The Japanese film industry seemed headed for a sterling year at the start of 2020. The total box office for 2019 was an all-time record US$2.4 billion, according to figures compiled by the Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan (Eiren). The previous high was US$2.2 billion in 2016.
Shinkai Makoto’s animation Weathering with You was the top-earner of the year among out of domestic and foreign releases, with a take of US$130 million.
This was about half the JPY25.03 billion (US$232 million) made by Shinkai’s previous film, the 2016 Your Name, but was still splendiferous – and another indication that Shinkai has inherited the mantle of Miyazaki Hayao, Japan’s anime maestro and a box office king for more than two decades.
Meanwhile, total admissions for 2019 rose 15.2% year-on-year to 195 million while the number of releases increased slightly to 1,278. Domestic films accounted for 689 releases and foreign for 589.
A total of 25 foreign films passed the JPY1 billion (US$9.27 million) mark considered the measure for a commercial hit. By comparison, 40 Japanese films attained this milestone.
Also, Japanese films took a majority market share in 2019 with 54.4% or US$1.3 billion. This was the 12th straight year they bested the foreign competition.
Once again, industry leader Toho claimed the most films in the domestic top ten: seven. The remaining three went to a resurgent Toei.
Five of the ten highest-earning Japanese films were animations, including new iterations of the long-running Conan the Detective, One Piece, Doraemon and Dragon Ball franchises.
The top-ranking live-action film, at number three with 5.6 billion yen (US$52 million), was Sato Shunsuke’s Kingdom. Based on a best-selling manga set in China’s Warring States period, the film follows the fates of two boys from the same peasant village who grow up dreaming of becoming great generals and unifying the country. With Sato’s usual brisk pace and visual panache, Kingdom is filled with fight scenes that make minimal use of computer effects and maximum use of eye-popping choreography.
The other live-action entries in the domestic top 10 – Masquerade Hotel (4.6b/US$43m), Fly Me to the Saitama (3.7b/US$34m), Hit Me Anyone One More Time (3.5b/US$32m) and Confidence Man JP (2.9b/US$27m) – all featured big casts, clever stories and laughs to varying degrees.
Directed by comedy master Takeuchi Hideki (Thermae Romae) from a popular manga, Fly Me to the Saitama was a personal favorite among this lot for its knowing, affectionate send-up of the title prefecture, which has the same relationship to nearby Tokyo that New Jersey has to New York. It’s a notoriously uncool place whose denizens feel inferiority, envy and resentment vis-à-vis their ultra-cool urban neighbor. Its parallel stories – one a family comedy, the other a fantasy about a “Saitama revolution” inspired by “boys love” comics – add up to hilarious spot-on satire.
The success of these films, all pitched more at adults than teenagers, pointed to the commercial decline of the seishun eiga or “youth film” genre, especially the romantic dramas, often with medical melodrama or time-travel elements, that were once sure box-office bets. Or perhaps their audience simply migrated to Weathering with You with its seishun eiga story of a runaway teenaged boy who falls for a girl with mysterious power over the weather.
With exceptions like Fly Me to the Saitama, which proved popular on the foreign festival circuit, Japanese commercial films are aimed first and foremost at local audiences, with the international market an afterthought.
By contrast, two of Japan’s most celebrated directors, Kore-eda Hirokazu and Kurosawa Kiyoshi, stepped outside their domestic comfort zones with their 2019 films.
Best known abroad for his family dramas, Kore-eda filmed in a foreign country, France, for the first time to make The Truth. When it premiered at last years’ Venice festival, this drama about an aging French actress (Catherine Deneuve) butting heads with her adult daughter (Juliette Binoche) over her largely fictional memoir received lukewarm reviews. Also, in contrast to Kore-eda’s 2018 Shoplifters, a winner of the Cannes Palme d’Or winner and a major hit at home, The Truth left Venice without a prize and met with a tepid box office reception in Japan.
Meanwhile, Kurosawa, long recognized internationally as a master of horror for such films as Cure (1997) and Creepy (2016), went to Uzbekistan to film To the Ends of the Earth. Starring Maeda Atsuko as a TV reporter who faces a personal and professional crisis while wandering the streets and bazaars, the film individualizes its Uzbekistani characters, unlike the many Japanese films shot abroad that view foreign people as stereotypes and use foreign settings as backdrops.
Kore-eda, Kurosawa, and other directors who first came up in the 1990s, are still getting most of the major festival invitations and prizes. Many younger directors, however, are doing excellent work while operating below the radar of the foreign programmers and critics who track films from around the world, not just Japan.
One now on that radar is Fukada Koji, whose drama A Girl Missing premiered at Locarno last year and was later screened at the Toronto, New York and Chicago festivals. Featuring the always excellent Tsutsui Mariko as a woman whose life is ruined in a media feeding frenzy, the film is incisive and disturbing as both a character study and a social document. Also, last year Fukada emerged as a leading advocate for change in an industry where sweatshop conditions prevail, women and minorities face discrimination and sexual and power harassment flourish. On November 12, 2019 he issued a statement calling for an end to harassment on and off the set, from hitting and yelling at subordinates (both of which Fukada says he himself experienced as an industry newcomer) to using power imbalances to force sexual favours.
A flurry of scandals in 2019 brought home the harshness of the punishments Japan’s entertainment industry, and society as a whole, mete out to well-known talents for everything from drug use to rape. The usual fate for offenders, as actors Taki Pierre, Arai Hirofumi and Sawajiri Erika discovered following their respective arrests, was professional oblivion.
Director Toyoda Toshiaki was luckier: Arrested in April 2019 on the charge of possessing an illegal weapon, he was later released when the firearm in question was discovered to be a rusty WW2-era souvenir he had inherited from his grandmother. (Not so luckily, Toyoda had been arrested for stimulant possession in 2005 and given a suspended sentence.)
But for all its many problems, the Japanese industry still attracts legions of young hopefuls, who work on the hundreds of indie films released every year. Most earn little or nothing for their labours, while the films themselves are often destined for small, short runs.
Some do break through, such as Tanaka Seiji and Minagawa Yoji, director and star respectively of Melancholic. Premiered internationally at the Udine Far East Film Festival, this film about a nerdy University of Tokyo grad (Minagawa) who becomes a cleaner at a public bath – and learns that it is used for after-hours yakuza executions – was made for US$25,000. But the film’s originality, inventive plotting, vivid characters and surprising warm-heartedness won it fans not only in Udine, where it received the White Mulberry award for the best film by an emerging director, but also at many other festivals in Japan and abroad.
After 2019 box office numbers were announced on January 28, the number of coronavirus infections began to rise. On April 7, Prime Minister Abe Shinzo declared a state of emergency for Tokyo, Osaka and five other prefectures. On April 16 this lockdown was extended to the entire country.
In reaction, theaters throughout Japan shut their doors, though the lockdown was voluntary and not enforceable by law. Also, distributors postponed the spring and summer releases of films, while production on new TV shows and films came to a shuddering halt.
At the time of the shutdowns, the biggest domestic live-action hit for the year was Fukushima 50, Wakamatsu Setsuro’s drama about frontline workers at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant after a giant tsunami set in motion a disastrous meltdown on March 11, 2011. Fans saw parallels between the life-or-death battle to save the plant, based on Kadota Ryusho’s non-fiction novel, and the current pandemic.
After theaters closed, co-distributors Kadokawa and Shochiku began streaming the film, a move condemned by Toho, which was anxious to preserve the traditional windows between a film’s theatrical opening and its release on other formats. But seeing no other way to recoup their investment, Kadokawa and Shochiku stood their ground.
According to numbers compiled by industry analyst Otaka Hiroo, the Japanese box office for January-April was JPY32.02 billion (US$296 million), a drop of 53 percent from the same period in 2019. The total for April was JPY690 million (US$6.3 million) – or 4 percent of the same figure the previous year. “Given the complete shutdown of theatres around the country, May could be worse,” Otaka said.
This precipitous decline in earnings may have been sustainable for Toho, with multiple revenue streams other than its theatre chain, which is the country’s largest. But it’s not sustainable for the arthouses, called “mini- theatres” in Japan, that sustain the large indie film sector.
Various initiatives have been launched to keep mini-theaters financially afloat, with the most successful being the “Mini-Theatre Aid” crowdfunding campaign started by directors Fukada Koji and Hamaguchi Ryusuke on April 13. By the end of the campaign on May 15, organisers had raised JPY331 million (US$3 million) – more than triple their initial target – from nearly 30,000 contributors. The funds will be distributed to participating mini-theatres across the country.
On May 14, lockdown restrictions were lifted for 39 of Japan’s 47 prefectures due to low infection numbers. On May 21 the state of emergency was ended for Osaka, Kyoto, and Hyogo prefectures, and on May 25 for all of Japan, Tokyo included.
On May 22 Tokyo governor Koike Yuriko outlined a road map for ending the state of emergency in three stages. Theatres were to reopen in stage two, by the end of May.
Theatres in other areas of the country had already started to show films, primarily older titles such as Shin Godzilla that gave viewers a big screen experience they couldn’t get at home.
Meanwhile, theatres in Tokyo and elsewhere scrambled to readjust their schedules while enforcing social distancing and taking other measures to create a safe environment. But by making many of their seats off limits, theaters risked cutting their profit margins to zero or below.
Also, distributors had to fill their pipelines with new product, not easy when production was at a standstill. On May 14 the Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan (Eiren), an industry body whose members consist of Japan’s four major studios, announced guidelines for a production restart aimed at reducing what the government described as the “three C’s”: closed spaces with insufficient ventilation, crowded conditions and conversations at short distances. “Everything has come to a stop in the film world, from upstream (production) to downstream (theatres),” Eiren Secretary-General Kacho Naotaka said. “We’ve been totally handcuffed, but we’ve finally started to move. There are still a lot of problems, but we want to take a first step.”
For all the changes the “new normal” will bring, Otaka believes that fans will always want the theatre experience. “You can’t really replace what a movie theatre gives you: a space where you can laugh and cry and be moved together with many other people,” he says. “The appeal and charm of movie theaters are deeply rooted in human nature. That’s never going to go out of style.”
Mark Schilling