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Description
"So sorry, allow me to introduce myself: I am Moto, of the International Police..."

The Rivals of the Great Mouse Detective takes place the 1930s, the delicate years between post-WWI and pre-WWII, when the progression of the "Golden Age of Detective Fiction" was at its height. Authors like Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ellery Queen, John P. Marquand, Chester Gould, etc, created some of the most legendary sleuths of the 20th century, from the glamourous to the hard-boiled. They are not adversaries, not at all so; they are the Great Detective's disciples, who integrated the Master's teachings of science and deduction into their own generation and carried them onto the next century. Nevertheless, our dear long-retired Sherringford Basil cannot help but conveniently pop his head up into a few of their lives and adventures.

Introducing Mr. Moto. The Russo-Japanese War grew out of an imperialist rivalry between Russia and Japan for dominance in Korea and the ancient Chinese province of Manchuria, a land so rich that both the Russians and the Japanese were greedy to possess it. While the Chinese were unable to defend their own homeland, the British was pleaded on to thwart the catastrophe that would follow a Japanese invasion, but they had recently become allies and loathed to interfere, and in 1904, the war erupted when the Japanese fleet launched a surprise torpedo attack and sank the Russian Pacific naval squadron at Port Arthur, on the Liao-Tung Peninsular in the south of Manchuria. After nearly two years of plunderage and genocide, the result of the Treaty of Portsmouth of 1905 gave Japan control over the most of southern Manchuria, Sakhalin (Karafuto) Island, and Korea as a Japanese protectorate. This victory marked the emergence of Japan as a major world power, demonstrating the weakness of the great Chinese empire as anti-Asian sentiment boiled over and spread across the globe, resulting in the "Yellow Peril."

As the Russo-Japanese War was reaching its end, Ishinomori Akimitsu (surname always before forename) was born and raised in Nagasaki City of Nagasaki-ken Prefecture on the island of Kyushu, Japan. His father Iwakuni Akiharu was born Kikkawa Akiharu, a descendant of the noble Kikkawa daimyo (feudal lord) of Izumo Province and Iwakuni Domain, who became a businessman, marketer, and successful founder of the Dai Nippon Shousha (Dai Nippon Trading Company). Nagasaki-ken is the commerce capital of the nation and served as a central exchange between itself and other countries, even during its national seclusion of Sakoku (1641-1859), linking Japan to China, Korea, and the more distant nations of the West. This exotic prefecture has been a welcoming, hospitable centre for a multitude of cultures, languages, and individuals.

While the East placed emphasis with equanimity and diligence, the West placed it with intelligence and individualism. It is the family, rather than the individual, which is considered to be the basic unit of society as family responsibilities take precedence over individual desires, familial relations provide the model for social integration at all levels, and plays an important role in determining individual life chances. The strict feudal system of Japan disallowed one born of one class to rise to another, but his father was a self-made man and a Harvard valedictorian, and experienced things in far more different light. He desired his children edification into an abstruse but principal ideology known as wakon yosai, or "Japanese spirit, Western intelligence" — an intercultural relationship between East and West where antiquity and tradition as well as modernisation and technology are to merge and fuse together harmoniously. The young Ishinomori Akimitsu was educated at the Kyoto Teikoku Shogakko and studied in an European university before he graduated at Stanford University in San Francisco, California. Nothing more is known of his academic career or early life beyond this.

He was originally engaged in the newly-assembled Kempei-tai, the Japanese Military Secret Police and infamous spy network of imperialists under Emperor Michinomiya Hirohito, as an anonymous attaché under the initials, I.A., for Unit 363, the International Association of Exporters and Importers (IAEI), thwarting piracy, fraud, money laundering, and the black-market trade of slave labour, weaponry, and narcotics. Sequentially, the Kempei-tai became a much feared and dreaded organisation in the protectorates of China and Korea, and possessed wide powers which they ruthlessly and hideously wheeled upon the captive territories into submissiveness. Civilians were tortured, or executed on mere suspicion, or for disrespect to Japanese soldiers, those caught stealing would have their heads off and displayed in public, prisoners were massacred in concentration camps, women and children regularly raped. After a service of five years, Agent I.A. resigned from the Kempei-tai in utter revulsion and was recruited a year later by the International Criminal Police Commission (ICPC), aiming to provide an unique range of essential services for the law enforcement community whose mission is detecting, preventing, and suppressing crime on a global scale. To protect and prevent any further disgrace towards his family, he acquired an alias of Moto Kentaro: Moto is an anagram from two of his samurai ancestors, Ishinomori Motoharu and Ishinomori Motonaga, which translates to 'origin, former time'; and Kentaro was the his mother's maiden name, which meant 'sharp, study of.' He remains one of their top international secret agents whose assignments and activities are shrouded in mystery, through his exotic Pacific Rim adventures against villainous masterminds, violent cut-throats, and designing dragon women.

---

I have been a great lover of the Mr. Moto films for years — I preferred him over Charlie Chan, hands down. Eight Moto films were made with Peter Lorre and an additional four were planned, but the 1941 bombardment of Pearl Harbour ultimately (and sadly) destroyed the series. And, to add more salt to the wound, the films were banned for the last sixty-five years for being "political incorrect." As a result, today, no one remembers who Moto was!

Yes, the series did play on stereotypes and misconception, but the character of Mr. Moto was never intended to be racist. Actor Peter Lorre was himself a foreigner, a Hungarian-born German-Jew who escaped the Nazis, and knew of the cruelty of bigotry. He played Moto suave, educated, cultured, clever, and damn sexy! In fact, Moto pre-dates James Bond; Moto is the original king of spy-fi! Last year, the entire collection was finally introduced to high-definition DVD. I can't help but be grudgingly annoyed by this because two years before I bought the series bootlegged, low quality, for $50, thinking it would never be released in my lifetime. Daaaaamn, the irony of it all!

(Konnichiwa, Moto desu is Japanese for "Hello, I am Moto." Check out a wonderful clip of Moto HERE !)

Models - Peter Lorre , Sessue Hayakawa , Kôji Yakusho

Medium – HB mechanical pencil.

Mr. Moto © John P. Marquand (and Diane N. Tran).

Description
"So sorry, allow me to introduce myself: I am Moto, of the International Police..."

The Rivals of the Great Mouse Detective takes place the 1930s, the delicate years between post-WWI and pre-WWII, when the progression of the "Golden Age of Detective Fiction" was at its height. Authors like Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ellery Queen, John P. Marquand, Chester Gould, etc, created some of the most legendary sleuths of the 20th century, from the glamourous to the hard-boiled. They are not adversaries, not at all so; they are the Great Detective's disciples, who integrated the Master's teachings of science and deduction into their own generation and carried them onto the next century. Nevertheless, our dear long-retired Sherringford Basil cannot help but conveniently pop his head up into a few of their lives and adventures.

Introducing Mr. Moto. The Russo-Japanese War grew out of an imperialist rivalry between Russia and Japan for dominance in Korea and the ancient Chinese province of Manchuria, a land so rich that both the Russians and the Japanese were greedy to possess it. While the Chinese were unable to defend their own homeland, the British was pleaded on to thwart the catastrophe that would follow a Japanese invasion, but they had recently become allies and loathed to interfere, and in 1904, the war erupted when the Japanese fleet launched a surprise torpedo attack and sank the Russian Pacific naval squadron at Port Arthur, on the Liao-Tung Peninsular in the south of Manchuria. After nearly two years of plunderage and genocide, the result of the Treaty of Portsmouth of 1905 gave Japan control over the most of southern Manchuria, Sakhalin (Karafuto) Island, and Korea as a Japanese protectorate. This victory marked the emergence of Japan as a major world power, demonstrating the weakness of the great Chinese empire as anti-Asian sentiment boiled over and spread across the globe, resulting in the "Yellow Peril."

As the Russo-Japanese War was reaching its end, Ishinomori Akimitsu (surname always before forename) was born and raised in Nagasaki City of Nagasaki-ken Prefecture on the island of Kyushu, Japan. His father Iwakuni Akiharu was born Kikkawa Akiharu, a descendant of the noble Kikkawa daimyo (feudal lord) of Izumo Province and Iwakuni Domain, who became a businessman, marketer, and successful founder of the Dai Nippon Shousha (Dai Nippon Trading Company). Nagasaki-ken is the commerce capital of the nation and served as a central exchange between itself and other countries, even during its national seclusion of Sakoku (1641-1859), linking Japan to China, Korea, and the more distant nations of the West. This exotic prefecture has been a welcoming, hospitable centre for a multitude of cultures, languages, and individuals.

While the East placed emphasis with equanimity and diligence, the West placed it with intelligence and individualism. It is the family, rather than the individual, which is considered to be the basic unit of society as family responsibilities take precedence over individual desires, familial relations provide the model for social integration at all levels, and plays an important role in determining individual life chances. The strict feudal system of Japan disallowed one born of one class to rise to another, but his father was a self-made man and a Harvard valedictorian, and experienced things in far more different light. He desired his children edification into an abstruse but principal ideology known as wakon yosai, or "Japanese spirit, Western intelligence" — an intercultural relationship between East and West where antiquity and tradition as well as modernisation and technology are to merge and fuse together harmoniously. The young Ishinomori Akimitsu was educated at the Kyoto Teikoku Shogakko and studied in an European university before he graduated at Stanford University in San Francisco, California. Nothing more is known of his academic career or early life beyond this.

He was originally engaged in the newly-assembled Kempei-tai, the Japanese Military Secret Police and infamous spy network of imperialists under Emperor Michinomiya Hirohito, as an anonymous attaché under the initials, I.A., for Unit 363, the International Association of Exporters and Importers (IAEI), thwarting piracy, fraud, money laundering, and the black-market trade of slave labour, weaponry, and narcotics. Sequentially, the Kempei-tai became a much feared and dreaded organisation in the protectorates of China and Korea, and possessed wide powers which they ruthlessly and hideously wheeled upon the captive territories into submissiveness. Civilians were tortured, or executed on mere suspicion, or for disrespect to Japanese soldiers, those caught stealing would have their heads off and displayed in public, prisoners were massacred in concentration camps, women and children regularly raped. After a service of five years, Agent I.A. resigned from the Kempei-tai in utter revulsion and was recruited a year later by the International Criminal Police Commission (ICPC), aiming to provide an unique range of essential services for the law enforcement community whose mission is detecting, preventing, and suppressing crime on a global scale. To protect and prevent any further disgrace towards his family, he acquired an alias of Moto Kentaro: Moto is an anagram from two of his samurai ancestors, Ishinomori Motoharu and Ishinomori Motonaga, which translates to 'origin, former time'; and Kentaro was the his mother's maiden name, which meant 'sharp, study of.' He remains one of their top international secret agents whose assignments and activities are shrouded in mystery, through his exotic Pacific Rim adventures against villainous masterminds, violent cut-throats, and designing dragon women.

---

I have been a great lover of the Mr. Moto films for years — I preferred him over Charlie Chan, hands down. Eight Moto films were made with Peter Lorre and an additional four were planned, but the 1941 bombardment of Pearl Harbour ultimately (and sadly) destroyed the series. And, to add more salt to the wound, the films were banned for the last sixty-five years for being "political incorrect." As a result, today, no one remembers who Moto was!

Yes, the series did play on stereotypes and misconception, but the character of Mr. Moto was never intended to be racist. Actor Peter Lorre was himself a foreigner, a Hungarian-born German-Jew who escaped the Nazis, and knew of the cruelty of bigotry. He played Moto suave, educated, cultured, clever, and damn sexy! In fact, Moto pre-dates James Bond; Moto is the original king of spy-fi! Last year, the entire collection was finally introduced to high-definition DVD. I can't help but be grudgingly annoyed by this because two years before I bought the series bootlegged, low quality, for $50, thinking it would never be released in my lifetime. Daaaaamn, the irony of it all!

(Konnichiwa, Moto desu is Japanese for "Hello, I am Moto." Check out a wonderful clip of Moto HERE !)

Models - Peter Lorre , Sessue Hayakawa , Kôji Yakusho

Medium – HB mechanical pencil.

Mr. Moto © John P. Marquand (and Diane N. Tran).