The Japanese film industry used to be happy just to hold its own against Hollywood. Hollywood has held a majority share of the Japanese market since 1975 and was once threatening the few remaining local strongholds, such as animation and monster movies. In 1998 Hollywood even made its own Godzilla film and Toho, in what seemed to be an act of corporate cultural suicide, released it.
In 2005, however, the Japanese film industry not only pushed back against Hollywood, but gained ground. The total gross of Japanese films rose 3.4% to US$699 million, for a 41.3% market share - the first time they had passed the 40 percent mark in eight years. Also, 356 domestic films were released - 46 more than the year before and the most since 1976. Of this number, 26 earned Y1 billion (US$8.5 million) or more at the box office.
Meanwhile the total take of foreign films plunged 11.7%, to US$995 million. The strong performance of Korean films, including A Moment to Remember (US$25.6 m) and April Snow (US$23.5 m), pointed up the overall weakness of Hollywood.
On the annual box office chart compiled by the Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan) the leader for the year, at US$167.5 million, was Miyazaki Hayao's Howl's Moving Castle (Howl no Ugoku Shiro), which was released in November 2004. Its success was no surprise - Miyazaki's animations have been topping the Japanese box office since Kiki's Delivery Service (Majo no Takyubin) in 1989.
What was new was the number of Japanese live-action films on the list, led by The Negotiator (Koshonin Mashita Masayoshi) with US$35.9 million. Directed by Motohiro Katsuyuki, the film was a spin-off of Motohiro's two mega-hit Bayside Shakedown (Odoru Daisosasen) comic thrillers about the culture clash between the police elite and the cops on the beat in a trendy Tokyo Bay precinct. The title hero, Mashita Masayoshi (Santa Maria Yusuke), is a police negotiator, an occupation about as common in Japan as kosher butcher. The story, about a terrorist who hijacks an experimental train on the Tokyo subway system, is mostly shadows and mirrors, but the film quotes so many Hollywood thrillers, including Steven Spielberg's The Duel and Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much, that the guess-the-reference game becomes more absorbing than the plot.
Not far behind, with US$32.7 million, was The Suspect (Yogisha Muroi Shigeru), another Bayside Shakedown spin-off, this time about an elite cop, Muroi Shigeru (Yanagiba Toshiro), who becomes the suspect in a murder case and the pawn in a bureaucratic game. Something of a stiff, but tenacious and fearless, Muroi takes on an entire organization, but is himself the quintessential organization man. The film, understandably, made a hit with salarymen.
The female buddy movie Nana scored a similar success, at US$34.4 million, but with an entirely different group. Based on Yazawa Ai's popular girls' comic - 27 million copies in paperback editions and counting - the film told the story of two 20-year-old women with the same first name - one a sneering punk rocker (Nakajima Miki), the other a chirpy country girl (Miyazaki Aoi) - who become unlikely friends, roommates and confidants. Directed by Otani Kentaro (Avec Mon Mari, Travaille), the film offered a well-blended mix of romance, music and female bonding. Meanwhile, Nakajima's recording of the theme song, Glamourous Sky, reached number
on the Oricon chart and the 13th Nana paperback, number one on the comics bestseller list - the same week the film topped the box office chart.
Targeting Japanese Baby Boomers was Always - Sunset on Third Street (Always - Sanchome no Yuhi), Yamazaki Takashi's ensemble drama, based on a long-running Saigan Ryohei comic, about folks in a downtown Tokyo neighborhood circa 1958. The film became a widely discussed phenomenon, grossing $28 million, less for its directing, acting and script - though Always scooped twelve Japan Academy Awards - than the meticulous reconstruction of 1950s Tokyo by Yamazaki and his staff at the Shirogumi effects house.
Although Hollywood routinely resurrects vanished eras with the help of pixels, Yamazaki's Tokyo had a special resonance for his Boomer audience because they had not only grown up in it, but remembered how it had all but vanished in the intervening decades. The film also appealed to younger Japanese, for whom its cityscape was like a lost world - a Japanese Pompeii - sprung to life.
Murakami Shosuke's Train Man was a phenomenon of a more contemporary kind. Based on the true story of a young otaku (nerd) who met a woman on a commuter train and went online for advice from chatroom strangers on how to woo her, it became the biggest romantic drama of the year, earning US$32 million. Playing the eponymous hero, Yamada Takayuki was comically hapless and clueless, but his sincerity won the hearts of the film's mostly female audience.
Train Man's popularity was also driven by the growing media interest in otaku culture. Its hero's Mecca is the Akihabara district in Tokyo, with its dozen of stores dedicated to electronics, computer games, plastic figures of mini-skirted anime heroines and other otaku obsessions.
This year the Japanese film industry is still on a roll, beginning with the WWII epic Yamato (Otokotachi no Yamato), which passed the US$34 million mark after its December 12 release. The film's success was a vindication for uber-producer Kadokawa Haruki, who had made a long string of hits in the 1970s and 1980s, but had become an industry non-person following a bust for cocaine smuggling in 1993.
The film tells the true story of the Yamato, the largest battleship in the Japanese navy, that sailed on a suicide mission to Okinawa in April of 1944 and was sunk by a ferocious American air bombardment with the loss of nearly 3,000 lives. Veteran Sato Junya filmed a climatic battle reminiscent of the Omaha Beach assault in Saving Private Ryan, with bullets, bombs and bodies flying everywhere. Although Kadokawa's intent was to stir patriotic sentiments among young Japanese - the film's core audience - Yamato was also a stark reminder of war's ultimate costs. The indefatigable producer is already making his next film - a $25 million epic on the life of Genghis Khan featuring Yamato star Sorimachi Takashi in the title role.
Also filling theaters early this year was Suite Dreams (The Uchoten Hotel), Mitani Koki's ensemble drama about New Year's eve in a luxury hotel. Inspired by the 1932 MGM classic Grand Hotel, the film follows the stories of several guests and hotel workers, including a suicidal politician (Sato Koichi) and a maid (Matsu Takako) pretending to be a rich man's mistress. The complex plot, scripted by Mitani, unfolds with a clockwork precision, as do the many comic bits, from the slapsticky to the sophisticated.
Mitani's two previous films as director, Welcome Back, Mr. McDonald (Radio no Jikan, 1998) and Our House (Minna no Ie, 2001), had similar multi-layered story lines, but Suite Dreams has far outdistanced them at the box office, passing Y5 billion (US$43 million) in early March. The reason, says Mitani, is simple: "The audience has become used to enjoying my style of comedy. I'm now reaping what I've sown."
On the other hand, Japanese audiences have become too used to the scares of J-Horror, a once hot genre that has had only patchy success at the domestic box office in the current decade. But Tsutsumi Yukihiko's Siren - the first horror film by a director of twisty thrillers (Chinese Dinner) and dramadies (Trick) - opened strongly in February and is now expected to gross as much as Y1.0 billion ($8.5 million). This is more than double the box office total of Reincarnation (Rinne), the latest outing by horrormeister Shimizu Takashi, whose Hollywood remake The Grudge earned more than US$100 million in the North American market.
Based on a Sony Computer Entertainment game, Siren sets itself apart from the general J-Horror run by unfolding across an entire island rather than a spooky house or apartment (The Grudge, Dark Water), not relying on cliched J-horror shocks (hands reaching out blood-filled tubs, double-jointed ghosts) while supplying fresh scares via a siren that, in the course of the film, becomes another character. "We put a lot of effort into the soundtrack," explained Siren producer Yamauchi Akihiro. The result is what he describes as "sonic horror." "It's the first film of its type," says Yamauchi. "We see it as a kind of experiment."
Real experiments, however, were relatively rare among mainstream films. The TV networks and the other media players who finance and produce most of them nearly always draw on hit material from another media, be it a manga (Nana), game (Siren) or highly rated TV show (the Bayside Shakedown films). A rare exception like Suite Dreams proves the rule: Mitani has become so well known as a scriptwriter/director that he has become a brand himself, much like his role model, Billy Wilder.
Japan's stubbornly vital indie sector is somewhat different. Films still get made from (usually lesser known) manga and books, but auteurship and originality count more. The indie directors who emerged in the New Wave of the 1990s, including Kitano Takeshi, Kurosawa Kiyoshi, Miike Takashi, Tsukamato Shinya and Kore-eda Hirokazu, still dominate the discussion of the Japanese film abroad, but collectively they have become a known quantity, recycling themes and styles or, as in Miike's case with the superhero spoof Zebraman and the kiddie fantasy film The Great Goblin War (Yokai Daisenso), even going mainstream (while delivering a few rude jolts to the tikes in the seats).
Miike, however, reverted to the gross and bizarre form his fans know and love in Imprint, an installment in the 13-part Masters of Horror series for the Showtime network in the United States. But the film, which unfolds in a Meiji-era (1868-1912) brothel, was judged too extreme to be broadcast - meaning that its value as a DVD release immediately soared.
The director trying hardest to break with the stylistic routine was Kitano Takeshi, whose trademark minimalism, affectless violence and pawky black humor was once widely imitated. In his twelfth and latest film Takeshis' Kitano stars in double roles - one as the celebrity "Beat Takeshi" and the other as the convenience store clerk/struggling actor "Kitano Takeshi," while heavily referencing his previous films. Kitano described Takeshis' to the press as a kind of "death" (Pronounced in Japanese, the title is "Takeshisu" or "Take[shi] dies"), in which he shakes off the mortal coil of his first eleven films and prepares himself for the next stage of his career.
The film is a violent, surreal fantasy that plays deliberately murky games with illusion and reality. The simplest interpretation is that Kitano, ever the insecure comic, is imagining what his life might have been like if, a quarter century ago, he hadn't hit the big time as "Beat Takeshi" - half of a popular comic duo. It exists entirely in this bubble called "Kitano" - and as quirkily brilliant as Kitano is in Takeshis', his absorption in private fantasies, whose logic only he understands, makes it feel more self-indulgent than self revealing.
Instead of Kitano and other New Wave stalwarts, most of the awards for 2005 were scooped by directors, both young and not so young, with less international cache. One was Izutsu Kazuyuki whose Pacchigi!! was selected for the Best One prize in the Kinema Junpo magazine annual Best Ten critics' poll, the Japanese film world's most prestigious honor. Izutsu was also named Kinema Junpo's Best Director.
A big, raw, revitalizing jolt, like walking from a present-day Tokyo street, with its dull, closed-off faces, into a wild student party-cum-riot, circa 1968, Pacchigi!! was partly Izutsu's look back at his own sixties youth. Mostly, though, it was Romeo and Juliet redux, with Kyoto standing in for Verona and the Japanese and Korean communities substituting, respectively, for the Montagues and Capulets. (Pacchigi!! was screened in the 7th edition of the Udine Far East Film festival.)
Japan's nominee for a 2005 Foreign Film Academy Award was Kurotsuchi Mitsuo's Semi Shigure, a somberly realistic samurai drama reminiscent of The Twilight Samurai. Its hero is a low-ranking young samurai whose father was forced to commit seppuku (ritual suicide), leaving his family community pariahs. More than his struggle to restore the family name, the film focuses on his star-crossed relationship with a servant girl who becomes the concubine of a lord.
The Foreign Film Oscar nomination usually goes to an industry veteran, such as Sai Yoichi in 2004 for Blood and Bones (Chi to Hone) or Yamada Yoji in 2003 for The Twilight Samurai (Tasogare Seibei). Kurotsuchi, who also scripted the film from a novel by Fujisawa Shuhei, was hardly a newcomer - he released his first film, Orugoru (Music Box) in 1989 - but he was primarily a TV drama director with only two feature credits prior to Semi Shigure, making his selection a bit out of the ordinary.
The most honored newcomer was Uchida Kenji, whose debut feature A Stranger of Mine (Unmei Janai Hito) scooped four prizes at Cannes, as well as several in Japan, including a Kinema Jumpo award for Uchida's script. Instead of art as usually conceived, however, the film is straight-up, cunningly plotted, entertainment. The story - two shy, lonely strangers meet by chance (or rather by the introduction of the guy's private detective pal) at a restaurant and fumble towards love - starts in a familiar romantic comedy groove. After the first act, however, it circles back to the beginning and, as it unfolds from other points of view, we realize that everything we thought we knew was wrong. The ensuing ride is clever, funny and, especially if you happen to be a shy guy (or girl) yourself, uplifting.
Also winning new recognition, at home and abroad, is Yamashita Nobuhiro, whose films are in the Jim Jarmusch and Kaurismaki Aki line, especially in their off-beat sense of humor. In his latest, Linda, Linda, Linda, however, Yamashita took a step (or rather a shuffle) toward the mainstream, even casting popular Korean actress Bae Doo-na in a bid for the Korean market.
The film is an infectiously funny, closely observed comedy about a girl rock band's frantic preparations for a school festival. The title is taken from the song by the 1980s rock song by The Blue Hearts the girls perform at the festival, with the sort of energy and charm seldom found in Jarmusch or Kaurismaki, while the film's DVD, released on February 22, hit the Oricon domestic film chart at number four.
Does that mean Linda, Linda, Linda is no longer indie? In today's Japanese film market the borders between what used to be two hostile (or at least mutually wary) tribes - the mainstream and indie sectors - are shifting. Multiplexes are slipping smaller, artier films into their lineups, if only for scattered screenings, while younger directors are making films that play in arthouses, but are pop at heart. They may want festival invitations and awards, but they want big audiences too. In other words, they want it all - and more of them are getting it.