Godzilla.

Shinpei Takeda's poignant documentary road trip, Hiroshima Nagasaki Download.

Lest we forget, the legacy of the atomic bomb is the subject of our second film in the Nuclear Reactions section, with Hiroshi Nagasaki Download detailing a road-trip by the Mexican-based Japanese artist Shinpei Takeda, who will be coming as a guest of Zipangu Fest to introduce his film, as he and his college friend embark on a road trip across North America to interview a number of the survivors of this tragedy who have now made their homes outside of Japan.

The Nuclear Reactions section is our attempt to remember the potentially lethal destructive power of atomic energy, whether used militarily or to provide our energy needs, with a series of four films produced in a country that has suffered the most from its misuse. The nuclear power debate in Britain seems to have already died down in the wake of the catastrophe at the Fukushima power plant, a power plant that politicians repeatedly told the Japanese public was completely safe. In Japan, Hitomi Kamanaka has made several films that have attempted to delve beneath the claims of the politicians long before the disaster, and her findings in the two films that we are screening at the festival, are both chilling and yet also provide hope for those who are prepared to engage with the issues more fully. With the director travelling to Sellafield in the first of these two films to investigate a radiation leak that already seems to have been forgotten by the British media and public, the films offer little in the way of cold comfort for those still convinced by the “can’t happen here” argument.

So what do you do with nuclear waste? Hitomi Kamanaka's Rokkasho Rhapsody provides a chilling answer.

So there’s a guide through our programme for this year’s Zipangu Fest. No doubt there are even more links between the films if you look for them, and we really hope this years festival succeeds in fulfilling our goal of bringing people together to enjoy these films, and to talk about them and other related matters. I’m certainly looking forward to it myself!

Almost forgot too, just a few days before the festival, me and Julian Ross will be at the Horse Hospital near Russell Sq at the invitation of Electric Sheep magazine for An Evening of Subversive Japanese Cinema. Electric Sheep and Strange Attractor will present a screening of Koji Wakamatsu’s anarcho-pinku Sex Jack (1970) to tie-in with their recent book publication The End: An Electric Sheep Anthology, while Julian and I will be there to provide some cultural background to the film as well as another screening of one of the top hits from last year’s Zipangu Fest, Naoyuki Niiya’s ero-guro kami-shibai animation Man-eater Mountain.

Yumehiro Imanari's highly entertaining documentary short The Student Wrestler, playing alongside Hiroshima Nagasaki Download

In the meantime, here’s a link to an interview I did with Zoe Baxter on her Lucky Cat show on Resonance FM last Saturday (29 October), in which I talk a lot more about the films and a few other things besides.

Parts of Zipangu Fest’s programme will be touring to the Bradford Media Museum on 10-12 December, and the Star and Shadow Cinema in Newcastle in January.

More news as it comes, and again, if there are any venues out there in the UK that are interested in hosting parts of the Zipangu Fest programme, then do drop us a line.

And in the meantime, you can sign up to our press list, our Facebook page and our Twitter feed.

Takashi Makino's Still in Cosmos (2009, screened as part of the earthquake benefit night at Cafe Oto on 22 November

November screenings at London’s ICA and Café Oto of Takashi Makino’s films, featuring soundtracks by Jim O’Rourke and Machinefabriek

Four films by the leading light of Japan’s contemporary experimental scene, Takashi Makino, will be screened at this year’s Zipangu Fest (18-24 November 2011). Three of Makino’s abstract visual odysseys – with soundtracks by avant garde musicians Jim O’Rourke and Machinefabriek – will be shown at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts on Saturday 19 November as part of a programme entitled Enter the Cosmos, while the fourth will be screened at Zipangu Fest’s benefit night for the Japan disaster fund to be held at Café Oto in Dalston on 22 November.

Come and enjoy a fine spectrum of experimental moving image works from Japan, for a good cause! The benefit night at Café Oto in Dalston (18-22 Ashwin St, London E8 3DL) – Nippon Re-read Radical Fragments and Abstractions from Japan I and II – will also include experimental works from the late 1960s by Takahiko Iimura and Toshio Matsumoto, as well as recent films by Tomonari Nishikawa and Shiho Kano. Organised by Zipangu Fest’s Julian Ross, the programme was curated by Aily Nash and Nine Eglantine Yamamoto-Masson of Kinema Nippon.

The films in this two-part programme range from late 60s to contemporary works. Although varying greatly in their formal and aesthetic concerns, the works all rigorously reexamine the everyday through their respective experiments and innovations in their medium.

Abstractions of the mundane are seen in the graphic films in Programme I, which deal directly with the materiality of their medium rather than focusing on a visual referent. In White Calligraphy Re-Read (1967), Takahiko Iimura activates the Japanese characters of the Kojiki, the earliest Japanese historical chronicle, by deconstructing text into its constitutive graphic ciphers. These works, including Lika (2007) by Stom Sogo, and Still in Cosmos (2009) by Takashi Makino, direct the attention of the viewer to the pictorial, emphasizing more painterly concerns, digital and celluloid textures, the visceral correlation of sound and image, and of flatness versus representational depth.

Sixties split-screen psychedia in Toshio Matsumoto's For the Damaged Right Eye (1969)

The works in Programme II offer a poetic investigation into the fragmentary experience of the quotidian by eschewing narrative and rendering cultural images and references to unveil the uncanny within the familiar. Tomonari Nishikawa’s in-camera manipulation of bustling metro hubs in Shibuya-Tokyo and Tokyo-Ebisu (2010), as well as Shiho Kano’s pensive meditations on quintessential Japanese subjects form a counterpoint to Toshio Matsumoto’s split-screen filmic hallucination of the late-60s underground, For the Damaged Right Eye (1969).

Tomonari Nishikawa's Tokyo-Ebisu (2010)

Doors open at 7.30pm. An admission fee of £5 will be charged on the door, and all proceeds the benefit night will go towards Japan disaster relief, via Japanisch-Deutsches Zentrum Berlin.

More details of the event can be found at http://zipangufest.com/events/2011/nippon-re-read-radical-fragments-and-abstractions-from-japan-i-ii.

*** We hope to have an added something extra special for the night, to be announced shortly ***

I’ve shared it with a few friends before, but it dawned on my that actually it could be quite useful to other people either living in or visiting Tokyo, inspiring them to look beyond Shibuya crossing. So here it is, to drag the focus of this website away from film for a brief while and stick up some of my photos from Japan that have been languishing unseen on my hard-drive for a very long time. This was written about 7 years ago; some of the prices might be a bit off, but it’s not like the mountains have moved or closed down or anything…

This is my enduring memory of the Mt Fuji climb, a thoroughly mixed experience!

It had been over 7 hours since we’d set off from the coach drop-off point located at Kawaguchi-ko 5th Station, about 2300 metres up Mount Fuji, and I, like my thousand or so fellow climbers standing shivering on the gravely slopes just below the summit of Japan’s highest peak at 5am on a mid-August Sunday morning was beginning to wonder what chain of foolish decisions had led me to where I was now.We’d set off at a brisk pace at around 10pm the previous night in order to time our arrival at the peak for the next day’s sunrise, the first few hours spent scrambling in pitch darkness up the bare rocky slopes with reckless abandon. The stifling weather of a typical Japanese summer day had eased off to a balmy breeze at this point, making climbing the possibility it probably wouldn’t have been during daylight hours. However, after ascending a further 1500 meters or so, the air had thinned and the wind picked up, and with only a tee-shirt and a flimsy cagoule to protect me from the elements, I was feeling distinctly under-equipped.

The sun had already appeared over the horizon about half an hour ago, and with its arrival my enthusiasm had started to wane. One of our party had long fallen by the wayside, complaining of altitude sickness with a dazed and sickly look on his face. Sleep was now little but a distant memory, and mentally I had prematurely prepared myself for the descent long before. A ripe smell wafting from somewhere above indicated that the summit, containing a much-needed toilet, was tantalisingly close over the horizon, though standing between us and it were a legion of similarly miserable-looking figures, inching forward at an agonizingly sullen pace up the scree. We didn’t know it then, but these few final hundred metres to the top would still take a couple of hours.

This photo reminds me slightly of the 1980s Nikkatsu logo, a cold crumb of comfort as the sun had come up several hours before we reached the summit.

There’s a Japanese proverb that says you’re a wise man if you climb Mount Fuji once in your life, but only a fool would attempt it twice. Nevertheless, it remains a challenge that many feel compelled to take. If you are going to do it, probably the most important thing to bear in mind is that, as a hike, Fuji-san is not actually that difficult, and can be done in around four and a half hours if you’re a seasoned hiker and conditions are in your favour. But during the official “climbing season” between 1st July and 31st August, there can be up to 3000 climbers per night, so it is best to avoid weekends of possible, especially those around the Obon holiday week, otherwise you’ll spend more time queuing than climbing. Though most guides recommend climbing during these weeks, there’s nothing technically stopping you from doing it during the rest of the year, and there’s no real reason to do it by night either. Just remember to take plenty of water and food, and that 3776 metres up on the summit, temperatures are significantly colder than those at ground level.

Its also worth noting that Fuji-san provides little in the way of memorably scenery (especially if you are climbing by night!), and that there’s still a 3-hour slide down the gravel path the other side of the crater to go through before you get back down to the bottom. You have been warned! Busses depart hourly from Shinjuku in Tokyo to Kawaguchi-ko 5th Station costing 2600 Yen, and the journey takes about an hour. It is probably sensible to book your ticket back to Tokyo in advance, because return busses can get pretty full.

And you've still got to get down the other side...

One of the joy’s of hiking is that feeling of getting away from the hustle and bustle of the city and escaping into nature, a desire that Fuji notably fails to satisfy. However, 70% of Japan’s land area is mountainous, and with most urban settlements nestling in the valleys between the peaks (the main reason the city sprawl around Tokyo and Yokohama has spread to the extent that it has is that the Kanto Plains have provided plenty of space for urban expansion), it stands to reason that the easiest way to get away from people is to head to the higher ground. Climb any mountain in Japan except from Fuji, and you could just as well be in another country, the neon and ferro-concrete replaced by trees, mountain streams and solitary Shinto shrines and statues, the frantic hordes of the salaryman replaced by isolated pockets of nature lovers and ramblers.

Getting away from it all, an Okutama mountain trail.

Within little over an hour by train from Tokyo, there are a plethora of pleasant strolls to clear the mind and invigorate the spirit, and ones that reveal a more timeless natural flipside to the country than that presented by the frenetic activity of the claustrophobic city spaces. Mountains such as Fuji, rising above 2000 meters in altitude (the point where the tree-line stops), are best saved for the summer months, and are mainly the reserve of the accomplished hiker. But for those wishing a quick break away from the thriving metropolis, there are a number of other excursions that can be undertaken in a couple of hours without wearing too muck skin from the soles of your feet. Such hikes are best embarked upon outside of June’s rainy season and the months of July and August, when the stifling heat and humidity are less conducive to vigorous activity. You’re better off going in April/May to catch the fresh green leaves of early spring (shinroku), or late October for the fiery autumnal red leaves (kôyô) of Autumn.

One of the Tengu statues at Yakuoin Temple on Mt Takao.

One easy climb that can be tackled without too much blood, sweat and tears is the historic sacred retreat of Mount Takao, to the West of Tokyo. Getting there takes a mere 50 minutes and 370 yen if you take the semi-limited express from Keio Shinjuku station to Takao-sanguchi, at the foot of the mountain. At only 599 meters high, the bracing trek to the summit can be made in about an hour, taking you along a well marked route of scenic forest paths and affording some breathtaking views over Tokyo once you get to the top. After such a relaxed climb you’ll probably be surprised that the summit is such a seething mass of activity, with bustling crowds of daytrippers jostling outside overpriced snack restaurants lined with vending machines. Other added attractions on the mountain, which you will spot on your way down, include the 1000-year-old temple Yakuoin, surrounded by scores of attendant bird-winged statues of mythical Tengu, and a rather less appealing monkey zoo, which you’ll be able to smell long before it hones into view.

Sightseers on the top of Mt Takao, coming to see the Autumn colours.

This increase in traffic at the top can be attributed to a fairly unnecessary cablecar that runs from the foot of the mountain to just below the peak, provided for the lazier Sunday walker. However, if you are feeling particularly energetic and want to get away from the crowds then you can continue down the other side of the mountain along a fairly precarious and not so well maintained path that will after a couple of hours take you down to the village of Sagami-ko on the shores of Lake Sagami. From there it’s a straightforward train ride back to Tokyo.

Some of the most beautiful walks in the world, within easy access from Tokyo.

For the more adventurous, the mountainous area of Okutama in the Chichibu-Tama National Park offers endless possibilities for easy day treks and nature trails. The focal point here is Mount Mitake, which can be reached by a 75 minute journey from Shinjuku to Ome Station along the Chuo line (you may need to change at Tachikawa depending on which train you take), changing at Ome to continue along the line to JR Mitake Station. The whole journey costs about 890 Yen one way. Details of a number of hikes in this area can be found in Gary D.A. Walters excellent book Day Walks Near Tokyo, but if you wish to go it alone, there’s an excellent information centre just outside Mitake Station that can provide you with a detailed English-language map of the Okutama area for free.

This is more like it - the Okutama region, little more than an hour on the train from Tokyo.

Mitake-san rises 929 metres above sea level, and it takes a vigorous two-and-a-half-hour climb to the top. You’d be forgiven for cheating by taking the cablecar, located about a 20 minute walk or a short bus ride away from the station, though it costs 1070 Yen for the roundtrip. Once you reach the summit, you’ll be amazed to find an entire village on top, with no visible means of road access, boasting a host of restaurants and souvenir shops and dominated by the majestic Musashi-Mitake Shrine. Here you can spend a couple of hours just roaming around, taking in sites such as Akuhiro Falls, the Rock Garden, and Jindai Keyaki, a 1000-year-old Zelkova tree. A nice option, if you have the energy, is if you carry on along to the ridge to the second peak, Mount Hinode (Hinodeyama), and follow the signs down the other side to Tsuru Tsuru Onsen, a hot spring resort which, as its name suggests (tsuru tsuru means slippery) boasts bizarrely viscous, soapy water, perfect for a long soak after your exertions. It is fairly easy from here to find your way back to Tokyo via a 40-minute train ride from JR Itsukaichi to Tachikawa.

A wooded mountain trail in Okutama.

The Okutama region around Mitake boasts a number of further walks, from the ambitious trek up the side of the 1266-metre high Mount Ôtake, through the more tranquil four-hour long circuit along the three peaks of the Sôgaku, Takamizu and Iwatakeishi mountains. You could spend a lifetime roaming the area and its secluded forest paths, in search of its wildlife (I saw a baby snake wriggling around on the pathside – still not sure what species) and ancient hidden shrines and temples, but there are other areas within an easy ride from the city centre too: For example if you take the Seibu-Ikebukuro from Ikebukuro out 50 minutes to Hannô station, or the Tanzawa-Oyama area around Hon Atsugi, about 40 minutes south from Shinjuku on the Odakyu line. The question is knowing where to go.

Hidden Buddhist shrine on the way to the summit Sogaku, said to be around 100 years old.

Those who seldom stray from within city limits might balk at the claim that Japan boasts some of the most beautiful scenery in the world, but for those more adventurous among us, such areas offer a chance to look at the country in a way they have never done before.

Check out these books for more ideas:

D.A. Walters. Day Walks Near Tokyo (Kodansha, 1993)

Richard Ryall, Craig McLachlan and David Joll. Hiking in Japan (Lonely Planet, 2009)

Tokyo, as seen from the vantage point of a mountain man.

All night Sasori at the Rio in Dalston on 24 Sept

There’s been a whole load of film-related news in our buzzing capital these past few days. Admittedly, the announcement of the London Film Festival programme yesterday slightly overshadowed my own announcement of the dates for Zipangu Fest (18-24 November at the ICA, if you can’t be bothered to scroll down a bit). Of course, we haven’t actually made  public any of our programming choices yet, which we’re keeping a closely guarded secret until nearer the time, but you might hear me let a few things slip out if you’re at the Female Prisoner #701 Triple Bill at the Rio Cinema in Dalston on 24 September. The event starts at 11pm and carries on through to daybreak, and I’ve been kindly asked by the organisers, Cigarette Burns Cinema, to stand up between screenings and deliver some patter about Meiko Kaji, Toei Pinky Violence, and other related topics. Perhaps I’ll crack under the pressure of sleep deprivation and end up revealing the whole programme…

The cool iconic beauty of Meiko Kaji, as Sasori

Anyway, my presence aside, this is going to be a wonderful night. If you’ve not seen any of the Female Prisoner #701 films (or Female Convict Scorpion, or whatever other titles you like to refer to them under), then you’re in for a rare treat – these aren’t your average Woman in Prison bits of exploitation fluff, but hypnotic, frequently surreal and dreamlike action titles with a logical progression between each of the various instalments and a captivating performance by the cool iconic beauty Meiko Kaji. I’ve not seen them for a while myself, and it’s going to be fab watching them on the big screen all at once.

The hypnotic Female Convict Scorpion: Jailhouse 41 (1972)

The films are being presented in association with the Scala Forever season currently running across a number of venues this Summer (although chiefly The Roxy Bar and Screen) in memory of the legendary repertory cinema up in Kings Cross in which so many of us had our viewing habits formed. In fact, I’m just looking at the programme and I notice that the ICA are showing my favourite Imamura film, The Ballad of Narayama, on the 28th and 29th of this month, which, as I wrote in the intro to Behind the Pink Curtain, proved a seminal experience when I first saw it on a Double Bill at the Scala with Koji Wakamatsu’s Violated Angels back in 1990.

Check out the Female Prisoner all-nighter Facebook page here and more info on this and Cigarette Burns’ other activites can be found here.

SECOND ZIPANGU FEST TO KICK OFF AT LONDON’S ICA

This year’s celebration of cutting edge Japanese cinema will get under way from November 18th to 24th in London

Following the success of last year’s inaugural festival, the second Zipangu Fest – celebrating the best of cutting edge and avant garde Japanese cinema – will be held at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts from November 18th to 24th, before moving to venues around the UK.

Showcasing a selection of Japan’s finest features, documentaries, shorts, animation and experimental films, this year’s Zipangu Fest will include a retrospective screening of two rarely seen gems that have never been shown in the UK. One of these – a pre-war horror title – has been subtitled especially for the festival.

Festival director and head programmer, Jasper Sharp, comments: ‘After the runaway success of last year’s festival, we are very excited about Zipangu Fest 2011. Our aim is to showcase the wealth of talent in the independent and experimental filmmaking scene in Japan by showing the sort of films that other festivals barely seem to be aware of. The beauty of Japanese film is that you know you’re always going to see something different, and this year we’ve got another exciting and diverse range of titles to challenge, provoke and entertain. We’re particularly thrilled that the ICA is hosting this year’s event, as it is the perfect venue for us, and with last year’s programme touring to cities including Bristol, Leeds, Newcastle and Tallinn in Estonia, we hope to continue with our goal of bringing these films to as wide an audience as possible.’

To make sure you are kept up to date with Zipangu Fest news, please subscribe to our press list: http://zipangufest.com/press/2011

For further press information please contact: Sarah Macdonald: sarah@zipangufest.com

You can also join out Facebook group or sign up to our Twitter feed.

Against the beautiful backdrop of Tallinn

This was my first time in Tallinn, and I absolutely fell head-over-heals with the city. It must be one of Europe’s best kept secrets, and I hesitate to sing its praises too loudly lest it become totally overwhelmed by tourists. It’s already suffering to some extent from the usual curse of jeering drunken idiots on organised stag parties that Britain seems to have a predilection for inflicting on Eastern Europe, something I’d already just encountered in Wroclaw the month before. Fortunately these are largely confined to the overpriced tourist and titty bars in the Old Town area, and it’s not difficult to wander off the beaten track and find quieter spaces to explore.

Cultural rivals - the Stalker Film Festival was going on simultaneously in the 2011 European Capital of Culture where parts of the film were shot

Tallinn is Europe’s 2011 City of Culture, and there were a whole host of events going on over the weekend that threatened to overshadow EVA. One of these was the Stalker film festival celebrating Tarkovsky’s classic Soviet sci-fi, parts of which were shot in the city, and featuring a number of examples of films of the type that it has now become acceptable to refer to as “slow cinema” – Bela Tarr, Sergei Paradjanov, you know the type. Luckily, it didn’t seem to draw too many, if any, potential viewers away from our festival, which was amazingly well-attended and well-received. Nothing is too far apart in Tallinn, it seems, and on one of the mornings before the screenings I managed to wander down to the film’s locations, and onwards down to the dockland/beach area, along with my old friend Yoshihiro Ito, whose Vortex and Others surreal shorts programme we screened. The last time we’d met was about 18 months ago in Tokyo, and before that, he was there with his films and disarming grin at the first ever Shinsedai, one of the first ever events I documented on this website in this post from 2009.

Drunken yobs in Tallinn: Saturday night ended in tequila, with Yolanda, Tim Grabham and Yoshihiro Ito, and me staying sensibly behind the camera

Another guest from rather less further afield (i.e. London) was Tim Grabham, one of the directors of the beautiful documentary KanZeOn, accompanied by his charming companion Yolanda. While this film was included in the programme for this year’s Shinsedai, this was the first time Tim had actually been present at one of its screenings, which was effectively the European premiere. It went well, incredibly well… as did Yoshihiro’s films, and that night, we celebrated with an extended tequila session before winding up down at the port area again, at an open air gig by local punk outfit Chungin & The Strap-On Faggots, one of the bands at the festival’s opening night punk concert, along with J.M.K.E., local legends with a fanbase that stretches as far as Finland. Apparently punk is to the Estonians what rockerbilly is to the Finns, the ultimate anti-authoritarian musical stance during the twilight of the Soviet era and still going strong – the fact that I managed to catch Chungin & The Strap-On Faggots twice during my brief stay merely highlighted this fact. You can read Tim’s account of his screening and beyond on the KanZeon website.

Again, I’ll end by saying a huge thanks to our wonderful hosts in Tallinn, Helen and Piret. It’s looking like we’re going to do the event again next year, so I can’t wait to head back, who knows… maybe even before the next fest…

Best laid plans, and all that, but I had been hoping to give readers of this website the heads-up on the festival some time beforehand, but somehow, what with my being wrapped up in New Horizons in Wroclaw, Poland, at the end of last month and numerous other things since, the best I could manage was a few tweets. Frustrating for those who might have wished to combine a trip to this beautiful city with some cutting edge films from Japan, but I know the team on the ground here, Helen Merila and Piret Mägi, have been pretty active in spreading the news locally, so I’ve no fears that local audiences won’t come.

The gorgeous facade of Tallinn's Kinomaja, host to the first ever East via Asia

The festival is taking place in the Kinomaja on Tallinn’s Uus tn 3 – one of the most beautiful cinemas I’ve ever shown anything in. If the programme looks familiar, that’s because I was invited to curate by Helen after she saw the line-up for last year’s Zipangu Fest in London. Most of the titles we’re screening here have screened either in Toronto as part of Shinsedai, or at Zipangu Fest, and those that haven’t played in London yet might well give you a bit of a clue as to what to expect for the second Zipangu Fest, which I can now reveal will be happening 17-24 November at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) – only a bit of a clue however, because we have a whole lot more planned which I personally can’t wait to announce.

I’ll be joined out here tomorrow by Yoshihiro Ito, director of the marvellously surreal Vortex and Others shorts programme which we screened at the first ever Shinsedai back in 2009 and Tim Grabham, one of the two directors of the amazing new documentary on the role of sound in Japanese Buddhism, KanZeOn. Before then, I’ve got an evening of Estonian punk to savour for the Opening Night party at the Kinomaja!

Anyway, I’ll repeat it down here for those who might not have been paying attention, this year Zipangu Fest will take place 17-24 November at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London. If you’re interested in signing up for our press releases or getting on the general mailing list, visit Zipangu Fest’s press section. You can also find us on Facebook and Twitter. Hope to see you in November!