Dogs and Demons

Nineteen-year-old fashion student Watanabe Eriko puts it succinctly: «It's stupid for the Japanese to compete with Western designers. . . .We should be selling our own Eastern styles to Asia, because Asians have the fashion sense and bodies to complement Japanese designs. Why must we go to Europe to dress tall blondes? Our aesthetic matches black hair and slimmer bodies better.»

The question is whether the new fashion means a cultural renaissance is on its way, as many of its supporters believe, or whether it is just, well, fashion. Ever since World War II, one of the favorite themes of Western journalism about Japan is the New Youth, and regularly, about once every year or so, Time or Newsweek devotes special articles to this subject. The youth are going to change, they are going to overturn the old order, because they wear miniskirts, or because they sport nose rings and dye their hair. It's a natural inference to make, because in the West free sexual and fashion mores have traditionally been linked to free thinking, viz. Woodstock. However, in Japan the situation is different in that such freedoms have always been allowed so long as people toe the line with regard to their families, work, social hierarchies, and so on. In other words, sex and fashion are delinked from politics. This was true even in the seventeenth century, when Jesuit missionaries fresh from imperial Beijing, where most people dressed in drab blue or black, arrived in Japan to find a colorful «floating world» of brilliantly dyed silks, incredible towering hairstyles, and long flowing sleeves. Compared to that in China, life in Japan looked like wild abandon, and yet at the time Japan was one of the most tightly controlled societies on earth.

Ian Buruma quotes an essay by movie director Oshima Nagisa (known for the film In the Realm of the Senses) in which he describes a meeting with a conservative politician. The politician says mores have the power to change society, but the director thinks otherwise. «Here Oshima puts his finger on the sorest point of Japanese politics-'it is not, as the LDP Dietman said, that mores have more power to change society than politics; rather the forces unable to change society through politics shift to manners and mores.' » One could argue that the extreme fashions of the youth represent precisely that: a veiled protest against the established order. Whether it signifies real change in the society is still an open question.

In any case, the youth fashion does underscore the extreme groupism of the young in Japan. Seventeen-year-old girls set the trend. «It's not how much they spend,» says Ogino Yoshiyuki, editor of a teen magazine, «it's that they all buy the same things. So if someone has a $10 product, they can sell lots of them.» Tim Larimer writes: «If an item is hot, like pagers – they're called pocket bells in Japan – a manufacturer can get almost 100% market penetration and fast. 'If it is really powerful, it can take less than a week,' says Ogino. Once 5% of the teen girl population takes a liking to something, he says, 60% will join the bandwagon within a month. A few weeks later, everybody will be on board. The hard part is predicting what the famously fickle teenage girls will next anoint as kawaii!'»

There is no better mirror of a nation's life than its movies, and Japan's cinema perfectly reflects the nation's modern cultural malaise, for it is a tale of nearly unbroken decline over three decades. Once boasting masters such as Kurosawa Akira and Ozu Yasujiro, Japan has recently produced only a few films of moderate world success. The number of good films is so low that at the 1994 Kyoto International Film Festival the usual Japan Film Today program was replaced by a retrospective of older films – the most recent from 1964. «Japanese audiences see Japanese art films as introverted, gloomy, and sentimental, and Japanese entertainment films as trash,» says Okuyama Kazuyoshi, a former vice president of Shochiku, Japan's largest film producer. «They've basically given up on them.»

Japanese cinema's golden age, from the 1950s through the early 1970s, coincided with the period of highest economic growth. In 1960, 545 domestic films captured almost four-fifths of the market. Admissions reached a billion people at 7,457 theaters. Since then, however, the industry has shrunk astonishingly, losing as much in quantity as in quality. In 1993, a mere 238 domestic films caught less than a 40 percent share. In 1996, admissions were 120 million people at 1,828 theaters. In other words, the number of films dropped to half, theaters declined to one-fourth, and admissions collapsed to one-eighth of earlier totals. Of this drastically shriveled market, foreign films captured a 72.4 percent share in 1998. In the past forty years, Japanese film has so thoroughly lost its audience that it exists more as a symbolic industry than as a real one.

Today, Kurosawa's and Ozu's films from the 1950s and 1960s stand as enduring masterpieces, exerting an incalculable influence on American and European directors. But, unfortunately, cinema followed a pattern similar to what we have seen in other areas of Japanese life: in the early 1970s, trouble set in, and the wind mysteriously went out of the sails. Studios found a way to take it easy by producing remakes of such comedies as Otoko wa tsurai yo, known for its star, the lovable vagabond Tora-san – of which approximately two were produced every year since 1969. In 1996, Otoko wa tsurai yo was showing in its forty-eighth episode, but then Tora-san died and everyone thought the series would finally be laid to rest. By that time, profits from Otoko wa tsurai yo accounted, by some calculations, for more than half of Shochiku's annual movie income. Even though Tora-san s audiences had been dwindling every year, and the longtime star was dead, Shochiku couldn't stop. That year, it announced that a replacement had been found and the series would go on as before – albeit under a different name. Only with the collapse of Shochiku as a movie producer, which followed soon afterward, did the series finally come to an end.

In the late 1980s, there was a brief resurgence in Japanese cinema with the director Itami Juzo's off-beat comedies, notably the 1986 film Tampopo. Twelve years later, in 1997, Suo Masayuki's Shall We Dance? achieved some success in the United States, yet in between there were very few films that have been popular at home or abroad. Curiously, like the decline in the Japanese environment and the decay of its old cities, the collapse of Japanese cinema has gone nearly unnoticed abroad. In general, there is a persistent time lag in the world's perception of Japan. In the mid-1970s, American industry failed to perceive quality in Japanese cars, steel, and electronics, even though companies such as Honda and Sony had established themselves as powerful competitors since the early 1960s. Michael Crichton's 1992 novel Rising Sun (filmed in 1993) depicted an all-powerful Japan about to gobble up a defenseless America – by which time the Bubble was burst and Japan was headed into a decade of stagnation and retreat from world financial markets.

For manufacturers the gap was about ten years; for Crichton it was only three years; but for foreign filmgoers the gap stretches back decades. Nostalgia for a great aesthetic era has made time stop: After all, Kurosawa's and Ozu's great films, far from being «contemporary cinema,» as they are usually portrayed, go back nearly half a century; they belong to the vintage of The King and I and Lawrence of Arabia. When it comes to more recent productions, what gets shown abroad is highly selective. Foreign art houses screen only the best of Japan's independent filmmakers, and this small but talented group saw a small renaissance in the 1990s. Beat Takeshi's Hana-bi and Imamura Shohei's Unagi received critical acclaim abroad, Unagi as co-winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1997 and Hana-bi as winner of the Golden Lion at the 1997 Venice Film Festival.

But independent art films do not a cinema industry make. While Japanophiles at international filmfests are enthusiastic about pictures the Japanese audiences have shunned-or never heard of--the domestic industry has continued its downward slide. A big percentage of movies produced in Japan today are porno flicks (as much as 50 percent in the early 1990s, somewhat lower today, since porno is moving to television, depriving filmmakers of even this market), and a high proportion of the rest are made for children. In the summer of 1998, the top domestic film was Pokemon, aimed at six-to-ten-year-old boys. It was the sixth-highest- grossing Japanese film ever, and in November 1999 a sequel grabbed the top of the charts in the United States, grossing $52 million in its first week-success like this among ten-year-olds blows adult art-house favorites like Hana-bi, Unagi, Tampopo, Shall We Dance?, and the rest right out of the water.

To give Japanese cinema its due, box-office success is a contentious issue among film lovers. Cinema critic Donald Richie comments, «World success is based on whether the pictures sell themselves or not. They are in the category of products – judged not by how good they are but by whether they sell. Since Japan's independent films are not intended for that, to judge them by this standard is a false equation. Every year there are a few good films that reflect Japanese realities, unlike the others that reflect no such thing, and a small but highly articulate audience goes to see those.» This brings us to a core question: What constitutes «art» in film? An argument could be made that art lies in achieving creativity within the constraints of an art form: hence it's essential to a sonnet that it have fourteen lines, to a haiku that it have seventeen syllables. In the case of cinema, which was from its very inception a popular art, one of the necessary constraints would seem to be that it appeal to the public. From this point of view, winning the hearts and minds of viewers is not an ancillary issue; it's central. When a director creates a film that entertains and at the same time establishes his unique aesthetic viewpoint, he has created a work of cinematic art. Otherwise, his film is lacking a core ingredient.

Japanese film was not always unpopular. Kurosawa's Seven Samurai was one of the box-office successes of all time when it was released in 1956. This brings us back to «the image of a wilted peony in a bamboo vase, unable to draw water up her stem.» Every year, according to Richie, out of about 250 films, there are 10 to 12 really good ones. But by and large the public avoids them. Obviously there should be room in cinematic culture for small experimental or independent films that appeal to a specialist audience. Nevertheless, a successful film industry requires that some films of quality make money. Japan is not unique in that it produces a number of good independent or experimental films every year – practically every country in the world does so, including America despite Hollywood, India despite Bollywood, and Hong Kong despite kung fu. One could say that Japan is lacking the interface between quality film and the marketplace. The quality is there, but the skills of presenting that quality to the public in an entertaining and appealing way are missing.

Commercial success is important for another reason, which is that for most film industries, even in the best of times, the more experimental films survive as a luxury: the existence of a large moviegoing audience means that there can be art houses that show offbeat films and small groups of dedicated fans who see them. A successful film industry can afford offbeat productions. Richie notes, «Nowadays an Ozu or a Kurosawa wouldn't be allowed to make films because the film studios couldn't get their money back.» Thus a decline in the box office has eventually affected quality. Says Richie, «Thirty years ago, I was on a committee to choose the best Japanese films, and it was an embarrassment, there were so many of them. Now it's equally embarrassing because there are so few. With the failure of films to make money, producers tightened the moneybags. Only company hacks were allowed to produce films, because they followed the formulas.»

How is it that the nation which gave the world Kurosawa is now producing Pokemon and not much more? It has partly to do with the «autopilot» syndrome we have met in other fields, a dependence on patterns set in the 1960s and never revised. Shochiku became so addicted to the Otoko wa tsurai yo series that it couldn't stop making these movies even when the star died-and its dependence on the income from the series was so severe that when the series finally ended, Shochiku itself died. Another reason-perhaps the most important one-was the abandonment of the adult market in favor of children. In the 1980s, «studios devoted themselves instead to churning out light entertainment for the mass teenage audience,» the film critic Nagasaka Toshihisa says. As cinema expert Mark Schilling observes, «Mainstream Japanese cinema, which used to mean classics like Kurosawa's Shichinin no Samurai (Seven Samurai, 1954), and Ozu's Tokyo Monogatari (Tokyo Story, 1953), is now primarily entertainment for children on school holidays.»

Godzilla is worth looking at because it epitomizes this history. The monster Godzilla debuted in 1954, and by the end of the 1990s, he had appeared in more than twenty films. In the West, Godzilla is something of a joke, synonymous with campy low-tech effects, but standards in Japan are now so low that critics polled at the prestigious bimonthly Kinema Junpo (Cinema Journal) voted it one of the twenty best Japanese films ever made. Each Godzilla film since 1989 has been among the top five money earners of the year for Toho, the company that produces them; Godzilla vs. Destroyer was the top-grossing movie of 1996.

It is not only in Godzilla and Otoko wa tsurai yo that old themes are repeated endlessly. Ekimae (In Front of the Station) had twenty-four installments from 1958 to 1969; Shacho (Company President) had forty remakes between 1956 and 1971. And there are numerous others, including the popular new comedy series Tsuri Baka Nisshi (Idiot Fisherman Diary), headed for its tenth installment. Repeats dominate the market: in 1996, thirteen of the top twenty films were installments in series. Hollywood is not averse to series, viz.