The Japanese film industry is booming, if recent numbers are any indication. Last year 591 Japanese and 526 foreign films were released theatrically, according to figures compiled by the Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan (Eiren). This was the highest total for local films since Eiren began releasing annual box office numbers in 1955.
Also, Japanese films grabbed a 61 per cent share of the 2013 box office and 34 of them earned Y1 billion (US$9.74 million) or more, long considered the marker of a commercial hit in Japan. Only 21 foreign movies achieved that milestone. And yet there is a widespread perception abroad that the Japanese film industry is somehow lagging, especially compared with its booming counterparts in China and Korea. “The Japanese film industry is a shell of its former self – TV is king,” writes a foreign blogger.
“Japanese actors in Japan are stuck doing soap operas, because the Japanese film industry is no longer thriving,” opines a commenter on an overseas message board.
This impression of stagnation or decline is not entirely groundless. Though Japanese films have enjoyed a majority market share for six years in a row, total box office in Japan has not been growing. In 2013 theater admissions rose by 0.5 per cent to 155.9 million yen, but box office earnings slid 0.5 per cent to 194 billion yen. Total annual box office has fluctuated around the 200 billion yen mark since the turn of the millennium, surpassing it six times and falling under it eight times.
Meanwhile, the number of theater screens has increased from 2,524 in 2000 to 3,318 in 2013, with most of the growth coming from multiplexes. “If you build it, they will come” does not apply to the Japanese exhibition business, which is struggling to fill its surplus of theater seats with paying customers.
Also, most of the Japanese films that top the box office are adaptations from other media, including TV shows, novels and manga. In fact of the top ten earning local films in 2103, six were anime, of which only one, Miyazaki Hayao’s WW2- themed The Wind Rises, was based on an original story.
Two of the four live-action films in the box office top ten – Kore-eda Hirokazu’s family drama Like Father, Like Son and Mitani Koki’s period comedy The Kiyosu Conference, were based on their directors’ scripts, but in recent years such commercial films have become few and far between.
Far more common are films like Midsummer Formula, the highest-earning Japanese live-action movie of 2013 with Y3.31 billion. Based on a novel by Higashino Keigo in his popular Galileo series, this mystery thriller stars Fukuyama Masaharu as a brilliant physicist who is staying at a seaside inn when another guest turns up dead. The physicist helps solve the case, just as he has in the other entries in the series, which has spawned a succession of hit TV shows and films since the first Galileo show aired in 2007.
Midsummer Formula, however, earned only about onefourth as much as The Wind Rises, Miyazaki Hayao’s animation based loosely on the life of Horikoshi Jiro, an aircraft designer best known for the second world war Zero fighter plane. Unusual for Miyazaki’s films, The Wind Rises is pitched squarely at adults. It’s more realistic in everything from its period detail to its biographical underpinnings than Miyazaki’s usual flying-witch or talking-goblin fantasies.
After the film’s successful release in July 2013, the 72-year-old Miyazaki announced his retirement from feature filmmaking. Critics and commentators began speculating on who if anyone, could fill the gap he left in an industry he and his Studio Ghibli team had dominated for more than two decades.
Also making what may have been a final bow was Takahata Isao, a Studio Ghibli co-founder and longtime Miyazaki colleague, with The Tale of Princess Kaguya. Based on a 10th century folktale, Takahata’s first film in fourteen years was animated in an impressionistic watercolor style totally unlike the highly finished 3-D digital animation now standard in Hollywood. But the film was lavishly praised by critics, and it made Japanese audiences weep buckets. The 78-year-old Takahata has said he is game for a follow-up, but an announcement may be a while in coming.
The films of both Miyazaki and Takahata were included in the 2013 Best Ten list compiled by Kinema Junpo magazine from a critics’ poll. Long considered the industry’s most significant honor, the poll was topped by Pecoross’ Mother and Her Days, a heart-warming drama by 86-year-old director Morisaki Azuma about a middle-aged comic artist and his dementia-afflicted mother.
Also ranking high with the Kinejun critics was The Great Passage, Ishii Yuya’s drama about a nerdy book editor who finds love and a vocation while spending decades compiling a dictionary. A former wunderkind known for his brash, quirky comedies, the 30-year-old Ishii turned down the volume for The Great Passage and his film reaped not only critical kudos and box office success, but a nod as Japan’s nominee for a Best-Foreign Language Film Oscar, though it did not make the cut for the final five.
These films were both squarely in the Japanese humanist tradition, and it’s almost as though Morisaki were handing the torch to the younger Ishii. But neither stirred up much excitement outside Japan. Getting more foreign honours and attention was Kore-eda Hirokazu’s Like Father, Like Son, a drama about two little boys switched at birth and growing up in the “wrong” families, until a DNA test reveals the truth. The film won the Jury Prize at Cannes, as well as a remake offer from jury president Steven Spielberg’s Dreamworks studio. At home, however, the film was named as one of the year’s Worst Ten in the Eiga Geijutsu magazine’s poll. The magazine’s notoriously contrarian critics also selected The Wind Rises as one of their worst, though it was later nominated for a Best Animated Feature Oscar. It seemed as though Eiga Geijutsu critics were gleefully slamming films their foreign counterparts were reverently praising.
Ironically, they had allies in so-called “Internet uyoku” (“Internet rightists”), anonymous commenters on Japanese message boards, such as the popular 2-channel, who slated Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises as un-patriotic for depicting the war as an unmitigated disaster for not only Horikoshi’s fighter planes, shown as reduced to a smoking heap of rubble, but Japan as a whole. At the same time, Miyazaki was criticized by certain members of the left for glorifying Horikoshi’s work on war machines for the Japanese military, which used them to wreak destruction in Asian civilians as well as soldiers.
Japan’s right-wingers, including Prime Minister Abe Shinzo, were more positive about Yamazaki Takashi’s The Eternal Zero, another film that featured a Horikoshi-designed aircraft – the famous Zero fighter. Seeing the film with his wife Akie and his mother on New Year’s Eve, Abe pronounced himself deeply moved – and he was not the only one. The film soared to number one after its release on December 21 and stayed there for eight straight weeks.
Unlike many Japanese films about the tokkotai (“kamikaze” or suicide squad) pilots who plunged into enemy ships in the closing days of the way, The Eternal Zero takes as its hero not a shining idealistic youth but a battled- hardened pilot of Zero fighter planes. Also, instead of being eager to give his life for the Emperor, as per the kamikaze stereotype, the hero is quite frank about wanting to survive the war, though this attitude gets him labeled a coward by his more gung-ho comrades, even decades after his death.
Widely praised in Japan for its anti-war message, the film was based on a best-selling novel by right-wing author Hyakuta Naoki. Appointed to the Board of Governors of public broadcasting NHK by Abe, Hyakuta stirred up controversy by calling the Nanjing Massacre fiction, and that claiming that Tokyo Trials of alleged Japanese war criminals were a ruse by the victorious Americans to cover up their own atrocities, including the firebombing of Tokyo and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This seeming contradiction between the survival-minded hero and his jingoistic creator illustrates an ambivalence that permeates tokkotai films in particular and Japanese war films in general. While lamenting war’s destruction and waste, many of these films honor and glorify the sacrifices the pilots and others like them made, despite their seeming futility. “They died so that Japan might live and prosper” is the message, spoken or unspoken, however strange it might seem to outsiders.
Most of the new films in 2014, however, are neither right nor left, just as most Japanese are more pacifistic than militaristic, with no desire to send anyone to war, let alone go themselves. But they still enjoy movies set in the bad old days of banzai-for-the-Emperor militarism – and no end is in sight, even as the last of those who lived through that era pass from the scene.
Mark Schilling