Taisho, Showa. Meiji

Sailing off again and switching his I.D. for fun, Pedro Edogawa makes for the fabulous city of Tokyo2. Five months of Mother America building up inside his endocrine system, making him sterile. Smothering, demanding, indecisive, casting out false hopes and easy optimisms, death, death, maybe birth, and death, hot and cold, altogether boring the way it plays out in repetitious weather, everyone with the same goddamn bike messenger bag.

Col. Baldwin (or maybe someone just like him) sends in the mission. A hand phases in from nowhere like the Four of Cups and drops a line.

Cut to just after the end of World War II, in a converted soldiers barracks near the old marching ground in Roppongi. Walt Disney signs a very big check. MacArthur takes a cut and moves forward. A demoralized infrastructure lets them do whatever they want, hissing and bowing all the while.

Disney reacting badly to animated propaganda. Pirate print of Momotaro, Holy Solider of the Sea projected on charred bed sheet, suicide shout out to the Emperor scrawled in blood, perfect penmanship…he sees where this is going to lead one day. Cute little heavy armored animals marching west instead of east, bayoneting kindly woodcutters, bestializing honey blond fairy tale princesses. Walt tells Mac, Japan’s animation cel counts must remain lower than Hollywood’s at all costs. “At what cost?” “This cost” The complete first set of Disney dollars helps buy some new aviator shades.

Remote viewers have seen the ceremony. One of them, a former Espionage Reject, draws a sketch of it. Baldwin’s eyes steer towards what looks like the top of a beret, just to the left of MacArthur’s corn-cob pipe (a tip of the hat to Popeye). Could it be…Tezuka?

Pedro can put one and one together. Counter-ESPY wants the actual documents, but for what purpose? He scans the keywords for what’s about to happen…

· Female Nudity
· Broken Nose
· Bowling
· Organized Crime
· Hitman
· Sketch Artist
· Tiananmen Square
· Undercover
· Surveillance
· Witness
· Police
· Flashback Sequence
· Electrocution
· Vulgarity
· Lasersight
· Drugs
· Professional Hit
· Corruption
· Cosa Nostra
· Crooked Cop
· El Train
· Sniper
· Martial Arts
· Murder
· Remuneration
· Nude Modeling

And then he's off to catch his plane...

Comments

[Daryl Surat]

When student Daryl Surat witnesses a killing, he finds himself caught between two feuding anime warlords. Betrayed and set up by the federal agents protecting him, the only one he can trust is Patrick, a single-minded San Francisco cop who reminds Daryl of his deceased father. To clear his name, Daryl agrees to help Patrick bring down the anime warlords.

That dastardly Asian man Tzi Ma is behind these rapid fire developments, no doubt.

[Gilles Poitras]

A San Jose State University (CA) Library School student on an internship at the Cartoon Art Museum discovers a false bottom to an old cardboard box with Crusader's Rabbit Farm stenciled on the side.

Hidden in the false bottom is a set of photographs, slightly out of focus, of documents from 1947 detailing a technique for producing animation at minimal cost and cell count. Inserted is a carbon copy of a memo on flimsy stock on how these photos were sent from Yokohama by a former associate of Ozaki Hotsumi and could be applied to the production of a cartoon show on this new thing called television. Scrawled in a corner is a note. "Don't tell Tzi Ma, contact the Car Salesman".

[Steve Harrison]

A room filled with cigarette smoke. Shadow men living shadow lives read.

"He knows Remote Viewing. His Keywords will find targets. There is danger here."

"He knows nothing. Our Agents have sown the story of how 'limited animation' was a creation of Americans to sell breakfast cereal. Reference Works all cite this as truth. Disney is protected."

"Some will believe...."

"Believe? the delusional ramblings of a faded rebel? A man who WATCHES cartoons, and not even in his own language?"

"What is his language, then?"

"Shut up, you divert the streams. All that matters is our plans move forward."

And the shutter slams closed, the tired stripper gyrates to invisible men, wearing cat ears.

[Mike D.]

Something was stirring.

He didn't know what exactly was on the move or why exactly he had to be there, only that things were about to heat up. Fast.

He looked up at the stars that night. He thought back to when he was younger, he and his friend would climb the tallest tress and watch the night sky for hours on end. He remembered how they both would look their hardest for shooting stars, so that their greatest wishes would be granted.

At the time, those wishes consisted of a everlasting triple scoop ice cream cone and the latest games, both of these would always seem like treasure on some distant island where no man dare travel to. He thought that actually, that everlasting ice cream would be nice right about now.

Then slowly, like always, the memories faded and he found himself pulled back to the present. However, unlike all those other times he was pulled back and reminded that he was an adult, he found himself at the stars and wishing once more. Wishing some herald from the heavens would tell him why this impulse was driving him crazy. Wishing that he knew why the hell he had to be there. Wishing that he knew why exactly she left him after all these years...

All of this, rushing through his mind like images of time lapsed traffic as he threw back another can of wannabe green tea to finish it off.

The only voice to reply to his wish was his own as he muttered another reminder to himself about how the canned green tea tastes like heated up cologne. Almost a memo to himself for future reference.

Tossing the can aside, his source of nourishment now depleted, all he could do was look to the skyline. Back to square one, he thought.

Back to waiting under the stars.

[Bruce Lewis]

Venice: filthy water laps at a striped post as the gondolas bob and pitch. The boathouse is dark now, the workmen gone home or to wherever light and drink can be found. The canal is silent save for the lap, lap of the tide and the distant sound of the crowd at the Piazza san Marco. The shade of Ezra Pound steps from the blackness of the empty window across the canal from the boathouse.

"So you see, Eliot, what our England was to us, Japan is to them. A vortex, drawing them in. They can't escape it any more than we could." His gray face crinkles in a smile as another specter appears across the water.

Eliot's dry American voice replies. "But damn it all, Pound. Cartoons? As the basis of a culture? We were, er, drawn, yes — but the vortex we felt pulling us to England was —" He shrugs, narrow shoulders going this way and that. The boathouse is visible through him, his spectral form standing moodily atop the striped pole, hands in pockets of his narrow serge suit. "Was, well, of a higher nature. Surely these vile — 'animations', as you call them — cannot serve the purpose poetry served for us. They rhapsodize schoolgirls in sailing clothes, for God's sake! It's as if we had found our muse in the garbage of Fleet Street."

"You always were a snob, Eliot," Pound replies with a chuckle. "But that's why I loved you. You might have sought your muse among a 'higher nature'. You are a brickmaker's son, a preppie; you never fall far from the Harvard oak. I, however, am from Philadelphia." Chuckling, Pound gestures at the water around him, and, by inference, the city. "Damn me, Eliot, but why do you think I made Venice my home. This filthy water, this place of trash, mildew, and base commerce, this city — not your Canterbury! — produced the wealth that fueled the greatest poetry, the greatest culture, the West ever knew." Pound's shade lowers his arm. "As for the schoolgirls, did not Beatrice's call draw Dante through Hell and Heaven?"

"Don't quote Dante to me, Pound", says Eliot's shade crossly. "He's up here, you know. The man never shuts up about his schoolgirl. It's enough to make one retch, if I'm honest."

Now Pound laughs in earnest. "And yet you speak as if schoolgirls were not motivation enough for culture. Did not Helen launch those ships? Did not Romeo pine for Juliet? Did not Hikaru pursue Minmay through the halls of the Giants? Here on the banks of Acheron, we have no schoolgirls. I'd write a stanza or two to see one again."

"Well, I bloody well wouldn't," says Eliot crossly. "Women have been nothing but trouble for me. Ask Shaw about that!" Eliot rolls his eyes theatrically. "Vivien! Damn me for a blind fool."

"Yet these children," Pound says, "In their blind love for these insubstantial schoolgirls — and schoolboys, too, damn them all as buggerers! — are, by their words, and dress, and deeds, creating a new world across their peaceful ocean, as we did across ours, 'a thousand miles long and two deep'."

Eliot turns to face Pound. "Yes, yes, I suppose you're right. Anglophiles then, Nipponophiles now, and who knows but Lunaphiles tomorrow. Let them have their schoolgirl cartoon dreams. I only hope the Eliots and Pounds and Yeatses and Lewises of this new culture do better by their new world than we by ours." He sighs. "I mean, honestly, Pound — fascism? State-worship? You knew better." Eliot shakes his head ruefully, then is gone.

"Did I?" says Pound wistfully. "I suppose I did, to the extent I knew anything at all. I was mad, you know." The gondolas bob and slap at the water. The sound from the Piazza is quiet now. Deep night has come, as it must. "But these children are not. Most of them aren't, anyway. I still don't understand the 'furry 'thing." Pound raises his eyes to Heaven, in death as in life forever beyond his ken.

"No, I think that the children of this world know better than we did about a great many things. Let them have their cartoon schoolgirl dreams. Let them live in peace."

Pound smiles. Then he, too, vanishes into black.

[Danielle Tokunaga]

Looks like your friends Kill Bill poster made it as a parody for Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei!!

(1:09 into the video)
http://youtube.com/watch?v=YkqdZ8c3rGM

Oh god somebody get the rights to the
manga and anime for the US.

[tissuekins]

uhh...I don't get it?