The Japanese film industry took a majority market share for the first time in sixteen years in 2006 - then lost it again in 2007, slipping from 53.2 percent to 47.7 percent. After decades of decline, was the industry’s brief moment of triumph already over?
Not quite. First of all, the slip was more at the top than across the board. In 2006, six Japanese films earned five billion yen (US$47 million) or more - the mark of megahit status in the Japanese market. In 2007, only two – the legal thriller Hero (US$64 million) and the latest Pokemon installment (US$47 million), crossed that line, compared with four Hollywood films: Pirates Of The Caribbean: World’s End (US$102 million), Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix, (US$88 million), Spider-Man 3 (US$67 million) and Letters From Iwo Jima (US$47.6 million), though the last film, with its all-Japanese cast, might be considered a Japanese film by proxy.
Below this box office stratosphere, Japanese films did better - 29 grossed 1 billion yen (US$9.3 million) or more, while the corresponding number for foreign films was 22. True, the number of local releases dipped from 417 in 2006 to 407 in 2007, but given the drop in total box office in the same period, 2.2 percent to US$1.854 billion, an upswing in releases would have been more surprising. Foreign film releases, at 403, remained nearly the same.
Despite the strong numbers, the wealth was spread unevenly. Toho, the 900-ton Godzilla of the Japanese distribution and exhibition business, handled nine of the local top ten box office films, beginning with Hero. The only exception was the Yamada Yoji samurai drama Love And Honor (Bushi No Ichibun), which was distributed by Shochiku. The other two ostensible majors - Toei and Kadokawa Pictures, were shut out of the top ten, with Toei pushing only three films over the one billion yen line, and Kadokawa, none, compared with five for Shochiku and 20 for Toho. (The only non-major with a one billion plus pic was Klockworx, with the latest entry in the Evangelion sci-fi animation franchise.)
There are two big reasons for Toho’s dominance, both of which go back decades. First, there’s its theatre chain, which is the largest in the country, and, second, the strong relationships Toho has forged over the year with the TV networks, animation houses and other media companies that produce the biggest commercial films, year in and year out.
The leading film producer among the networks has long been Fuji TV. Uber-producer Kameyama Chihiro put the net on top with the Bayside Shakedown (Odoru Daisosasen) cop comedy/thriller franchise, centering on a cheeky, but dedicated salaryman-turned detective who battles both crooks and police bureaucrats in the Tokyo Bay area – where Fuji TV headquarters happens to be located. The first feature of the series, Bayside Shakedown, earned US$95 million in 1998, while the second, Bayside Shakedown 2, grossed US$164 million in 2003, more than any other film that year, the first Harry Potter included. Two spin-offs, focusing on minor characters from the first two films, were also hits in 2005.
Kameyama’s latest box office coup was Hero, which began as a Fuji TV series, featuring megastar Kimura Takuya as a rule-breaking delinquent-turned-prosecutor. The series racked up 30-plus ratings for every episode when it was broadcast from January to March 2001. Instead of signing Kimura and company to another season, however, Fuji dropped the show for five years, finally reviving it for a special that aired in July of 2006. By this time Kameyama and his team were developing a Hero feature. Released in Japan on September 8 on 450 screens, it soared to the top of the box office and stayed there.
Fuji also had a hit last summer with Monkey Magic (Saiyuki), a live-action version of the classic Chinese story Journey To The West about a priest journeying to find Buddhist scriptures together with three animal companions. The film’s story, however, focuses on the struggle to possess a powerful magic orb that can cast the world into total darkness. Starring Katori Shingo of the pop super group SMAP, to which Kimura also belongs, the film earned $40 million.
Fuji’s two top rivals among the networks – Tokyo Broadcasting System (TBS) and Nippon Television Network (NTV) - also had their share of hits last year. TBS’s biggest was Dororo, an adventure fantasy based on an Tezuka Osamu comic about a warrior hero who was dismembered as an infant by his own father, but miraculously restored to a semblance of normality by an herb doctor. The warrior sets out on a quest to defeat the demons who possess his original body parts – and rejoin them to his frame. Directed by Shiota Akihito and starring Tsumabuki Satoshi as the warrior and Shibasaki Kou as his tomboyish companion, the film grossed US$31.5 million.
Another big film for the net was Crows - Episode 0 (Crows Zero), Miike Takashi’s take on Takahashi Hiroshi’s comic about high school gangbangers. Featuring Miike’s patented brand of ultra-violence and black comedy, as well as a cast of hot young male stars with large female followings, Crows became the biggest box office hit among Miike’s 70-plus films, finishing with US$23 million.
Meanwhile, NTV scored with Always - Sunset On Third Street - 2 (Always Zoku 3 chome No Yuhi), the sequel to the 2005 dramady about the inhabitants of a close-knit Tokyo neighborhood, circa 1958. The new film is set in 1959, when the building boom for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics has just begun and Tokyo is about to be changed forever. The focus: The struggle of a failing writer (Yoshioka Hidetaka) to win a major literary prize – the most unlikely subject for a Hollywood film imaginable. But director Yamazaki Takashi’s meticulous recreation of 1950s Tokyo, using more CG pixels more than real buildings, car and trains, attracted nostalgic Baby Boomers, while the film’s warm-hearted drama, with its depictions of close, caring neighborhood and family ties, opened tear ducts of audiences of all ages. Its final gross of US$31 million was more than that of the first installment, but the prospect of an Always 3 looks dim.
This decade the hottest commercial genre in Japan has been tear-jerker dramas, starting with Yukisada Isao’s Crying Out Love In The Center Of The World (Sekai No Chushin De Ai O Sakebu), a 2004 drama about a tragic teenage romance that earned US$79 million.
Last year the genre started to signs of box office fatigue, as audience tired of the flood of films about dying teenagers. One major exception was Sky Of Love (Koizora), a TBS drama based on a popular cellphone novel. Its mostly young female audience wept buckets over its sad tale of a teenage girl (Yui Aragaki) who falls for a wild but sensitive boy and decides to have his baby over the objections her of her parents - but ends up losing everything, save her memory of their tempestuous love. The film’s box office of $28 million may not have matched Crying Out’s, but the Koizora phenomenon demonstrated the power of viral marketing via the cellphone - the one indispensable accessory for every teenager in the land.
The film that garnered the most awards for the year, however, was the decidedly dry-eyed I Just Didn’t Do It (Sore Demo Boku Wa Yatteinai), Suo Masayuki’s courtroom drama about a salaryman (Kase Ryo) unjustly accused of groping a teenage girl on a commuter train. Based on Suo’s own extensive research, the film was a quietly devastating indictment of the Japanese justice system, in which defendants in criminal trials have a one percent chance of acquittal and many convictions are based on forced confessions. It was named the best Japanese film of 2007 in Kinema Junpo magazine’s annual critics’ poll, as well as winning many other domestic prizes.
Another big award winner was Tokyo Tower: Mom And Me, And Sometimes Dad (Okan To Boku To Tokidoki Otan), a mother-son relationship drama based on a memoir by illustrator Lily Franky. It scooped five Japan Academy Awards for 2008, including Best Picture, Best Director (Matsuoka Joji) and Best Screenplay (Matsuo Suzuki). Also, Kirin Kiki won the Best Actress prize for her portrayal of the hero’s salty-tongued mother, while Koyabashi Kaoru took the Best Supporting Actor award for his turn as the scapegrace artist father. Odagiri Joe came away empty-handed for his role as the cool-butconcerned illustrator son, who brings his mother to Tokyo from Kyushu for cancer treatment.
One film that the Kinema Junpo critics and the Japan Academy ignored, Kawase Naomi’s drama The Mourning Forest (Mogari No Mori), won a far more prestigious prize – the Grand Prix at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival. The film, about woman who becomes a caretaker at a home for the aged following the death of her child – and finds herself on a quest with a senile man determined to find his dead wife, was shot in Kawase’s favourite location - the fields and woods of her home Nara Prefecture - with her trademark lyricism and sensitivity, as well as with a new technical polish. Why the Kinema Junpo critics subbed it is anyone’s guess, but her remark at a post-Cannes press conference that “after Kurosawa and Oshima, I think Kawase will be the next internationally known name... among Japanese filmmakers” may have rubbed some the wrong way. But after this triumph, which came ten years after she took the Cannes Camera d’Or prize for her first feature, Suzaku (Moe No Suzaku), it’s harder to disagree with her.
Kawase’s breakthrough cracked open a door that other women directors have pushing through in ever greater numbers since mid-decade. One is Ninagawa Mika, whose period drama Sakuran was a surpise hit last year, particularly with young women for whom the “period drama” label often says “old-fashioned and uncool.” Based on a popular comic by Anno Moyoco, the film focuses on the lives and loves of oiran - high-priced concubines -in the Yoshiwara red-light district of Edo (feudal-era Tokyo). But instead of ladling on the pathos and Japanesque atmospherics, like Memoirs Of A Geisha, Ninagawa cheekily re imagined the era according to her own exuberant, gaudily colored aesthetic. She presented her oiran heroine - a punk rebel type played with gusto by Tsuchiya Anna - more as a contemporary women than a period character.
This year promises to be even better for Japanese films, at least in terms of market share. The biggest single reason is Ponyo On The Cliff (Gake No Ue No Ponyo), the new animation by Miyazaki Hayao that is set for a summer release. Miyazaki’s first film in four years, since the 2004 smash Howl’s Moving Castle (Howl No Ugoku Shiro), Ponyo is being animated with a watercolor style new to Miyazaki’s films, but in line with his traditional “hand drawn” aesthetic. The story, about a five-year-old boy who meets a goldfish princess who wants to become human, is also a change from Miyazaki’s usual teen and tween heroines. Regardless of the film’s “experimental” nature, it will no doubt become a monster hit. One reason: fans fear that Miyazaki, now 67, may finally make good on his many promises to retire - so they will want to see his latest “last film.”
Or he may keep plugging along, if he follows the example of Yamada Yoji, now 76, who has been making some of the best and most successful films of his career since passing 70. The first was the 2003 samurai drama The Twilight Samurai, which was nominated for a Foreign Language Film Academy Award, a first for a Yamada film. Last year, Love And Honor (Bushi No Ichibun), the third film in his “samurai trilogy,” earned $38.5 million, with the casting of domestic megastar Kimura Takuya as the blinded samurai hero giving the box office a major boost.
This January Yamada released Kabei - Our Mother (Kaabee), a family drama based on the wartime memoir of Nogami Teruyo, Kurosawa Akira’s script supervisor for more than four decades. Screen icon Yoshinaga Sayuri plays the title role, a mother who is forced to care for her two young daughters after her husband, a professor of German literature, is arrested for thought crime one night in 1940. Filmed with a restraint and realism not often seen in mainstream film, albeit with Yamada’s trademark populist humor, Kabei was not expected to do well at the box office by industry prognosticators, but the film has packed theaters, particularly with filmgoers over 50, and is now expected to earn $25 million. Screened in competition at the Berlin Film Festival, it left emptyhanded, but received a warm reception from the local audience - and distributor Shochiku, which represented the film at the European Film Market, claimed sales to seventeen territories.
The big Japanese winner at Berlin was Kumazaka Izuru, who received the Best First Feature award in the Forum section for Asyl - Park And Love Hotel, a drama about a cranky middle-aged woman who manages a love hotel - and has transformed its roof into a park for the neighbourhood. She has encounters with various visitors, including a thirteen-year-old runaway and a lonely housewife, but keeps her hard shell intact, until one day it suddenly breaks - and she reveals the secrets of her past. Inventive in its storytelling and perceptive about the strange ways of the human heart, the film was released in Japan in April.
The biggest local hit so far this year is L change the WorLd, the spin-off to the hit Death Note duology of fantasy/thrillers, directed by Nakata Hideo of Ring series fame. On its opening three-day weekend, from February 9 to 11, the film recorded US$7.9 million on 670,754 admissions - the fastest start of any film in the Japanese market in 2008. Warner Bros Japan, the distributor of L and the two Death Note pics, projected that the three films will collectively reach the US$112 million and 10 million admission marks.
Based on a Obata Takeshi comic that has sold 26 million paperback editions in 12 volumes, the two Death Note films, both helmed by Kaneko Shusuke, told the story of Light (Fujiwara Tatsuya), a college boy who discovers a notebook that deals death to anyone whose name is written in it. At he uses the notebook to thin out the criminal element, but soon goes over to the dark side and starts killing anyone who displeases him. The baffled police call on the aid of a brilliant, geeky investigator known only as L (Matsuyama Ken’ichi). He matches wits with Light - known to the public at Kira (Killer), while hunched over his computer screen, ingesting an endless supply of junk food.
L became a cult hero - his pasty face, kohl-rimmed eyes and ever-present sweets inspired many a Halloween costume - and the Death Note production partners, led by the Nippon Television Network, decided to make a spin-ff featuring L. The story revolves around a plot by an extreme environmentalist group to thin out the world’s population by releasing a killer virus. Instead of staying glued to his monitor, L makes like an action hero, while going to the aid of two children - a mute Thai boy who survived a virus outbreak that wiped out his village and a Japanese girl who is trapped in an infectious disease lab with a virus-infected terrorist.
Released by Toho at the same time as L change the WorLd - and also drawing crowds -was Nakamura Yoshihiro’s The Glorious Team Batista (Team Batista No Eiko). It also has a medical theme, but is more of a puzzle mystery in the Agatha Christie line than a thriller. Takeuchi Yuko stars as a flakey hospital psychologist who is asked to investigate mysterious deaths at the hands of a crack heart surgery team - and decides they are accidental. Abe Hiroshi plays a Health Ministry bureaucrat who detects the scent of murder and arrogantly takes over the investigation, but needs Takeuchi’s help to zero in on a suspect. Based on a best-selling novel by Kaido Takeru, the film is expected to pass the US$20 million mark - a solid hit for producer TBS.
The rest of the Toho line-up for 2008 looks similarly strong. For the Golden Week holiday in late April and early May, Toho has slotted Shaolin Girl, a potentially winning collaboration between Motohiro Katsuyuki, the director of the Bayside Shakedown films, and Shibasaki Kou (Sinking Of Japan, Dororo) in her first all-out action role. Scheduled to bow in May is Higuchi Shinji remake of the 1958 Kurosawa Akira classic The Hidden Fortress (Kakushi Torisde No San Akunin), that may be critically slated like another recent Kurosawa remake, Morita Yoshimitsu’s Tsubaki Sanjuro, but has a built-in audience among samurai swashbuckler fans.
As for upcoming indie films, Kurosawa Kiyoshi will release Tokyo Sonata, a film about a dysfunctional family scripted by Australian Max Mannix - both the subject matter and the script by a non-Japanese are firsts for Kurosawa - the “Prince of Darkness” of the J Horror genre.
Meanwhile, Kore-eda Hirokazu, director of the highly acclaimed After Life (Wonderful Life, 1998) and Nobody Knows (2004), has completed Even If You Walk And Walk (Ariutemo Aruitemo), a film about family ties and memories - both familiar themes in his work, as well as a promise to return to form after the period drama Hana (Hana Yori Mo Naho, 2007), a tepid, if beautifully filmed, attempt at comedy.
Also, Kawase Naomi has finished shooting If Only The Whole World Loved Me (Sekaiju Ga Watashi O Suki Dattara). The film stars Hasegawa Kyoko as a woman who quits her temp job and leave her lover for a new life in Thailand - a departure for Kawase, who has rarely ventured cinematically outside her native Nara Prefecture.
All three films are being tipped for Cannes - but they and other directors from the New Wave of the 1990s no longer dominate the discussion among critics and fans. A New Wave of the oughties has yet to emerge, but new talents are coming from all directions, from the world of “pink” or soft porn films to the game industry, as well as through the more conventional (at least in the West) film school/indie pic route.
The sheer productivity of these and other Japanese filmmakers make it hard to keep up. But they are also making this an interesting time to be watching Japanese films.
Mark Schilling