Japanese films had a stellar year in 2023, setting box office records and winning major awards. Industry news, however, was full of scandals signaling the breakdown of old power structures and the rise of a new consciousness about everything from sexual harassment to feudalistic workplace practices. This year promises more opportunities for women to succeed, the doors to new themes and voices are opening.Japanese films dominated the domestic box office in 2023, accounting for eight of the year’s highest-earning films according to figures compiled by the Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan.In the top spot was The First Slam Dunk, an animated feature based on a hit basketball manga by Inoue Takehiko that made ¥15.9 billion ($106 million) following its December 2022 release. The film, which Inoue scripted and directed, was also a box office smash overseas, earning a total of $279 million worldwide. All three of the top-earning Japanese films were animated, the latest indication of the genre’s enduring strength in the domestic market. At number two, with ¥13.9 billion ($93 million), was Detective Conan: Black Iron Submarine, the 26th entry in the Detective Conan film series about the adventures of a genius teenage detective trapped in a child’s body. This total set a series record, beating the ¥9.78 billion recorded in 2022 by Detective Conan: The Bride of Halloween.
At number three, with ¥8.8 billion ($59 million), was The Boy and the Heron, Miyazaki Hayao’s semi-autobiographical fantasy, set during the Second World War, about a boy who enters an alternative world. The film, which many assumed would be the 82-year-old Miyazaki’s last (though he is reportedly working on a new project), opened in July with none of the usual pre-release publicity. Producer and long-time Miyazaki associate Suzuki Toshio told the media that this ploy was designed to pique interest of fans, who had not seen a full-length Miyazaki film since The Wind Rises in 2013.
In Japan, The Boy and the Heron did not attain the ¥10 billion ($67 million) milestone that Miyazaki’s films had once routinely surpassed, but it was a solid hit abroad, with a total worldwide gross of $166 million. Also, it won the Golden Globe Award and also the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, an honour he last won for the 2001 Spirited Away.
The year’s highest-ranking live-action local film, in fourth place with ¥5.6 billion ($37 million), was Sato Shinsuke’s Kingdom III: Flame of Destiny, the third entry in a period action series based on Hara Yasuhisa’s hit manga. As with the first two entries, the film featured an all-Japanese cast led by Yamazaki Kento as Xin, a former slave boy with ambitions to become a great general and unite China in the Warring States Period (475-221 BCE).
But the Japanese film arguably making the biggest splash abroad was Yamazaki Takashi’s Godzilla Minus One, the 37th entry in the iconic Godzilla series. Scripted by Yamazaki, a long-time Godzilla fan who had incorporated the creature into the 2008 Udine FEFF selection Always: Sunset on Third Street 2, the film was set not long after Japan’s defeat in World War II. Men who served in the military, including a disgraced kamikaze pilot (Kamiki Ryunosuke), band together and using the era’s technology and their own ingenuity and guts, defeat a nuclear-breathed Godzilla that threatens to level Tokyo.
Though debuting in November, the film managed to earn a resounding ¥5.59 billion ($37 million) in Japan by the end of the year, while grossing a series-record $106 million worldwide. The film also won an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, the first ever Godzilla film to receive an Oscar nod.
Meanwhile, veteran auteur Kore-eda Hirokazu proved again that he could please both critics and audiences with his new film, Monster. After debuting at the Cannes Film Festival, where scriptwriter Sakamoto Yuji won the best screenplay prize, Monster earned ¥2.2 billion ($15 million) at the Japanese box office, making it Kore-eda’s biggest domestic hit since his 2018 faux-family drama Shoplifters. The film also garnered glowing reviews for its multilayered story about a single mom (Ando Sakura) who butts heads with an unsympathetic teacher (Nagayama Eita) when her young son begins acting strangely.
Also winning accolades on the international festival circuit was Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s dark drama Evil Does Not Exist, which was awarded the second-place Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival, among other honors. Already hailed as a modern master for his 2021 film Drive My Car, winner of an Academy Award for Best International Feature, Hamaguchi first conceived Evil Does Not Exist as a short to be played at the concerts of singer-songwriter Ishibashi Eiko, but turned it into a full-length feature.The story, which begins with a pair of Tokyo talent agency reps trying to sell a skeptical mountain community on a glamping site, goes beyond its rural-folks-versus-city-slickers setup in ways that are emotionally engaging and in its enigmatic climax, chilling and thought-provoking.“It is not the type of film in which the audience asks questions and the filmmaker responds to them,” Hamaguchi told movie trade publication Variety in an interview. “But I hope the questions will stay with the audience for a long time. ” The year’s biggest entertainment industry story was the once-powerful Johnny & Associates talent agency’s fall from grace following revelations that founder and long-time president Johnny Kitagawa had sexually abused boys for decades. Before Kitagawa’s death at age 87 in 2019, allegations had surfaced in tabloid magazine stories and tell-all books, but the Japanese mainstream media had maintained a code of silence, fearful that the agency would retaliate by denying access to their popular male talent roster, whose members starred in countless films and TV dramas.
That changed in March 2023 with the release of a BBC documentary that detailed Kitagawa’s history of abuse. Soon after, former Johnny’s talent Okamoto Kauan told the international press that he and many other teenage trainees had been subjected to Kitagawa’s sexual attentions. In August, Kitagawa’s niece and agency president Julie Keiko Fujishima resigned following an independent investigation that found hundreds of boys had been abused from the 1970s to the 2010s. Later in the year, after dozens of sponsors had withdrawn their support, the agency split into two companies: Smile-Up, with a mission to compensate Kitagawa’s victims, and Starto Entertainment, to handle all talent and entertainment business.
Another headline-grabbing controversy arose with the simultaneous US release in July of Greta Gerwig’s infectiously pink comedy, Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, a three-hour film about the creator of the atomic bomb. When memes appeared jokingly linking the two films, Japanese complained on social media: The “Barbenheimer” memes, they argued, made light of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After months of speculation over whether Oppenheimer would receive a release date in the only country to experience a nuclear attack, Tokyo-based distributor Bitters End opened the film in Japanese cinemas on March 29, 2024.
The Hollywood writers and actors strikes, which dragged on for five months, also impacted Japan as productions shut down and releases were delayed, leaving gaps in local distributors’ release schedules. Indirectly, the joint labour actions highlighted the yawning gap between writers and actors in Hollywood, who work with contracts under union rules, and their Japanese counterparts, many of whom live hand-to-mouth existences as independent contractors, with payments subject to the whims of their employers. “The result is a low-quality environment with long hours and low wages,” veteran actor Furutachi Kanji told The Japan Times newspaper. “The system here incentivises exploitation.”
Then in September, Tokyo Laboratory, a major film processor that had been in business since 1955, announced it would close up shop at the end of November and dispose of the 20,000 films in its possession by the end of October unless clients claimed them. The company did not reveal a detailed list of the films under threat, saying only that they included various genres, from features to TV commercials, and dated mainly from the 1970s to the 2000s.
In the ensuing uproar, Tokyo Laboratory defended its decision, saying that it had no legal right to hand over the films to a third-party saviour. This did not mollify director and producer Fran Rubel Kuzui, whose 1988 debut feature Tokyo Pop had recently been rescued from warehouse oblivion and restored. “It’s a crime,” she told the Nikkei newspaper. “Those films are a part of Japanese culture.”The story has a happy ending, of sorts: On Nov. 30, it was announced that Toho Archive, a member of the Toho group that also included Tokyo Laboratory, would store the films that had not been claimed. But until the rights issues are resolved, no one will be able to screen them.
Among Japanese films set for release this year are those by Toho, the studio, distributor and exhibitor that towers over its competition like its iconic character, Godzilla.
Toho’s lineup for 2024, features many familiar franchises and genres, which will doubtless produce most of the year’s biggest box office hits for Japan. Toho has no sequel in the works for Godzilla Minus One, though director Yamazaki Takashi has hinted that he is open to making one. The distributor will, however, release Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, a new Hollywood-produced epic directed by Adam Wingard (Death Note, The Guest), just in time for the Golden Week holiday period starting at the end of April. Among other familiar faces on Toho’s lineup are new entries in the Doraemon and Detective Conan anime series and the fourth installment in Sato Shinsuke’s Kingdom period action series.
Typically, Toho’s live-action films are based on proven properties from other media, be it a popular manga or TV show, and are helmed by directors who work mostly in television but also have feature credits. These films may connect with domestic audiences and transition successfully to the small screen, but their not-for-export stories often make them a hard sell abroad.
This year, however, Toho is bending this template (if not breaking it) with Last Mile, a thriller starring Mitsushima Hikari as the manager of a huge distribution warehouse who is confronted with a series of mysterious explosions. Set for a summer release, the film is directed by TV drama veteran Tsukahara Ayuko and scripted by Nogi Akiko. While female directors are hardly a rarity in Japan, they rarely helm major commercial outings.
One woman who has, though, is Sato Shimako, whose credits include the 2008 action film K-20: The Fiend with Twenty Faces, which screened at FEFF, and two theatrical entries in the Unfair franchise starring Shinohara Ryoko as a Tokyo homicide cop. On April 19, Warner Bros Japan will release Sato’s The Yin Yang Master 0, a period fantasy set in the Heian Period (794-1185) that tells its folklore-like story with mind-expanding twists and eye-popping effects. Whether it scales the box office heights of husband Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One remains to be seen.<
Among Japan’s internationally recognised auteurs, only one at the moment, Hamaguchi Ryusuke, has a film set for a 2024 theatrical release: Evil Does Not Exist, which opens in Japan on April 26. Meanwhile, fellow Venice winner Kurosawa Kiyoshi, who was awarded that festival’s best director prize in 2020 for his Second World War drama Wife of a Spy, is returning to his trademark horror genre with Chime. Starring Yoshioka Mutsuo as a man who starts hearing the sound of chimes and feeling a sense of creeping fear, the film will premiere on the new media platform Roadstead sometime this year. It made its premiere at this year’s Berlin Film Festival.
Among directors making their feature debuts one of note is Fujita Naoya, whose Confetti opened last year’s Skip City International D-Cinema Festival and was released in theatres on March 2. Newcomer Matsufuji Shion stars as a teenage boy who plays female roles in a traveling taishu engeki (theatre of the masses) troupe. Enrolling in a junior high school for a one-month stay, he begins making friends, but his art and his demanding father, who is also his troupe leader, draw him away.
Grounded in Fujita’s research, the film offers a perspective on gender roles not often seen in the West, or even in Japan for that matter. Taishu engeki is far overshadowed by all-male kabuki with its own tradition of men playing female characters. It is yet another indication that, as conservative and even retrograde as it may be in many ways, the Japanese film industry is slowly moving toward more diversity and inclusiveness in everything from themes and treatments to the gender of the person sitting in the director’s chair.