The Japanese economy may resemble Tokyo after a Godzilla attack - battered, if not yet a smoking ruin - but at least one part of it flourished in 2008: the local film industry. 418 Japanese feature films were released last year, compared to 388 by the foreign competition. Japanese films also took a 59.5% market share in 2008, while accounting for seven of the top ten films at the box office. This included the number one, Ponyo On The Cliff By The Sea. The animation by Miyazaki Hayao earned US$158 million, compared with US$58 million for the number one Hollywood film, Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull. Meanwhile, the largest Japanese distributor, Toho, had its best year ever, grossing US$754 million from 29 releases. Of this number, 21 earned 1 billion yen ($10.2 million) or more, the traditional marker for a hit in Japan. Eight ranked among the top ten domestic films at the 2008 box office.
Toho's dominance goes back decades. But it has become stronger in recent years as audiences turn away from Hollywood product to embrace films produced from popular manga, anime, game or TV franchises by Japan's five commercial TV networks. Toho has long cultivated partnerships with the networks, especially leaders Nippon Television Network and Fuji Television Network, though they also work with Toho's two main rivals, Toei and Shochiku. At the same time, Toho has built a base of long-running anime series, including Pocket Monsters, Doraemon and Detective Conan, that reliably draw the family audience year after year. Toei and Shochiku have launched similar family-targeted series, both animated and live action, but not as consistently or successfully. Finally, Toho manages the largest theater chain in the country, accounting for nearly 1/5 of Japan's 3,359 screens. This chain shows not only Toho, but also Hollywood films, putting Toho in the ambiguous, if enviable, position of both competing with Hollywood major studios and sharing revenues with them. The Japanese offices of the Hollywood majors have been ramping-up local production - a strategy they are also pursuing in other big territories around the world. The most active is Warner Bros. Japan, which distributed the smash Death Note duology, as well the hit spin-off L Change The WorLd. It’s now taking a more active role in development and production. Recent releases include the tsunami-hits-Tokyo epic 252 - the latest in a spate of local disaster films - and the period swashbuckler Ichi, which was inspired by the iconic Zatoichi series about a blind swordsman. There’s also Goemon, Kiriya Kazuaki's spectacular period actioner about the exploits of the legendary title thief - Japan's Robin Hood - that Warner will release this May.
But unlike similar collaborations between Hollywood and the domestic industry in India that have the international market in mind, these and other made-in-Japan Hollywood films are targeted mostly at local audiences. The rest of the world is an after-thought. One exception is Rain Fall, a thriller based on a novel by Barry Eisler about a Japanese-American gun-for-hire and released in April by Sony Japan. Though set in Tokyo and featuring a Japanese cast headed by Shiina Kippei as the hero, Rain Fall was directed by Australian Max Mannis. It co-stars acclaimed US character actor Gary Oldman as the hero's CIA antagonist, and was financed using a limited liability partnership of a type common in the West, but almost unknown in Japan. Abroad, the film will appeal less to Asia cinephiles than mainstream fans - though its true home will probably not be theaters, where it will compete with vastly bigger budgeted Hollywood product, but the DVD shelves. The Japanese film industry is inward-looking for good business reasons. The domestic market is large (admissions totaled 160.5 million in 2008) and affluent enough to pay the world's highest ticket prices (a standard adult ticket costs 1,800 yen or $18.32).
Last year 28 Japanese films made 1 billion yen ($10.2 million) or more at the box office, while the average production budget for commercial films was about US$5 million, rising as high as US$20 million. Even counting expenses for publicity and advertising, producers of these hit films could probably make their money back on domestic revenues alone, including DVD and TV sales. They rarely need foreign sales to recoup on even big-budget - by Japanese standards - films. The worldwide recession, which has devastated the export-driven Japanese economy, has also shaken this domestic-oriented business model. But it’s been felt more at the bottom than the top. This year Toho has bet against a big recessionary impact, announcing a line-up of 32 films, three more than last year, while forecasting a total annual box office of US$663 million. That’s less than 2008, when Ponyo led the pack, but more than its previous record year, 2007.In January, however, Toho's admissions were down 9% compared with the same month the previous year, while its box office fell 8.5%. Far harder hit, however, are indie filmmakers.
At the Nikkatsu Studio in Tokyo's Chofu district, where many of indie films are shot, production of low-budget titles is down by half compared with last year. "There is a big and growing difference between the few films that become hits and far bigger number that don't", Ikeda Noyuki, manager of the studio's Business Department, commented. "Producers of [low-budget films], which tend to fall in the latter category, are finding it harder to raise money". Also, too many films are chasing too few screens. The total number of screens in Japan reached 3,359 last year - nearly 1,600 more than the postwar low of 1,734 in 1993 - but most were in indie-unfriendly multiplex sites. Even in the boom year of 2008, dozens of domestic films were put on the shelf, unable to find either distributors or theatres. This already bad situation has been made worse by the decline in the DVD market, which was for a time the supporter of films with only limited theatrical prospects. DVD store sales fell 11.2% year-on to US$3.686 billion last year, while the number of DVD rentals slid 8.7% to US$697.3 million. "Without the prospect of DVD sales, a lot of Japanese films are not going to get made", explained Otaka Hiro, box analyst for the Bunka Tsushin entertainment news service. "We've been seeing this trend for some time now - and this year it will accelerate. This bad news does not mean that Japanese filmmakers have suddenly stopped taking risks and are now making formula product based on proven media properties - though films of that sort can certainly be found in abundance.
If anything, contemporary Japanese films tend to be more adventurous, in everything from subject matter to treatment and style than their equivalents in the West. In fact many Japanese films - from the mass audience entertainments of Miike Takashi to the zero-budget comedies of Kawasaki Minoru - are rightly judged offbeat and downright bizarre. This is due to the growing influence of Japan's huge otaku (geek) culture, with its legions of obsessed fans of anime, manga, games and other pop culture phenomena. Otaku, outsiders by definition, have long sought out and celebrated creators whose visions are too downbeat, complex or strange for mainstream tastes. More and more, however, otaku favorites are gaining wider acceptance. One recent example is Urasawa Naoki's manga 20th Century Boys (20-seiki Shonen), with its story of a gang of boys who dream up disastrous "prophecies" and then, as adults at the turn of the millennium, start to see them come horrifically true. Though a dark, twisty, highly detailed fantasy in the best otaku tradition, 20th Century Boys became a bestseller and has now been made into a film trilogy by Tsutsumi Yukihiko - think a Japanese Lord Of The Rings - that fans with no otaku tendencies whatsoever have been crowding in to see. The third installment, which will conclude the story and answer many mysteries, is expected to be one of the big hits of the summer.
Another project that might have once been considered too risky is Sato Shimako's big-budget action suspenser K-20 - The Fiend With Twenty Faces (K-20 - Kaijin Nijumenso-den). Instead of being based on a new manga, the film uses the work of Edogawa Rampo (aka Hirai Taro, 1894-1965), who first became popular in the 1920s for tales inspired by Edgar Allan Poe (Edogawa Rampo's namesake), and Arthur Conan Doyle. This traditional blend of Eros and grotesquery is called "ero-guro" and is found in Japanese art, literature - and S&M clubs. While taking as her hero "The Fiend With Twenty Faces" - a Rampo-created thief who is a master of disguise, Sato has set her story in an alternative Japan in 1949, where World War II never occurred and the sharp class division of pre-war society still remain. The film, however, plays up the comedy and action, while playing down the creepy "ero-guro" aspect of its source material. Still, it is decidedly different from the commercial norm. The director who has proven the most commercially adept at bringing the marginal into the multiplexes, however, is Miike Takashi, who began his career making straight-to-video yakuza pics in the early 1990s. In 1997 and 1999 he filmed two installments in the Young Thugs (Kishiwada Shonen Gurentai) series about teenage punks in Osaka's tough Kishiwada district, who rumble as naturally as they breathe.
He is not the first to celebrate punks as anti-social heroes. Be Bop High School, a popular manga about high school gangbangers by Kiuchi Kazuhiro that ran from 1983 to 2003, has spawned a series of anime and films. Miike launched Takahashi Hiroshi’s Crows, another manga series on a similar boys-will-beat-other-boys theme, to box office heights with Crows - Episode 0 (Crows Zero). Packed with strobed fight scenes and starring hot male talents Oguri Shun, Yabe Kyosuke and Yamada Takayuki, Crows drew female as well as male fans and earned US$25.5 million - the most of any Miike’s film. He has since filmed a sequel, Crows Zero II, that opens in Japan in April 2009. His biggest film this year is Yatterman (Yattaman), a CG-heavy fantasy actioner based on an anime that was broadcast in Japan from 1977 for two years and shown widely abroad. The story concerns the quest of a young inventor, aka Yatterman 1, and his spunky girlfriend, aka Yatterman 2, to find all four pieces of the powerful Skull Stone before the rival Doronbo gang can get their nefarious hands on them. This is standard superhero stuff, even for Japan, but Miike adds a new twist in the romantic relationship that develops between the inventor, Gan (Sakurai Sho), and the voluptuous, ditzy Doronbo gang leader Doronjo (Fukada Kyoko).
He has also packed the film with sly 1970s pop culture references, raunchy gags and surprisingly sweet daydream sequences, in which Doronjo imagines herself as a contented housewife and Gan her salaryman husband. Hollywood has nothing to compare with this. Quirky films, however, flourish most readily at the lower end of the budget scale, where filmmakers can take more chances with fewer consequences. One such director is Nakamura Yoshihiro, who first rose to prominence as a scriptwriter - among his early screen credits is the 2002’s J-Horror hit Dark Water (Honogurai Mizu no Soko Kara). He has since directed several of his own decidedly unconventional scripts that question not only social norms, but the nature of reality. His newest film in this line, Fish Story, combines four separate plots threads as it investigates the unexpected consequences of seemingly minor acts, the human potential for growth and destruction. Along the way, Nakamura violates many a standard rule of scriptwriting, at one point stopping the story dead for an extended gab by members of a failing 1970s punk band about the title of their latest tune: "Fish Story". But he brings his various story strands together brilliantly in the closing minutes, somewhat in the manner of The Sixth Sense. Nakamura's true scriptwriting soul mate is Charlie Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind Kaufman. Some Japanese directors continue to make serious dramas aimed at prestigious festivals and prizes.
But even these films often depart from the humanist conventions inherited from Japanese cinema's 1930s-to-1960s Golden Age, when source materials were often literary masterpieces rather than geeky comic books. Tokyo Sonata, which won the Jury Prize in the A Certain Regard section at last year's Cannes Film Festival, is the first-ever family drama by renowned horrormeister Kurosawa Kiyoshi, but has little in common with outwardly similar Golden Age films. Its story of family dysfunction, co-scripted by Australian Max Mannix, is familiar enough, but Kurosawa sends his newly unemployed salaryman hero (Kagawa Teruyuki) on a horrifying downward spiral - which he only escapes by a harrowing, if cleansing, near-death experience. Not exactly Ozu. A bigger prize winner - as well as a far bigger hit - was Departures (Okuribito), Takita Yojiro's dramedy about an out-of-work cellist (Motoki Mashiro) who finds a new calling as a nokanshi - a professional who cleanses and clothes corpses, often while their grieving relatives look on. Nearly a decade in the making, the film brought a light comic touch to its unconventional subject, while tracing the personal growth of the middle-aged hero and his much-younger, initially uncomprehending wife (Hirosue Ryoko) with a clear, unmelodramatic, eye. Released in Japan in September, Departures became a word-of-mouth smash, earning more than US$35 million at the box office. It also won a surprise Oscar for Best-Foreign Language Film, as well as nearly 60 domestic prizes, including Japan Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director. Interestingly, Departures was produced by the TBS network and released by Shochiku - that is, two companies usually inclined to prefer a safe franchise property rather than a risky indie gamble.
Whether either will take similar gambles in the near future remains to be seen. Also fighting their way to the industry forefront, against historically steep odds, are women directors. Although women have long been prominent behind the camera - as everything from art directors to producers and publicists - few have ever sat in the feature director's chair until the current decade. Now the gates are wide open, with new films by women - from Cannes Grand Prix winner Kawase Naomi to newcomers from TV and other fields - appearing in a steady, growing stream. Among the splashier debuts is that of Kitagawa Eriko, a veteran TV drama scriptwriter with a long string of hits. Halfway, her first film as a director may have a clichéd story - a teen romance turns sour when the guy decides to go away to college, leaving his heartbroken girlfriend behind - but Kitagawa films it with a fresh, natural eye, while showing us the true, tender heart of her spunky heroine. Japanese film fans will recognise the stylistic influence of indie veteran Iwai Shunji, who served as producer and co-editor.
But Halfway is definitely Kitagawa's. Will the surprise win of Departures at the Academy Awards spur greater interest in Japanese films, both and abroad - and help struggling producers and distributors stay out of the red? Or will the current downturn stifle promising careers? Whichever outcome, the Japanese industry has shown the ability to adapt and reinvent. Yesterday, J-horror was taking Hollywood by storm. But its scares quickly became formulas. Today the defining adjectives for many new Japanese films are “quirky” and “crazy”. Tomorrow? Perhaps “serious” and “sane” will be back in vogue. Ozu may yet get the last word.
Mark Schilling