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.

That’s the obligatory New Year message out the way. It’s now 6 January and it seems there’s already a whole load of news that has come my way that I want to report here over the coming days. As it usually takes me hours to wrestle with WordPress to get my posts up in a satisfactory form, some of these might appear later than I hope, but I’ll kick off 2011 straight away with the first, my long overdue report on the inaugural Zipangu Fest, five days of Japanese cinema overkill as curated by yours truly.

It has taken a bit longer than expected, mainly because I was waiting for all the press reportage to come in, but also in no small part because as the festival’s director and head programmer, I felt like I was stuck in the eye of a storm for most of it. My feet barely touched the ground all week, as I was whisked, along with my fellow organisers Tun Shwe, Fei Phoon, Rob Buscher, Almudena Lopez and Julian Ross and festival guests (listed on the Zipangu website here) from event to event across the East End of London, from the Bethnal Green Working Man’s Club via Café 1001 to our final destination at the Genesis Cinema. It’s pretty difficult to be impartial about how the whole thing went, so instead I aim with this post to summarise the festival using other people’s accounts (as assembled meticulously by Fei), and for those that weren’t there, attempt to re-invoke it using other people’s text, sound and image.

First up, I should draw your attention to the above Zipangu Fest ident above, which was created by the talented Keiichi Matsuda, a visual artist who divides his time between London and Tokyo, and whose concerns stretch between film, architecture and design, exploring ideas pertaining to virtual and actual space. Keiichi also created a 3D version of the same ident that was screened just before Big Tits Zombie 3D at the Barbican on 29 October; if you’ve got the 3D glasses supplied with the Terracotta DVD release of this film you can enjoy it with the added third dimension too – in fact any pair of old school red-cyan spec: check it out on Youtube.

Hisayasu Sato, flanked by Zipangu Fest's Almudena Lopez and Rob Buscher

For a broad overview of the festival and the films that played at it, the best place is Electric Sheep’s coverage of the festival. Electric Sheep also interviewed Hisayasu Sato, and more recently made available on their website a podcast of my onstage discussion with Tetsuaki Matsue at SOAS on the first day of the festival.

There were also reviews of a number of the films that played the festival by David Parkinson on Empire Online, and an advance puff piece in the Guardian Guide. In the run up to the festival, I was interviewed by Christopher Upton for Zeitgeist Online magazine on 2 October, which gives some idea as to our battle plan, even if it was conducted before the programme was actually announced.

90 minutes of Zipangu Fest Interviews on this VCinema Podcast

Jon Jung from the VCinema Show also sadly couldn’t be with us, although understandably given that he’s based in San Francisco, but through an amazing piece of technical wizardry, he was on hand at the other end of a Skype line to interview all our guests for a special Bonus Episode 6: Zipangu Fest 2010 Special Podcast during our Saturday night House Party – I’ll warn you in advance, I was pretty drunk by the time he got round to talking to me.

Kenta Maeno and Yuki Yoshida manfully brave the cold in an attempt to rekindle the magic of Live Tape on London's Brick Lane

We also got a fair bit of coverage in the Japanese language, The presence of Matsue and the Live Tape crew of Kenta Maeno and Yuki Yoshida was largely down to the generous support of the Japan Visualmedia Translation Academy, who sent Risa Tanaka along to report on the festival for their website, with an interview with me, an interview with Matsue and day-by-day accounts for the Opening Night Party, then more here, here, here, here, here, and here. (I think I might have missed one…)

Meanwhile, Yukari Yamaguchi wrote two reports for Cinema Today focussing on Tetsuaki Matsue, here and here.

In discussion with Tetsuaki Matsue at SOAS, with Julian Ross interpreting

Alongside our own festival videographer, Tania Martin, who is currently putting together her video document in the editing room to be put up online sometime soon, we were really lucky to have those fine folks from the Coventry University East Asian Film Society (or CUEAFS) along for at least one night with cameras in hand, for the Live Tape ‘Live’ Night at the Café 1001. I’ve already written about my trip up to Coventry in October where I screened Tetsuaki Matsue’s Annyong Kimchee. For one night only, a team of avid CUEAFS returned the favour by coming down to London to see Matsue’s masterful Live Tape and watch its subject, Kenta Maeno, perform live, accompanied by Yuki Yoshida on the Chinese harp. You can read their report and browse through their photos on their website and also on the CUToday website: I assume the video they shot will make it onto the web sometime soon, so keep checking their Youtube account if you haven’t already, and while you’re doing so, check out their other interviews with various figures involved in the Asian film scene. Other pieces by CUEAFS members include this interview with me by Nadia Baird (BTW, the ‘Mind Feast’ referred to in this article was actually Masumura’s Blind Beast), a review from the Annyong Kimchee screening by Sabina Pasaniuc and coverage of our Halloween Japanese Schlockfest Big Tits Zombie / RoboGeisha night at the Barbican.

Tetsuaki Matsue interviewed by CUEAFS' Spencer Murphy, with Julian Ross interpreting

My favourite night of the whole festival was undoubtedly our partnership with Close-Up, the Nippon Year Zero: Japanese Experimental Film from the 1960s-1970s programme curated by Julian Ross, who was also on-hand throughout the fest to offer his invaluable interpreting skills. This was for two reasons – firstly, because I didn’t have to run around madly organising things, and secondly, the Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club venue itself, was so cosy, and the combination of mulled wine, a packed house full of genuinely interested film fans, and the sheer joy of seeing these very rarely screened films shown in 16mm by a projectionist who actually knew what he was doing made for a winning formula. There’s an interesting review of the evening by Ryan Hewitt on the Flamingo Magazine site.

Louis the projectionist, projecting from 16mm at the Bethnal Green Working Man's Club

This seems as good a point as any other to mention that the Motoharu Jonouchi films from this programme are travelling to Newcastle, where they will screen at the Star and Shadow Cinema on 15 January, then Nottingham, at the Nottingham Contemporary on the 19 January, both times introduced by Julian.

Happy Times! Nippon Year Zero at the Bethnal Green Working Man's Club

And while we’re still on the subject of Julian, I’ll close with a final couple of reviews from the Children of the Beehive screening at the Breaking Boundaries conference in Leeds and Leeds Film Festival, prior to the London date. I’m not sure who wrote it, but you can read about it on The Case for Global Film website, while M. Dawson also gives the film a big thumbs up at Left Field Cinema.

I think that’s all the main coverage for Zipangu Fest, although there was a lot more buzz scattered in fragments around the internet. We’re also waiting upon a few more videos and podcasts, so once these are up, I’ll link to them.

Zipangu Fest Guests (L to R): Takuro Kochi (Man-Eater Mountain, sound-designer), Sumire Kiyose (Live Tape, distributor), Yuki Yoshida (Live Tape, musician), Daishi Matsunaga (Pyuupiru 2001-2008, director), Tetsuaki Matsue (Live Tape, director) and Kenta Maeno (Live Tape musician)

I’ve mentioned on numerous occasions too that Zipangu Fest is intended to be a moveable feast, and following our most recent screenings at the Arnolfini in Bristol – as reviewed by Subtitled Online ( who were keen to praise the programme, but acknowledged the low attendances – the Bristol leg was frustratingly held over the weekend when most of us in the UK were completely snowed in), we’re currently in the process of setting up further screenings across the UK of some of the films. Any exhibitors, regional curators, film societies or university film clubs interested, drop me a line at jasper@zipangufest.com…

Sachi Hamano in London (photo by Fei Phoon)

Raindance seems like aeons ago, and I’ve still not got round to transcribing most of the interviews I conducted with our Japanese guests this year. Don’t worry, you’ll be getting a chance to read these in the not-too-distant future on Midnight Eye, but until then, you can make do with this interview with Sachi Hamano which has recently been put up on the website of Electric Sheep magazine. I covered Sachi Hamano in quite some detail in my book Behind the Pink Curtain. For those not familiar with her name, she’s not only the most prolific woman film director in Japan, but also one of the most (if not the most) prolific pink film directors, which probably makes her among the most prolific filmmakers in the world, male or female. It was a real honour to have her at Raindance this year as one of the people featured in the Japanese Woman Directors programme, where her non-pink comedy Lily Festival played to great aplomb, and I am delighted that Electric Sheep’s Virginie Sélavy recognised Sachi Hamano’s achievements in the industry and wanted to talk to her, as the interview makes for quite fascinating reading. As I’ve posted before, Electric Sheep also interviewed another Raindance guest, Momoko Ando, which went online last month. I should also point out that the photo of Hamano was taken during her stay in London by Fei Phoon, one of the whizz kids behind the design of this website.

On a sourer note, the latest print edition of Electric Sheep appears to be its last, at least in its current form, with the editors attributing the gloomy financial climate to its demise. Its very sad, because Electric Sheep plugged a valuable gap in the film media, giving intelligent coverage to films that weren’t necessarily getting covered elsewhere. The website will continue, as will the editors’ admirable attempts to broaden film culture with regular screenings in London of films that you rarely get a chance to see on the big screen nowadays. Anyway, you can pick up the Winter 2009 issue at a good magazine stockist, if you can find one – I was going to suggest Borders on Charing Cross Road, but it was just announced a couple of weeks ago that Borders UK has just filed for administration. One wonders if any of us in this country are going to get out of this recession in one piece!