Japanese Cinema

I

Introduction

Japanese Cinema, historical development of the cinema in Japan. Motion pictures reached Japan in 1896, when the systems of Lumière and Thomas Alva Edison were demonstrated, but there was no real local industry until 1908. Early Japanese film dramas were reproductions of the popular Japanese stage drama, such as Kabuki theatre, which had female characters played by men, and was generally highly stylized and unrealistic. Until 1916, Japanese films were not that advanced technically, with just one shot for each scene, and the actors shown full length. The sole real film star of the period was Matsunosuke Onoue, who acted for Shozo Makino, director of the Yokota company. Japanese cinema retained the use of a narrator (the benshi) to explain and comment on films, whereas this practice had been abandoned in the West.

In 1916 American films were imported into Japan for the first time in any real numbers. A few Japanese film-makers, led by Norimasa Kaeriyama, began to use women in the female roles. They attempted to follow the style of standard American cinema, with more cutting within the scenes, and with the content also in a more realistic style. At the beginning of the 1920s, the Taikatsu and Shochiku companies were set up to make films in the full American style. The result was films such as Rojo no Reikon (1921; Souls on the Road), which had a Mary Pickford-type heroine and action, but lacked the full polish of Hollywood of the time.

The Tokyo earthquake of 1923 destroyed the film studios, and temporarily halted production, which led to more foreign films being imported. This encouraged further Americanization, and new directors such as Kenji Mizoguchi took advantage of this to make films that left no room for the use of the benshi, and were based on European-type subjects. More Japanese directors studied in Hollywood, and Western-style comedies began to be produced. Some of the best of these were made by Yasujiro Ozu shortly after he started directing. Japan also acquired an avant-garde cinema, rather like that of France, seen in Teinosuke Kinugasa’s Kurutta Ippeiji (1926; A Page of Madness). Kinugasa took his Jujiro (1928; Crossroads) on a trip to Europe, where it was widely shown, and he picked up the latest Russian and German styles of film-making as well.

Also in the late 1920s, Japanese period films, and in particular sword-fight films, acquired a modern style under the director Daisuke Ito. Left-wing directors disguised some mild social criticism under the guise of period subjects (these were called “tendency films”), and this continued into the next decade until suppressed by the rising military powers.

II

Japanese Sound Cinema

Sound films arrived in Japan a couple of years later than in Europe, partly for technical reasons, and partly because a large part of the audience still preferred silent films with a benshi chanting his commentary. However, several years after the first Japanese sound film, Gosho’s Madamu to Nyobo (1931; The Neighbour’s Wife and Mine), the reign of the benshi was over. The Toho production company was created in 1936, joining the four other majors: Shochiku, Nikkatsu, Toa, and Teikine. Between them they largely controlled production and distribution. In the 1930s the standard range of subjects continued, but Japanese cinema pushed a little further into realism than Western cinema when depicting the lives of the lower classes, as in Sadao Yamanaka’s Ninjo Kamifusen (1937; Humanity and Paper Balloons) and other films. Some directors developed their own distinctive styles further: examples are Kinugasa, with his fast cutting and flashy angles in Yukinojo Henge (1935-1936; Yukinojo’s Transformation); Hiroshi Shimizu, with his very long takes with a moving camera, as in Arigato-San (1936; Mr Thank You); and Ozu, with his own special angle on the domestic world of ordinary people.

When the military seized power in Japan, they instituted laws to control the film industry on the model of Nazi Germany (see German Cinema), with censorship of scripts before production, and exertion of strong pressure on the subjects made, to encourage eager participation in the war effort on the home front. Akira Kurosawa got his start as a director making these “national policy” films, with Sugata Sanshiro (1943; Judo Saga) and Ichiban Utsukushiku (1944; The Most Beautiful), but it was possible to avoid making these by concentrating on period subjects, as did Mizoguchi. The number of film companies was reduced to three, and production fell to around a hundred films a year.

III

Post-War Developments

After the war, the Allied Occupation Authorities destroyed half the wartime films, and also banned the production of period subjects for a couple of years. Many of the top industry people were prohibited from working, and only ten features were made in 1945. However, production soon reached the pre-war levels of about 500 films and over a billion tickets sold per year. This volume was sustained into the 1960s.

In the 1950s Japanese films broke through into the international market for the first time, starting with Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950). In fact, some of Kurosawa’s films had an influence on American films. At the more commercial end of production, the series of science-fiction monster movies starting with Gojira (1954; Godzilla) did even better in the West. There was a new emphasis on serious moral and social problems by new directors such as Kon Ichikawa with Biruma no Tategoto (1956; The Burmese Harp) and Masaki Kobayashi with Ningen no Joken (1959-1961; The Human Condition). Japan had its own equivalent of the French nouvelle vague (New Wave) at the beginning of the 1960s, for roughly equivalent reasons with those of France. The Shochiku company backed the making of a number of cheap films by new young directors, including Nagisa Oshima, Masahiro Shinoda, and Yoshishige Yoshida. Of these, Oshima produced the most radical stylistic experiments in films such as Koshikei (1968; Death By Hanging) and Shinjuku Dorobo Nikki (1969; Diary of a Shinjuku Thief), while dealing with previously taboo subjects, such as the treatment of Koreans in Japan; all three directors dealt with youth in revolt.

At the same time, television finally made its mark, and film-going went into a severe decline. By the 1970s admissions had dropped by 80 per cent to 170 million. Film production was still 340 pictures a year in 1978, but three quarters of this was soft-core pornography. From this point on, American films came to dominate the box office for the first time. The government set up a fund to aid quality production in 1972, but although this gave some talented new directors a chance, it did not arrest the decline, which continued into the 1980s, by which time all the major studios had almost stopped producing films. New directors mostly worked for small independent companies; examples include Sogo Ishii (1984; Crazy Family), Juzo Itami (1988; Tampopo), and Shinya Tsukamoto (1988; Tetsuo: The Iron Man); and established directors such as Kurosawa looked for finance outside Japan—Ran, Kurosawa’s 1985 version of King Lear, was a Japanese/French co-production.

Throughout the 1990s, the Japanese film industry experienced mixed fortunes, with 120 million tickets sold in 1996, a post-war low, rising to 153 million in 1998, buoyed by Hollywood blockbusters like Titanic. However, despite attempts to modernize Japanese cinemas, attendances fell back to 135 million in 2000. With the exception of commercially successful animated films—for example, Akira (directed and written by Katsuhiro Ôtomo, 1988), Mononoke Hime (1997; Princess Mononoke, Hayao Miyazaki)—Hollywood continued to dominate the Japanese box-office, and Japanese films reached an all-time low of 30 per cent of domestic market-share in 1998. Notably, one film that bucked the downward trend was the ballroom dancing comedy Shall We Dansu? (1996; Shall We Dance?) by Masayuki Suo, which was a huge success in Japan and a surprise hit abroad. Indeed, since 1997 there has been a resurgence of interest in Japanese cinema overseas, particularly the idiosyncratic crime films of Takeshi Kitano (Sonachine/Sonatine, 1993; Kidzu Ritan/Kids Return, 1996; Hana-Bi/Fireworks, 1997), while Unagi (The Eel) by Shohei Imamura took the Palme D’Or at Cannes in 1997, and the remake of the Japanese horror film Ringu (1998; The Ring, Hideo Nakata) by Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks studio was released in 2002. In 2003 the Japanese animated film Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (2001; Spirited Away), directed by Miyazaki Hayao, won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. The cartoon is the most successful film ever released in Japan.