While Japan was becoming one of the world’s great economic powers in the 1970s, its film companies were falling on hard times. As in western countries, the problems began with slumping attendance. In 1958, the peak year for the Japanese box office, 1.2 billion tickets were sold; in 1972, fewer than 200 million were sold. The studios cut production to around 350 features per year. The vertically integrated Toei, Toho, and Shochiku ruled the domestic market, but the latter two put little money into filmmaking, preferring to invest in other leisure-time industries.
The studios’ most dependable in-house projects came to be their endless series, such as Toho’s Godzilla movies and Shochiku’s sentimental Tora-San dramas. Like their Hollywood counterparts, most of the studios built their release schedules out of independent projects that they had helped finance. The Big Three dominated distribution and exhibition, so they still controlled the market. The most profitable genres were martial-arts films, yakuza (gangster) tales, science-fiction movies (based on the success of Star ’Wars), disaster films, and the so-called roman porno (soft-core pornography).
Independent Filmmaking: An Irreverent Generation
As the studios floundered, independent production and distribution gained ground (p. 530). Smaller firms financed nonstudio projects and became strong presences in international export. The most artistically oriented independent group was the Art Theater Guild (ATG), founded in 1961 and throughout the 1970s still funding a few films by Nagisa Oshima, Susumu Hani, Yoshige Yoshida, Kaneto Shindo, and other New Wave directors. The ATG also owned a circuit of art-house theaters for showcasing its product. Bigger independent companies founded by department stores, television companies, and publishing concerns also began producing films, and these firms gave the studios stiff competition.
Most of the well-established auteurs were able to work by acquiring financing from both the studios and independent sources. Kon Ichikawa had a hit with a Godfather-type gangster story, The Inugami Family (1976), financed by Toho and a publishing house specializing in crime fiction. Shohei Imamura’s own company joined with Shochiku for a characteristic tale of rape and revenge, Vengeance Is Mine (1979). His Ballad of Narayama (1983), a Toei production, won worldwide notice for its presentation of the rural custom of abandoning the old to die.
The most renowned big-budget directors moved toward internationally financed productions. Akira Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala (1975) was a Russian project; Kage-musha (1980) and Ran (1985) were assisted by French and U. S. backing. Dreams (1990) was partially financed by Warner Bros.
Nagisa Oshima’s international coproductions Empire ofPassion (1978), Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence
(1982), and Max mon amour (1986), the last made without any Japanese participation, represented a retreat from the disjunctive experimentation of his works of the 1960s. None of these productions matched the scandalous success of his first French-Japanese vehicle, In the Realm of the Senses (1976). Based on a famous 1936 incident, it centers on a man and woman who withdraw from the political upheavals of their day into a world of erotic play. At the climax, the man languidly succumbs to murder and mutilation. The film relinquishes virtually all the modernist experimentation that had made Oshima famous, presenting its erotic encounters in sumptuous imagery (Color Plate 26.6). Although shot in Japan, In the Realm ofthe Senses was heavily censored there.
Imamura, Kurosawa, and Oshima slowed their pace to a film every four or five years. While they struggled to find backing for their ambitious projects, a younger generation was glad to work quickly and cheaply. The super-8mm underground, often Punk-flavored, carried several directors to mainstream production. Born around 1960, the new generation found political modernism as alien as the New Wave directors had found the great tradition of Ozu and Mizoguchi. The young directors of the late 1970s and early 1980s reveled in the anarchic vulgarity of violent manga (comic books) and heavy-metal rock music. Financed by the Art Theater Guild and some major studios, they attacked the stereotypes of Japanese harmony and prosperity with a raucous humor.
Not surprisingly, they often concentrated on youth culture, with such rocker-biker films as Crazy Thunder Road (1980, Sogo Ishii). Domestic tradition was another target. In Yoshimitsu Morita’s The Family Game (1983), a college student tutoring a boy winds up seducing an entire family. Sogo Ishii offered The Crazy Family (1984), in which household hatreds escalate into a desperate chainsaw battle. The same absurd violence permeates Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo (1989). Tsukamoto, who started shooting super-8mm movies at age 14, worked in an advertising agency and directed television commercials before he produced this raw fantasy about ordinary citizens becoming robots as a result of their macabre erotic impulses.
Parallel to the new generation of live-action directors there emerged a group of animators specializing in feature-length science-fiction and fantasy cartoons known as anime. Derived from manga, these energetic films features robots, astronauts, and superheroic teenagers (even schoolgirls, as in Project A-Ko, 1986). Several domestic box-office hits of the 1980s were animated features, and one, Katsuhiro Otomo’s bloody, postapocalyptic Akira (1987), became a cult success in other countries. Working with low budgets, anime artists gave up much of the complex movement of classic animation in favor of canted angles, rapid editing, computer-generated imagery, and a striking command of gradual shading and translucent surfaces (Color Plate 26.7). Anime of all types yielded profitable foreign television and videocassette sales.
Another hope of the mainstream industry was Juzo Itami. Son of a distinguished director, he had been an
26.12 The Funeral: a family member takes a snapshot. “Get a little closer to the coffin. Look sad.”
Actor, a screenwriter, and an author since the 1960s. Itami’s The Funeral (1985; 26.12), Tampopo (1986), and A Taxing Woman (1987) are mordant satires of contemporary Japanese life. Full of physical comedy and mockery of the new consumerist Japan, they became highly exportable items and made Itami the most visible Japanese director of the 1980s.
The success of the “New Japanese Cinema” was undergirded by industrial factors. As in the United States, the decline in attendance leveled off; by the late 1970s, it stabilized at around 150 million annually. The market could support about 250 films per year, although at least half of these would be low-budget, soft-core pornography. Producers sought filmmakers willing to turn out inexpensive films attuned to the free-spending younger audience.
Yet even offbeat films faced increasingly stiff competition from U. S. firms. In 1976, for the first time, receipts from foreign films surpassed those from Japanese films. By the end of the 1980s, most of each year’s top-grossing films were American, and Japanese films made up only about one-third of all features released. Japan replaced Britain as Hollywood’s biggest foreign market.
The film industry, facing few export prospects and sharper competition at home, drew some hope from its new directors and from favorable tax laws that encouraged motion-picture investments. In addition, the studios’ control of exhibition guaranteed them a share of Hollywood’s income. Yet even this security was shaken in 1993, when Time Warner, in partnership with a Japanese supermarket chain, opened a chain of multiplex theaters. Slowly the Big Three launched multiplexes of their own.
In the meantime, Japanese business was coming to terms with Hollywood in another arena. By 1980, the
Country was supreme in manufacturing automobiles, watches, motorcycles, cameras, and electronic goods. Japan replaced the United States as the world’s major creditor, holding the largest banks and insurance companies and investing billions of dollars in foreign companies and real estate. During the same period, investment companies began funneling hundreds of millions of dollars to Hollywood firms. With the launching of pay television and high-definition television, Japanese media companies needed attractive material of the sort that Hollywood could provide.
Most spectacularly, Japanese manufacturers of consumer electronics were buying Hollywood studios. Sony purchased Columbia Pictures Entertainment for $3.4 billion in 1989, while Matsushita Electric Industrial Company paid $6 billion for Music Corporation of America, the parent company of Universal Pictures. The latter was the largest investment any Japanese company had ever made in a U. S. firm. Matsushita eventually pulled out, selling MCA/Universal to Seagram. After purchasing Columbia, Sony had a rocky time of it at first, eventually writing off over $1 billion in debt. Still, Japanese firms had shown their desire to operate as global media players.
The 1990s: The Punctured Bubble and a New Surge of Talent
Japan’s boom decades were followed by a steep and prolonged recession, with falling stock prices and real estate values bringing the economy to a halt. The long-ruling Liberal Democratic party, repeatedly exposed as corrupt, could respond only by sinking more money into the construction industry. In this climate, the vertically integrated movie companies became even more stagnant. They preserved their power at the box office through superior distribution power and the tradition of forcing employees of the studios or of allied businesses to buy movie tickets. For the world outside Japan, the interesting films were largely independent products, and fresh talent began to attract festival prizes and foreign distribution.
Young directors, many of whom started with 8mm student films, began to win acclaim. Shinji Aoyama’s melancholy and disturbing Eureka (2000) galvanized festivals. The film begins with a brother and sister taken hostage on a bus, but the film is not a conventional action picture (26.13); instead it focuses on the efforts of the bus driver to heal the teenagers’ wounded lives after the crisis. Shunji Iwai directed the offbeat romance Love Letter (1995) and the dystopian fantasy Swallowtail Butterfly (1996). The tirelessly self-promoting Sabu (Hi-royuki Tanaka) made post-Tarantino genre exercises
26.13 Eureka: the bus driver and a policeman at the mercy of the hijacker.
26.14 A team of sumo misfits and their cheerful cheerleader [Sumo Do, Sumo Don’t).
Like Dangan Runner (1996), about three men chasing through Tokyo, and Sunday (2000), about a young salaryman dragged into a gang war. Several filmmakers examined gay sexuality; Ryosuke Hashiguchi’s Like Grains of Sand (1995) presented a sensitive study of schoolboys exploring their affection for each other.
More in the mainstream was Masayuki Suo, who sought to revive early-Ozu comedy in a series of films about young people, notably Shiko Funjatta (aka Sumo Do, Sumo Don’t, 1992), centering on the adventures of a college Sumo team (26.14). Suo found international success with his wistful salaryman comedy Shall We Dance? (1995). Likewise, Hirokozu Koreeda won attention with Maborosi (1995), a subdued drama of a widow learning to love her second husband. The stately, often distant, compositions celebrate the beauty of everyday life (Color Plate 26.8) and the forbidding but fascinating seaside landscape of the community in which the wife finds herself. Koreeda’s After Life (1998) presents a benevolent limbo in which the dead are allowed to record their most precious memory on film.
Many of the most intriguing directors worked in downscale genres. Kyoshi Kurosawa (no relation to Akira Kurosawa) loosed a barrage of enigmatic and shocking works, using crime plots or horror conventions in quirky ways. Cure (1997) is about a detective tracking a killer who is able to control his victim’s minds. Kairo (aka Pulse, 2001) suggests that ghosts haunt the Internet. Takeshi Miike, Kurosawa’s contemporary, also reworked pulp material, turning out movies at a pace no less frantic than that of the plots. Fudoh: The New Generation (1996) centers on schoolboy gangsters and schoolgirl assassins. Dead or Alive (1999) is a hard-driving crime movie, while Audition (1999) begins as a slightly perverse romance (a salaryman auditions women as girlfriends) and ends in carnage (when he gets more than he bargained for; 26.15).
The most significant director of the 1990s was Takeshi Kitano (aka “Beat” Takeshi). Japanese audiences
26.15 In Audition, the sa laryman’s chosen woman answers his call; unbeknownst to him, a mysterious sack (containing a previous lover?) thrashes helplessly behind her.
26.16 A typical Kitano “clothesline” composition (Sonatine).
Loved him as a TV comedian but turned away from his movies. It was on the international scene that he won praise for brutal yakuza movies such as Boiling Point (1990), Sonatine (1993), and Hana-bi (1997). Kitano cultivated a deadpan style of performance and image design, with characters often facing the camera, lined up like figures in a simple comic strip (26.16). They speak seldom, stare at each other, and remain strangely frozen when violence flares up. Kitano’s films compel attention by unashamedly alternating brusque rhythm with almost childish poignancy, especially when he returns to his favorite motifs—sports, adolescent pranks, flowers, the sea. His sense of color has a naive immediacy (Color Plate 26.9), and he warms his spare visuals with the car-toonish tinkle of Joe Hisaishi’s musical scores. Kitano’s work outside the yakuza genre includes A Scene at the Sea (1991), a wistful tale of a deaf-mute couple, and his coming-of-age movie Kids Return (1996).
In the late 1990s, Japanese horror won new audiences with a cycle of mystical Japanese films about a videocassette that kills anyone who watches it (Ring, 1998, and its sequels). The Asian craze for Ring resembled the western response to The Blair Witch Project
(1999). Still, anime remained Japan’s most popular film export, with 250 hours of it produced each year. The new god of anime was Hayao Miyazaki. His charming features My Neighbor Totoro (1988) and Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989) made their way to Europe and North America slowly, but they became perennials of video rental. Princess Mononoke (1997) blends Miyazaki’s splendid linear style with selective use of computer techniques to enhance cel animation (Color Plate 26.10).
Miyazaki’s works broke local box-office records; Spirited Away (2001) became the top-grossing Japanese film to date and the first non-U. S. film to earn more than $200 million outside the United States. But such rare hits could not revive the Japanese industry. At the end of the 1990s, 250 or more features were being made each year, most going unseen. Average yearly attendance hovered at one visit per person, and the Big Three studios clung to power. Nonetheless, the scale of Japanese investments overseas ensured the nation a central place in international film commerce, and a surge of excellent films brought new attention to one of the world’s most venerable national cinemas.
World History
