GKids has agreed to become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Toho International.

Founded in 1932, Toho is one of the biggest film producers and distributors in Japan, most famous for the Godzilla franchise (including the Oscar-winning Godzilla Minus One) and the films of Akira Kurosawa and Studio Ghibli. Toho Animation has done much of its work behind the scenes, regularly showing up on the production committees of top-tier anime series such as Spy x Family, Jujutsu Kaisen, My Hero Academia, and The Apothecary Diaries.

But then earlier this year, Toho purchased animation studio Science Saru, known for The Heike Story, Scott Pigrim Takes Off, Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! as well as an upcoming addition to the Ghost in the Shell franchise.

Toho also bought a minority stake in CoMix Wave Films, the production home of Makoto Shinkai.

The GKids catalog already includes the films of Studio Ghibli, Mamoru Hosoda, Makoto Shinkai, Hideaki Anno, and a wide selection of animated productions from across Europe. So it looks like a good fit in the content department too.

Labels: anime, business, japanese tv, movies about japan

The Shogun miniseries debuted on NBC on September 15, 1980. It ran for five consecutive nights and a total of 12 hours, garnering the highest weekly Nielsen ratings in the history of the NBC network.

Two months later Ronald Reagan would be elected in a landslide. A year later, IBM launched the IBM PC. Japan had the second largest economy on the planet. Japanese automakers were leaving Detroit in the dust and Sony was the Apple of its day. Serious people were seriously predicting "Japan as #1."

(And I was studying Japanese at BYU.)

By the end of the decade, Sony Corporation owned Columbia Pictures and Mitsubishi bought Rockefeller Center. Only seven years after that, Mitsubishi lost a billion dollars on the deal and sold off its controlling interest. The real estate bubble burst and Japanese fell into a decade-long recession.

(And I was teaching English in Japan.)

But at the time, Japan was the China of today, with a critical difference being that Japan was and remains a stalwart ally of the United States.

So credit NBC with great timing. But also credit the network for broadcasting a pretty good product. Based on the 1975 novel by James Clavell and starring Richard Chamberlain and Toshiro Mifune, Shogun gave its American audiences a westernized version of a classic NHK Taiga historical drama.

Meaning "big river," the Taiga is a big-budget (by Japanese standards) hour-long drama that runs from January to December. Each year it tackles the life of a notable historical figure. This year, the 16th century female clan leader Ii Naotora; next year, the 19th century general Saigo Takamori.

Unlike Shogun, the Taiga drama strives for sufficient accuracy to use everybody's real names, and does its best to faithfully recreate well-documented events. Though with forty or so hours to fill, a healthy amount of fiction will inevitably backfill the scarcer stuff that historians are confident happened.

Taking place after the death of Toyotomi Hideyoshi in 1598 and before the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, Shogun is mostly fictional filler. But the miniseries does nail down the time frame and the principal characters, and does a reasonable amount of justice to the historical context.

Richard Chamberlain's John Blackthorne is based on a real person. Will Adams was the English captain of the Dutch-flagged expedition. Confined to a single year, at the end of which Tokugawa Ieyasu defeated Ishida Mitsunari at Sekigahara, Shogun can't help but downplay what a fascinating figure he was.

It also downplays the cruelly ironic turn of history that would take place in his lifetime. Every indignity suffered by the Protestant sailors at the beginning of Shogun would be visited upon the Jesuits a hundred fold. One explanation for this reversal of fortunes is made clear in Shogun, and another is alluded to.

Made clear is the geopolitical insult of the Treaty of Tordesillas, which "divided the newly discovered lands outside Europe between the Portuguese Empire and the Crown of Castile." The reason alluded to was Portuguese involvement in the mid-16th century trade of Chinese and Japanese slaves.

Restrictions on Catholicism in Japan began in earnest under Ieyasu's predecessor, Hideyoshi. Shogun mostly ignores this to keep the Jesuits around as the bad guys. It became a draconian ban under Ieyasu's son, culminating in the systematic annihilation of the Christian community after the Shimabara Rebellion in 1638.

Martin Scorsese's Silence (based on the novel by Shusaku Endo) explores this at length (if you can stomach two hours of man's inhumanity to man vividly illustrated).

Along with the suppression of Christianity, the Edo period of Tokugawa rule was characterized by a strictly-enforced sakoku (isolationist) policy. But Ieyasu did employ Adams to negotiate limited trading rights with the East India Company and the Dutch, though they were confined to a small port off the coast of Nagasaki.

Until the mid-19th century, information about the outside world trickling in from Europe became known in Japan as rangaku (蘭学) or "Dutch learning." Though it was an Englishman that made it happen.

Shogun is not without its anachronisms, stereotypes, and soapy subplots. But as a Hollywood version of Japanese history, it does an all-around better job than The Last Samurai or 47 Ronin. Not merely a noted moment in television time, some forty years later, Shogun stands up well to a second viewing.

Related posts

Shogun revisited (2)
Techno-orientalism
Dances with Samurai
Japan made in Hollywood

Labels: japanese culture, japanese tv, movies about japan, nhk, pop culture, shogun, social studies, sony, television, television reviews

The rest of the movie aside, the first six minutes of The Great War of Archimedes (a literal translation) is worth watching for its recreation of the sinking of the Japanese battleship Yamato on April 7, 1945.

The most memorable scene in this segment has an anti-aircraft battery on the Yamato shooting down an American fighter, only to watch in stunned amazement as a PBY Catalina swoops in and scoops the fallen pilot out of the water.

It's like, "That is so not fair!"

The dark irony of the scene is surely intended, as the Yamato was dispatched to Okinawa on a suicide mission. Without air cover, it was destroyed along with its destroyer escorts soon after leaving the coastal waters of Kyushu.

The story then flashes back a decade to an Imperial Navy conference proposing the construction of the Yamato and turns into a movie about—accounting (do not trust movie posters to tell you what a movie is actually about).

The conference pits the Kantai Kessen faction led by Admiral Shigetaro Shimada against the carrier faction led by Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. Convinced that Shimada has grossly underbid the project, Yamamoto recruits mathematics prodigy Tadashi Kai to come up with a more accurate cost estimate.

The middle third of the movie thus consists of Kai (promoted on the spot to lieutenant commander) and his aide, Ensign Shojiro Tanaka, desperately searching for some way to obtain the necessary data, while being obstructed at every turn by Shimada's henchmen and denied access even to the blueprints.

Along the way, Kai essentially figures out how to solve a Fermi problem, a method devised by the physicist Enrico Fermi for making accurate estimates about really big things using really small amounts of data. In this case, the really big thing is the largest battleship deployed by any navy in history.

Thus the title of the movie refers to Archimedes' principle, which describes the design of a vessel in terms of its displacement.

Actors Masaki Suda (Kai) and Tasuku Emoto (Tanaka) have reasonably good chemistry in what becomes a two-man play. It is based on the manga by Norifusa Mita. (That's the thing about manga. There is nothing unusual about a manga that is primarily a paeon to accounting and calculus in particular.)

Along the way, we also get lessons about how to cook the books and get your ridiculously low-ball contract approved by the government and still turn a profit.

But despite director Takashi Yamazaki's best efforts (he helmed the wonderful Always: Sunset on Third Street and the well-received war film Eternal Zero), there's not much in the way of dramatic tension. After all, if the Yamato didn't get built, it couldn't get sunk in the first scene.

Three Yamato-class battleships were ultimately constructed, the Yamato, Musashi, and the converted carrier Shinano. None of them survived the war, with the Shinano lasting a mere ten days after being commissioned.

Kai and Tanaka present their results to the conference in the nick of time (again, the dramatic tension is unconvincingly manufactured), proving that Shimada's proposed budget is utterly at odds with reality.

Of course, it proves a Pyrrhic victory. Shimada immediately switches gears and claims the official bid was purposely underestimated (by an order of magnitude) in order to mislead Japan's enemies. But then Kai points out a fatal flaw in the Yamato's design and again appears to have won the day.

This leads to the penultimate scene, the most interesting in the movie, in which Shimada (Isao Hashizume), recognizing Kai's genius, entices him to the dark side by offering an opportunity for existential atonement.

Shimada explains that he actually agrees with the carrier faction and fully expects the Yamato to become a sitting duck in any upcoming conflict. In the wake of an inevitable defeat, the sacrificial lamb bearing the historical name of Japan will show the way for Japan to leave its military past behind.

Frankly, it's a rhetorical reach, and even Hayao Miyazaki criticized Yamazaki for likewise imbuing the characters in Eternal Zero with sentimental but contemporary sensibilities. Though to play the devil's advocate, I think there is a constructive role for historical fiction as social commentary.

This fanciful historical revisionism does accurately capture what the Yamato became in the popular imagination of postwar Japan. Rather like the Titanic, its mention in any period piece now foreshadows both a heroic end and the inevitable doom that surely awaits such enormous displays of human folly.

The Yamato itself lives on most notably in Leiji Matsumoto's enormously influential Space Battleship Yamato franchise, in which the battleship is resurrected to save the human race from alien marauders. The first anime series debuted in 1974. Takashi Yamazaki directed the 2010 live-action movie.

The opening theme song for the 1974 series by Isao Sasaki has since become an instantly recognizable classic.


The Great War of Archimedes is currently streaming on Tubi.

Related links

Kantai Kessen
The Showa drama
The Great War of Archimedes
Star Blazers (2013 anime series)
Space Battleship Yamato (2010 live action movie)

Labels: history, japan, japanese culture, japanese movie reviews, movie reviews, movies about japan, streaming, tubi, ww2

Everybody loves a triumphant underdog. The problem is when the only way for the underdog to end up top dog is to make the bad guys dumber than dirt and the good guys the luckiest in the universe. In other words, the ending of the supremely silly Avatar. And to be honest, the ending of Star Wars dances right on the line.

The suspension of disbelief can only be suspended so far before some semblance of reality must intervene.

Pit the primitive against the modern in head-to-head battlefield combat and the noble savage will—sooner or later, rightly or wrongly, and no matter how noble—get its military butt kicked. As Kate says about the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi, "Yeah, sure, Winnie the Pooh versus lasers. My vote is on the lasers."

In The Last Samurai, Edward Zwick and Tom Cruise do an ironically good job of turning the ruling military class of a defeated dictatorship into underdogs. "Movies can manipulate you to root for just about anyone, anytime," observes David Edelstein. Though Zwick and Cruise do deserve credit for demonstrating why bringing a knife to a gunfight is a bad idea.

Oda Nobunaga figured this out back in 1575 at the Battle of Nagashino, where he deployed arquebusiers in staggered ranks and cut the attacking Takeda cavalry to shreds.

There was no way Saigo Takamori ("Katsumoto" in the The Last Samurai) was going to prevail in the ill-fated Satsuma Rebellion. The soldiers mowing down Katsumoto and his troops were in fact "the good guys," representing the ninety percent of the population finally allowed to fight for a share of the rights and privileges once granted only to a small elite.

The Last Samurai could also be titled, "What the ending of Avatar would really look like."

And that's pretty much what happens in Gate too. Only this time we get to cheer overwhelming military superiority right from the start, with no need to rationalize the backward prerogatives of a decaying feudal order. Besides, they started it.

On a perfectly normal summer day, a sort of Stargate portal opens in the middle of downtown Tokyo. A Roman-era army pours through, accompanied by an "air force" of flying dragons. Chaos ensues. The bewildered Japan Self-Defense Forces (JSDF) finally get their act together and send in a couple of gunships. Invasion over.

Not wanting to turn Tokyo into a battleground, the JSDF sets up a fortified base on the other side of the Gate. The "Special Region" happens to be smack dab in the middle of an empire ruled by Emperor Molt Sol Augustus (there are reasons for the Roman resemblances). The emperor orders his forces to expel the interlopers. They attack and get wiped out. Repeatedly.

However replete the Special Region is with magicians, elves, dragons, and super-powered demigoddesses, as Arthur C. Clarke pointed out, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."


A dramatic illustration of this occurs when a mercenary army attacks a walled city lightly defended by a JSDF recon patrol. They call in an air strike (cue Ride of the Valkyries and a bunch of Apocalypse Now allusions). Just as the mercenaries breach the gates, an AH-1 Cobra hovers inside the walls and does a one-eighty with its Gatling gun, bringing the attack to an abrupt halt.

As it turns out, Emperor Augustus isn't that stupid either. He is cynically using the "invasion" by the JSDF to hobble the military strength of any "allies" that might threaten his reign. His "allies" are aren't happy about being turned into cannon fodder. When a patrol tracks down a badly wounded King Duran of Elbe, he knows who the enemy is, and it isn't them.

The futility of armed conflict leads to an uneasy peace. The story at this point resembles the 1853–1867 Bakumatsu period in Japan, during which both the shogunate and its domestic enemies came to realize that the "Expel the barbarians!" (sonno joi) call to arms was a military impossibility and they had to find ways to deal with the situation politically.

So the diplomatic corps are sent in to negotiate an armistice. Their guide and on-the-ground expert is Yoji Itami. Able to adapt on the fly to unusual situations and get along with the locals, the watchword in the Special Region soon becomes: "What would Itami do?"

Yet Yoji Itami is at heart a die-hard otaku who candidly admits the only reason he works is to support his hobby. A running joke throughout the series is that, unknown to practically everybody, the lackadaisical Itami is actually a highly qualified special forces graduate with little interest in climbing the ranks. Nevertheless, despite his slacker attitude, he can't help rising to every occasion.

He was on a shopping trip to the Ginza when the Gate first opened. Keeping his wits about him, he saved hundred of civilians, thus unwittingly gaining hero status. He is promoted and given command of a recon patrol in the Special Region.

Another running joke is how closely the Special Region resembles the isekai genre otaku are so enamored of. Itami and his sergeant pass the time wondering what stereotypical otherworldly creatures they're going to meet next.

During their first patrol, they encounter their most formidable foe, a Godzilla-sized fire dragon. They manage to drive it off with RPGs (not kill it). Along the way, they rescue Tuka Luna Marceau (an elf), Lelei La Lelena (a magician), and Rory Mercury (a demigoddess with a fondness for goth). These three form the core of Itami's Scooby Gang.

Meanwhile, Molt Sol Augustus finds himself caught between the peace faction, led by Imperial Princess Piña Co Lada, and the war faction, led by Imperial Prince Zorzal.

The hotheaded Zorzal is not nearly as smart as he thinks he is, and his slave, Tyuule (defeated queen of the Warrior Bunny Tribe), makes herself Iago to his Othello, goading him into conflict with the JSDF in hopes that he will destroy himself. Palace coups, embassies under siege, and that pesky fire dragon keep Lieutenant Itami a busy man.

In the middle of all this, the Scooby Gang returns to Japan to report to the Diet about What in the World is Going on There. This is the least satisfying arc in the series. While it's fun meeting Itami's ex, the political confrontations are ham-handed and the accompanying Spy vs. Spy antics do nothing to further the plot.

Back in the Special Region, King Duran having granted them passage through his territory, Itami gets approval to put together a small team and go after the fire dragon. This arc reminds me of WWII actioners like Where Eagles Dare and The Dirty Dozen, where everybody but the leads (the Scooby Gang, in this case) gets taken out before the mission is complete.



After a little nick-of-time assistance from a pair of F-4EJ fighter jets, Itami circles his squad around to the capital to rescue Princess Piña Co Lada and Emperor Augustus from the machinations of Prince Zorza. The series concludes with a massive airborne operation.

As you have probably gathered from the names of the characters, we're not asked to take any of this very seriously. Despite the high body count, Gate definitely belongs in the "War is hell but a lot of fun to watch" category. One thing Gate does take seriously are the military details. There is plenty for military otaku to geek out about.

Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution prohibits the armed forces of Japan from engaging in offensive action outside their borders, restrictions Prime Minister Abe would like to amend. For the time being, the JSDF confines itself to peacekeeping missions, disaster relief, and chasing off the Russian patrol planes and Chinese patrol boats that "stray" into Japan's territorial waters.

The full name of the series is Gate: Thus the JSDF Fought. I do not doubt that it was born in part out of a desire to see the JSDF strut their stuff on a larger stage.

Related links

Gate (CR HD)
No way to wage a war
Dances with Samurai
Mononoke vs. Avatar

Labels: anime, anime reviews, history, japan, movies about japan, politics

The most beloved stereotype of the Japanese salesman is that of a mild-mannered carnival barker as portrayed in the long-running Tora-san movies. Persistent and endearingly ingratiating (almost to the point of being annoying). Not hard-sell.


The business of business-to-business—a popular subject of Japanese television melodramas—combines persistence and supplication in the face of rejection. The objective, it seems, is to be inoffensively irritating to the point that the other side caves to get rid of you.

Sort of like stalking. In a good way! Ganbaru—to patiently persist, endure, never give up—is intrinsic to the character of the ideal Japanese striver. A good salesman is NOT Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross. That's how yakuza behave. That's why yakuza terrify the average Japanese.


In Japan, one such feared "hard sell" technique is known as "catch sales." It uses an aggressive approach (invading a person's space and getting in his face) to physically move the conversation to a "home ground" where the salesman controls every aspect of the interaction.

You know, like a church.

As I recount in Tokyo South, back during the late 1970s and early 1980s, Mormon missionaries deployed catch sales techniques with enormous success. In the short term. In the long term—well, by design, Mormon missionaries aren't around for the long term.

So the whole thing fell apart in a few short years. The catch sales approach treats people as disposable. The bird in the hand is never worth as much as two in the bush, and for good reason. It's a lot easier to sell the idea of joining a community than to create one.

Or as Groucho Marx famously said, "I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member." If it's that easy to join, why join? Besides, all Japanese already belong to a club. It's the Japanese club, and being a member is a full time job.

If you can sell that, then you are sure to "always be closing."

Labels: introversion, japanese culture, japanese tv, movies about japan, social studies, tokyo south, yakuza

English is a Germanic language, but thanks to the Romans, the Vulgate, the Normans, and Latin being the lingua franca of academic scholarship well into the 17th century, Latin left its indelible mark on the language.

One of those truly cool marks is the word quintessential.

It derives from quīnta essentia, meaning the "fifth element" or essence of the heavenly bodies (believed to be "ether"). The other four elements are air, fire, earth, and water. (And now you also know where the title of The Fifth Element came from.)

For the past five centuries or so, quintessential (adj.) and quintessence (n.) have referred to the pure essence of a substance or the perfect embodiment of a thing.

I think it should refer to a school of acting.

The thought occurred after catching several episodes of Kojak (1973–1978) on Cozi TV (also available from Netflix). A recurring theme in Blue Bloods is how bad the "good old days" were. Crime statistics from the past quarter century prove it. Or you can watch Kojak.

Inspired by gritty crime dramas like The French Connection (1971) and Serpico (1973), the grime and nihilism is lightened by Telly Savalas's witty, wry, better-honest-than-nice Lieutenant Theo Kojak. Savalas was doing the cop version of Hugh Laurie's Dr. House thirty years before House.

In the role, Savalas captures the quintessence of the hard-nosed Brooklyn detective. His performance reminds me of Luca Zingaretti's in Inspector Montalbano (not just because they're both bald). Both play to type, a Greek-American and a Sicilian, and play that type over the top.


Zingaretti plainly states that his Montalbano is an exaggeration, a "commedia dell'arte," which is a

theatrical form characterized by improvised dialogue and a cast of colorful stock characters that emerged in northern Italy in the fifteenth century and rapidly gained popularity throughout Europe.

It is exactly this embrace of the inner stock character that allows an actor to "transform and enlarge" the part, that allows the essence of the person represented by the character to shine through. Such a performance creates an emotional rapport with both the cast and the audience.

This is what makes Savalas's and Zingaretti's characters so memorable. They key in on our familiarity with the type (which all fictional characters must be to some extent) and use that familiarity to pull us deeper into the substance of the person they are playing and the story he is telling.

I call this "acting to the quintessence." It deliberately skirts the Stanislavskian approach because theater isn't real life and actors aren't the real people they are portraying. The most "realistic" portrayal on screen is ultimately a made-up story told against an artificial backdrop.

Even a rigorously objective documentary is a shadow on Plato's wall. Once a camera starts rolling, "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players."

Embracing the type while transcending it is no simple task. Cast as Japanese, Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's delivers a cringe-worthy stereotype, while Marlon Brando in Teahouse of the August Moon convincingly depicts a person utterly unlike himself.

Brando was famously a method actor, except that all the "method" in the world wasn't going to turn him into a Japanese living in post-WWII Okinawa. What he could do was focus on those demonstrable aspects of the character that communicated the essence of his part in the story.

In other words, Brando acted like he was that person, and being a good actor, those actions resonated with the audience.

The job of narrative fiction, regardless of the medium, is not to recreate the real world. It is to draw in rough sketches with a specific and artificial focus, giving our own creative instincts enough material and latitude to fill in the rest. Our minds are the only virtual reality machines that matter.

Labels: language, movies about japan, social studies, television, thinking about writing

What struck me the most forcefully when I started rewatching Shogun for the first time in almost 40 years is how politically incorrect it is starting out. And I don't mean the silly Orientalism that You Only Live Twice revels in (though there is plenty of that).


No sooner has Chamberlain's Blackthorne run his ship aground in the "Japans" but his ego collides with every human obstacle in literal spitting (and pissing) distance. In the process, determined to repay every slight and assert his authority, he makes life much worse for himself and his men.

However he may realize that he is a stranger in a strange land, it takes him too long to grasp how the balance of power has shifted, that he has no power and no authority except that which is granted to him.

In any early scene, the hugely enjoyable John Rhys-Davies (his part isn't nearly big enough) commiserates with him in a hilariously vulgar rant. I doubt that any network would broadcast such a soliloquy of racial slurs over the air today.

This is not vulgarity for its own sake. In Blackthorne, Clavell creates a character arc comparable to Clint Eastwood's Walt Kowalski in Gran Torino and even Andrew Garfield's Rodrigues in Silence (though at opposite ends of the civility and introspection spectrums).

All three men find themselves at war with an image of themselves that cannot survive a changing environment, with the moral stakes raised all the higher when the fate of third parties become dependent on their actions.

In both Silence and Shogun, the well-being of their colleagues, and then the lives of villagers unknown to them, are used to extort from them external changes in behavior (in Japanese, tatemae) that eventually become incorporated into their characters (honne).

The English translation of Shusaku Endo's novel was published in 1969, which leads me to believe Clavell was familiar with it when writing Shogun.

There was literally no going back for Blackthorne. He had to adapt or be crushed underfoot, because the new world was not going to adapt to suit his whims. By the end of the story, his sense of who he is as an Englishman will have been taken apart and remade in Japanese terms.

The striking nature of his transformation is illustrated when he is briefly reunited with his old crew. They haven't changed. They can't even imaging changing. The differences are stark. They have literally grown worlds apart. He can't leave their presence and get back to "Japan" fast enough.

Like Rodrigues in Silence, this is a transformation resisted, negotiated, and then embraced. In Blackthorne's case, however, he does so largely on his own terms and not at the point of a sword.

A big disappointment of Shogun is that so much happened after the miniseries ends. As a retainer of Tokugawa Ieyasu, Adams fought at Sekigahara, he negotiated trading rights with the Dutch and the East India Company, and captained several voyages to the Phillipines.

As the fictional Father Alvito predicts, Will Adams never returned to England. He died in 1620, leaving behind families in both countries. Adams is buried outside Nagasaki, where his grave marker still exists. Richard Cocks of the East India Company recorded in his diary,

I cannot but be sorrowfull for the loss of such a man as Capt William Adams, he having been in such favour with two [shoguns] of Japan as never any Christian in these part of the world.

Two and a half centuries later, another man from the British Isles, the Scotsman Thomas Glover, moved to Japan. In 1859, he established himself in Nagasaki and became a key arms dealer supplying guns and warships to the Satsuma and Choshu domains in their successful revolt against the shogunate.

Glover went on to contribute significantly to the industrialization of Japan during the Meiji period. Unlike Adams, he couldn't be made the hatamoto of a shogun who no longer existed. He was instead awarded the Order of the Rising Sun. Like Adams, he was also buried in Nagasaki.

And thus did two subjects of the Queen of England help shape the future of Japan.

Related posts

Shogun revisited (1)
Techno-orientalism
Dances with Samurai
Japan made in Hollywood

Labels: history, japanese culture, movies about japan, shogun, social studies

As I've noted previously, back in the day, Hollywood made (often very good) movies in and about Japan on a regular basis. The over-the-top camp of You Only Live Twice played well in Japan. Shogun showed up at the right time on American television, with the rights leads (Toshiro Mifune alongside Richard Chamberlain), and with sufficient verisimilitude.


More recently, The Last Samurai gave western audiences the same story from Dances with Wolves while Japanese audiences got an fantasy version of the Satsuma Rebellion. As with Rurouni Kenshin, fantasy versions of the Satsuma Rebellion abound in Japanese historical fiction (it's Japan's version of The Wild, Wild West).

The Last Samurai did reasonably well on both sides of the Pacific.

On the other hand, Memoirs of a Geisha didn't do anything that Japanese historical melodramas don't do on a weekly basis, and without any Japanese actresses in the leads. What was exotic to western audiences was ho hum in Japan.

Silence is an art house film that Martin Scorsese got to make because he's Martin Scorsese, so the box office is beside the point. But he filmed it in Taiwan for $46 million ("low budget" in Hollywood), did a good job recreating a recognizable Edo period Japan setting and finding good excuses for his Japanese actors to speak English.

Why 47 Ronin cost $175 million is beyond me. Its budget probably had a lot to do with the relative success of The Last Samurai. But at those nosebleed levels, it was never going to recoup its investment, Keanu Reeves notwithstanding.

It was too "Japanese" for western audiences, and audiences in Japan had no interest in a "Hollywood rendition of Chushingura bearing no resemblance to the historical epic." And barely any resemblance to Japan, period. Shooting anywhere but in Japan is fine until it it's obvious you're no longer in Japan.

The message wasn't going to resonate. It didn't resonate in 1941, when a version of Chushingura commissioned by the Japanese military and directed by Kenji Mizoguchi was also a commercial failure. It's been sourced for Japanese  television miniseries over twenty times, except it's Masterpiece Theatre material, not Marvel Comics.

Though 47 Ronin does prove that Ko Shibasaki, who has the lead in NHK's 2017 Taiga historical drama, can hold her own paired with a big Hollywood star. And with the right direction, Japanese actors can speak okay English. Although it (accidentally) also proves that speaking no Japanese doesn't guarantee anything either.

Mismatched cultural assumptions and a needlessly "adapted" adaptation sank 47 Ronin. Same for Ghost in the Shell. Paramount blamed social politics for the failure of the latter to rise to blockbuster status. I think it more accurate to say that these movies weren't nearly good enough to justify the amount of money spent on them.

At the end of the day, critics don't have much of a say in what audiences will like and pay money to see. And neither do the accountants.

The Marvel and DC universes are the current Comstock Lode of the entertainment business. Alas, the richest veins at the Comstock Lode played out in a decade or two. After that, it took more and more work to produce less and less, until the mines eventually closed.

Well, there's a whole lot of gold in them there manga and anime hills. All Hollywood has to do is figure out the mining technology that will refine that precious ore into movies that American audiences actually want to watch.

Related posts

Japan's Bond legacy
Dances with Samurai
Hollywood made in Japan

Labels: business, ghost in the shell, history, japanese culture, movies, movies about japan, nhk, shogun

Hollywood rose to world domination by finding the common dramatic denominator amongst most of the movie-going population on the planet, epitomized by the Disney animated feature and the action movie (whether shoot 'em ups or CGI-heavy fantasy epics and space operas).

Hollywood films once dominated the box office in Japan too. Lately, Japanese filmmakers have started paying less attention to high-brow film critics abroad and learned how to appeal to those common denominators too. In other words, they stopped trying to be the next Kurosawa and started trying to be the next J.J. Abrams.

As a result, the home-grown share of the Japanese movie market has grown from under 30 percent to over 60 percent in under two decades.

Combined with digital technology, cinematographers have proved themselves capable of producing the Hollywood action-flick "look" for a fraction of the cost. Over the span of a single decade, the technological improvements in the Appleseed films (3D animation using motion capture) have been nothing short of staggering.


A Harry Potter or Frozen will still zoom to the top of the charts, but made-in-Japan movies now hold most of the top-twenty spots. Except that, more often than not, they do so by fitting into Japanese culture in ways that Hollywood films can't, by exploiting culture, currents, and trends that are literally foreign outside Japan.

The evolutionary spiral that results has been termed "Galapagos syndrome," referring to products so customized to Japan's "island culture" that they are incompatible with the rest of the world.

In the Japan Times, Stephen Stapczynski and Shoko Oda point out that two of Japan's biggest grossing films of 2016, Your Name and Shin Godzilla, couldn't be less alike, and yet "the two movies share one thing in common—they're relentlessly, unapologetically Japanese."

Your Name is at times a love letter to Tokyo's cityscapes, with key plot points revolving around regional Japanese traditions. Shin Godzilla has more fast-talking scenes riffing on Japan's post-Fukushima politics than it does building-stomping monsters.

Another good example is the Rurouni Kenshin trilogy. It follow the Hollywood action movie playbook, with slick production values and lots of action paired with a dumbed-down script stocked with cardboard characters (played by actors better than their parts).

Part 1 is worth watching for the dazzling swordplay. Part 3 is worth watching because Masaharu Fukuyama dominates the first third doing a combination of Yoda and Mr. Miyagi from Karate Kid. Plus Yosuke Eguchi shines as Saito Hajime, a cynical ex-Shinsengumi lieutenant who switched sides.

The seeming simplicity of the story aside, the Rurouni Kenshin series assumes a cursory understanding of the Bakumatsu era (during which the various sides negotiated by day and assassinated each other by night), the Boshin War, and the early Meiji period leading up to the Satsuma Rebellion.

Even a Japanese kid who slept through every history class in school will have absorbed the rough details along the way. Western audiences will have a much harder time figuring out what the heck is going on.

This is one of the many reasons made-in-Japan family films and copies of the Hollywood action flick formula can't compete with the Hollywood behemoths outside the Asian market, such that most never even get a DVD release in the U.S. (Getting American audiences to read subtitles is another reason.)

The live-action version of Chihayafuru is a fine adaptation and a great teen movie with a compelling female lead. But I can understand why U.S. distributors would pass on a story that centers around a competition involving medieval Japanese poetry. And only the hint of a romantic sub-plot.


Despite winning a "best picture" award in Japan, the live action film of The Great Passage (about a team of etymologists compiling a Japanese dictionary) also remains unlicensed, while the anime version was picked up by Amazon. The Chihayafuru anime series is available on Crunchyroll

So while the Fast and the Furious franchise has raked in $1.5 billion worldwide by stripping away the cultural baggage and concentrating on a handful of universal story elements, anime and manga have thrived by being not-Disney, by creating a unique media niche not easily duplicated. Which, ironically, makes it all the more niche.

Your Name set records around Asia for a Japanese-produced film. But it's still a niche product that, like all those highly praised Studio Ghibli movies, barely made a dent at the U.S. box office.

Thankfully, audiences are growing large enough to make "borderless" media worth the bother. Increasingly, studios in Japan (same Blu-ray region as the Americas) distribute discs with English subtitles. Maybe someday in the not-too-distant future, any movie made anywhere will be available everywhere at a reasonable price.

Labels: anime, business, chihayafuru, japan, japanese culture, movies, movies about japan, your name

Speaking as I was last week of art about artists being artists, Miss Hokusai is a fine addition to the genre (click image to enlarge).


Based on the manga by the late Hinako Sugiura, the film is episodic in nature, with no real plot or even much in the way of character development. Told from the perspective of O-Ei, Hokusai's elder daughter and an accomplished painter in her own right, it is series of vignettes about Hokusai, his two daughters, and his apprentice, living and working in Edo (Tokyo) during the first half of the 19th century.

If there is a theme to the movie, it concerns the limits of technical ability alone to produce great art (here also meaning that people will pay to see it). The much fabled eccentricity of the creative type thus reflects the ongoing struggle to resolve that conflict ("good artists copy; great artists steal").

But the setting is the real story. These slices-of-life take place in the surreal Edo of the popular period drama, untroubled by politics or the impending collapse of the Tokugawa regime (mentioned in an afterword). As with the imaginations of the characters, it is infused with magical realism, the threads of folk tales and religious figures winding through the fabric of the scenes, sketches, and anecdotes.

The title of the movie in Japanese is Sarusuberi (百日紅) or "crepe myrtle." The flower symbolizes the subtle tragic arc that bridges the narrative, though the matter-of-fact tone of the presentation never threatens to overwhelm us with emotion. Rather, the movie invites us to watch and observe and examine it like a painting. Whatever sentiment you wish to bring to the subject is entirely up to you.

Miss Hokusai is like a slow stroll through a stately old museum (whose director is doing his best to make it more "accessible"). Nobody is going to clobber you over the head with ART, but if you wish to look, it's hanging on the walls all around you to see.


The soundtrack on the GKids DVD defaults to a pretty good English dub version.

Labels: anime, anime reviews, art, gkids, japan, japanese culture, japanese movie reviews, movie reviews, movies about japan

Mitsuki Takahata (bottom right) plays Shizuko Ohashi in the NHK series.

As I noted last week, Homer Sarasohn was the first quality control guru to visit Japan, invited by General Douglas MacArthur to rebuild Japan's electronics industry. Why was that a priority for the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers?

Because MacArthur believed in the power of the mass media to spread the good word of freedom and democracy. His good word. It wasn't simply a political pose. MacArthur was Ronald Reagan with ten times the ego and a papal sense of infallibility.

In other words, the perfect personality for a Japanese shogun (with access to a radio studio).

In fact, the first few years of the Occupation saw a spate of surprisingly liberal reforms (that drove Shigeru Yoshida up a wall). Leftists, labor organizers, and even communists were let out of jail and the press was unleashed.

In Embracing Defeat, John Dower documents how enthusiastically the Japanese embraced these freedoms. Soon SCAP was censoring as many articles and broadcasts as it was approving. A free press, you see, wasn't free to criticize SCAP.

But the fire had been lit. It's telling that the moral backlash that "brought about the collapse of the comic book industry in the 1950s" was shrugged off almost as soon as it arrived in Japan (though, to be sure, it never entirely went away).

The NHK Asadora, Toto Nee-chan, is a fictionalized biography of Shizuko Ohashi (1920–2013), who in 1948 co-founded 「暮しの手帖」 ("Notebook for Living"), a home improvement magazine for women still in print.

This retrospective at the magazine's website is in Japanese, but the illustrations largely speak for themselves.

This was an era when movie makers as well were yanking themselves up by their bootstraps. Akira Kurosawa turned the devastated landscape of Tokyo into a movie set in his second post-war film, One Wonderful Sunday, released in 1947.

Labels: asadora, embracing defeat, history, japan, japanese culture, japanese tv, movies about japan, nhk, politics, publishing, social studies, ww2

Mamoru Hosoda was briefly slated to direct Howl's Moving Castle but left after what really were "artistic differences." All for the better, as it turned out. Miyazaki took over and made a great movie. And now Hosoda is well on his way to matching his record.

Hosoda is one of the few directors I consider self-recommending: the name alone in the credits is enough.

If anybody stands to inherit Miyazaki's mantle, it's Hosoda, whose films rival Ghibli productions for their consistent quality, dramatic depth, a sheer entertainment value: The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006), Summer Wars (2009), and The Wolf Children (2012).

And this year, The Boy and the Beast. The description sounds like supernatural version of The Karate Kid: the bellicose, bear-like swordsman Kumatetsu takes Kyuta under his wing and trains him to be a fighter.


The setting is Shibuya in Tokyo, except that a connection to an alternate realm has turned this Shibuya into a kind of postmodern Narnia. (Blood Blockade Battlefield sports a similar premise, though in New York, so maybe we've got a sub-genre going here.)

Funimation has licensed the film for North America; it's scheduled to open in theaters in 2016.

Speaking of the Miyazakis, Goro Miyazaki's Ronia the Robber's Daughter, based on the children's fantasy novel by Astrid Lindgren, has been made available to international distributors. The series ran for 26 episodes on NHK between fall 2014 and March 2015.


The series is currently streaming on Amazon.

And speaking of Studio Ghibli, GKids is distributing Only Yesterday, Isao Takahata's 1991 slice-of-life melodrama, with voice-over work by Daisy Ridley, no less. (And GKids now lists Ocean Waves, the last Ghibli film to be released in the U.S., on its website too.)

Related posts

The Girl who Leapt through Time
Summer Wars
The Wolf Children

Labels: anime, funimation, gkids, hosoda, japanese culture, miyazaki, movies about japan, nhk, studio ghibli

The 2011 biopic Admiral Yamamoto (Toei Pictures) focuses on the last decade of Yamamoto's life. But even at 140 minutes, it only skims the surface, a surface made all the thinner by telling a peripherally-related "homefront" story at the same time. The "fiction" in this "historical fiction" gets a good workout.

As for the "historical" part? That's pretty much fiction too.


To cite one technical detail, Yamamoto's plane was shot down near Bougainville in 1943. We're shown the version carried in the Japanese press, that has him dying elegiacally in the crash. In fact,  U.S. Naval Intelligence knew where he was and he was killed mid-air by a P-38 Lightning during its initial strafing run.

Well, call it "subjective" history. This shameless hagiography burnishes Yamamoto's reputation the same way Robert E. Lee's record was "rehabilitated" after the Civil War. As a military commander, Lee was less than he was cracked up to be. Like Lee, Yamamoto was a disaster at every offensive action he initiated.

But the buck stopped nowhere. However reluctant he might have been going in, Yamamoto pushed hard for the Pearl Harbor attack. And then with no carriers to hit, he refused to launch a necessary second wave to destroy the tank farms. Later in the film he declares Pearl Harbor a failure. Which it was, largely because of him.

The movie does show how the Doolittle Raid fueled Yamamoto's obsession with Midway (a welcome result entirely unintended). Forced to divide his forces to keep the Midway option alive, Coral Sea was a halfhearted effort the U.S. Navy was able to fight to a draw.

Then at Midway, Yamamoto failed to rein in Admiral Nagumo after the battle was lost for certain, and acquiesced to Rear Admiral Yamaguchi going down with his ship. No, you don't let experienced officers kill themselves after the enemy failed to do so.

Veteran actor Koji Yakusho (Shall We Dance) depicts Yamamoto as practically a spectator to the war he's waging. Director Izuru Narushima apparently wants us to associate "passive" and "detached" with "peaceful." Except depicting Yamamoto as a saint makes him as delusional as his ideological foes in the Imperial Army.

In real life, Yamamoto was anything but a bystander when it came to the war planning. In Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway, Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully recount that

In the midst of the Pearl Harbor debate, [Yamamoto] had let it be known that he and the entire staff of Combined Fleet were prepared to resign if his views were not confirmed. [Admiral] Nagano, given the choice between acquiescing or confronting his wayward subordinate, had backed down. In so doing, he essentially let Yamamoto hijack the Navy’s strategic planning process and place it under the purview of Combined Fleet.

Both McClellan¹ and MacArthur also thought themselves indispensable men. Lincoln and Truman let them know they weren't.

I subscribe to the theory that when the critical information fell into his hands, Admiral Nimitz might possibly have balked at killing Yamamoto for the same hypothetical reasons Lee would have balked at killing McClellan in 1862. Why eliminate your best asset?

At its heart, Admiral Yamamoto wants to be one of those old-fashioned, patriotic, big-screen blockbusters like The Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) and The Battle of Britain (1969) and Midway (1976). Those were movies that celebrated the "good war" and the "greatest generation" and starred every big-name actor under the sun.

(And to lend extra gravitas: John Wayne's Sergeant Stryker dies on the slopes of Mt. Suribachi in the last reel after the iconic flag raising. Charlton Heston's Captain Garth dies in the last reel ferrying a fighter from the sinking Yorktown. Alas, Yakusho's Yamamoto dies in the last reel amidst a "transfer of troops.")

Those earlier classics were made with the cooperation of the military branches, along with mothballed equipment pulled out of storage and plenty of repurposed newsreel footage. Admiral Yamamoto make good use of digital effects to create more convincing snapshots of Pearl Harbor, Midway, and the Solomons.

Unfortunately, live-action digital effects like this don't come cheap in Japan, where a "feature film" is "low budget" by Hollywood standards. So Admiral Yamamoto gives us maybe ten minutes of actual cinematic battles and two hours of actors pacing around soundstage sets.

It's on those sets that Teruyuki Kagawa steals every scene he's in as a fiery newspaper editor in the tradition of William Randolph Hearst: "You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war." Then does a 180 when the war is lost. (John Dower notes in Embracing Defeat that this was a not uncommon phenomenon in 1945.)

The more interesting (perhaps unacceptably iconoclastic) story would have shown us the war from the point of view of Kagawa's newspaperman, who goes from hero worship to cynic, and yet concludes (as Jimmy Stewart is informed in The Man who Shot Liberty Valance), "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

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1. Both McClellan and Yamamoto had great press and the affection of their subordinates. Both were enamored of elaborate battlefield strategies that promised the deliver a crushing blow to the outfoxed enemy (Parshall and Tully explore this failing at length). Both couldn't accept that "no plan survives the first shot." As a result, neither knew what to do next besides retreat. Unlike McClellan, Imperial Japan didn't have more capable officers waiting in the wings. Yamamoto was the basket in which they had placed all their eggs.

Labels: embracing defeat, history, japan, japanese movie reviews, movies about japan, ww2

The couple in question.

As I mentioned in my previous post about Kimi ni Todoke, two supporting characters, Chizuru and Ryu, are substantively more interesting than the main characters, Sawako and Shota. As for the latter two, ultimately there's not a whole lot of "there" there.

That's not an insurmountable problem in story like this (with so much else going on). But as Kate asks, "What on earth will they talk about for the rest of their lives if they can no longer talk about their growing romance?"

Pushing aside everything you know about the characters from the anime, the live-action movie makes this hard to ignore. On the plus side, it hits all the major plot points from the first season of the anime. The two-hour time constraint means much less angst to wade through.

But the deeper side-story about Ryu and Chizuru is reduced to about five minutes. Racing from conflict to conflict, the relationship among Sawako, Ayane and Chizuru--the true substance of the series--becomes a fait accompli rather than a nurtured and growing thing.

In the process, Shota ends up a conventional teen lead, little more than a "MacGuffin." That's Hollywood slang for "a plot device in the form of some goal, desired object, or other motivator that the protagonist pursues, often with little or no narrative explanation."

What separates formula romance from, say, Jane Austen, is giving the heroine a reason to want the hero aside from him being the closest available white knight. Aside from being a nice guy, nothing about Shota convinces us that he is desired for anything more than being desirable.

Even in the movie, we learn far more about Ryu than we ever do about Shota. (The movie actually adds more backstory about Sawako than is in the anime.)

As Sawako, Mikako Tabe, in turn, has to lean more heavily on affect than acting. Trying too hard to match the look of the anime forces her to compete with her hair in the early scenes. Her performance improves considerably when she can finally wear her hair up or back.

Even then, she has barely any material to work with, other than her character's odd personality. The movie unintentionally makes it obvious that here are two kids who really need to get themselves a life, something more substantive than pining for each other.

Sawako at least has her flower garden. I would have liked to see this used much more as an outer expression of her inner self. Make her a budding botanist.

Kimi ni Todoke is a good example of how animation can be the superior visual medium when so much of the subject matter is internal or subjective. Manga artist Karuho Shiina can draw what she wants us to see (hair, to start with), especially if she wants us to see a state of mind.

Sawako and Chizuru in super-deformed mode.

Manga and anime have rich repertoires of abstract effects and visual metaphors, such as the "super-deformed" style.⁽¹⁾ These effects don't interrupt the narrative and announce themselves precisely because they are drawn. We've already disassociated story from "reality."

Pixar has further proven the point with Inside Out.

I think a movie adaptation like Kimi ni Todoke would work better by addressing a far smaller slice of the original. A straightforward summation of events, however accurate, simply can't generate the same emotional Sturm und Drang.

They look and can play the parts.

The movie does get a few things exactly right: Haru Aoyama and Misako Renbutsu are perfectly cast as Ryu and Chizuru. There's the better movie to make: flip the point-of-view around and tell the story from their perspective. All the necessary material is already available.

Related posts

Kimi ni Todoke (anime manga)

Here is a useful guide to the dating scene in Japan.

Japan's “Love Confessing” Culture
What It's Like Dating A Japanese Girl
What It's Like Dating A Japanese Guy

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1. Although "super-deformed" is generally considered analogous to "chibi," I think it's more semantically useful to define "super-deformed" literally and "chibi" as a sub-category.

Labels: anime, japanese movie reviews, mikako tabe, movies, movies about japan, romance, social studies, thinking about writing

Continuing from my previous post on the subject, a closer look at Catholicism in Japan's popular culture. Only one percent of Japanese consider themselves Christian, less than half that Catholic, making the influence of Catholic culture wildly disproportionate to its demographic presence.

Shusaku Endo (1923-1996) wrote about Catholicism in the context of Japanese history. His definitive novel, Silence, details the persecution of the church in the early 17th century. A movie directed by Masahiro Shinoda was released in 1971. An adaptation by Martin Scorsese starring Liam Neeson is scheduled for 2016.

Forced deep underground during the Edo period (1603-1868), a dedicated few courageously kept the faith alive for 250 years in the face of fierce persecution. Those days are all bygones. Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso is Catholic. "Christian"-style weddings are a popular (and less expensive) alternative to the Shinto rite.

That includes "Christian" weddings officiated by foreign "priests." Because any gaijin who can dress up and play the part will do. A marriage license is an official document issued by the state; what goes on in the church is legally irrelevant.

So setting serious things aside, let's glance briefly at the lighter side of pop Catholic references. I say "briefly" because I can only mention a few of the dozens of titles that qualify.

As I mentioned previously, the Inquisitorial arm of the Catholic church in Hellsing and Witch Hunter Robin (among many) functions as a conspiratorial manipulator of events on the world stage, like The Smoking Man from The X-Files or the NSA/CIA in Enemy of the State (and a zillion other Hollywood flicks).


For history buffs, there's Maria the Virgin Witch. It takes place during the Hundred Years' War. When she keeps interfering in human events as an avowed pacifist, Maria gets at cross-purposes with the Archangel Michael. (The series crazily ricochets between high-brow historical fantasy and very low-brow burlesque.)

Chrono Crusade features the "Order of Saint Magdalene" as a ghost-hunting organization. The vampire hunters in Trinity Blood work for a post-apocalyptic Vatican. The heroine in Saint Tail is a Robin Hood type whose base of operation is a Catholic church.

Haibane Renmei is perhaps the most accessible exploration of Catholic purgatory (or the Mormon "probationary state") in religious literature.

Though supernatural genres predominate, there are a few real life titles, such as Rumiko Takahashi's One-Pound Gospel, about a boxer kept on the straight and narrow by a Catholic nun.

More than theology, which few Japanese (and few Americans) could explain, Catholicism is best known as a setting, namely the Catholic girls school. Based on popular entertainment, you'd conclude that every other private school in Japan is a Catholic girls school. A recent example is Maria Watches Over Us.

The live action comedy Gomen ne Seishun! ("Saving My Stupid Youth") has a Catholic girls school with slumping enrollment merging with a Buddhist boys school in similar straits. School uniforms matter a lot in Japan, and Gomen ne Seishun! ridiculously dresses the girls up in what look like training habits.


It's not available in the U.S. (though Maria Watches Over Us is). Maybe someday it'll show up on Hulu or Crunchyroll? Really, you'd have to have a heart of stone to get offended at something this silly. A world beset by religious strife calls for even greater faith in the more jocular angels of our nature.

Related posts

Christianity is cool
Pop culture Buddhism
Pop culture Shinto
Anime genre horror

Constantine
Hellsing (Fun)
Madoka Magica (CR)
Scrapped Princess (Fun)

Labels: anime, anime lists, haibane, hellsing, japan, japanese culture, movies about japan, pop culture, religion

Emperor (with Matthew Fox and Tommy Lee Jones) is a needlessly boring and unjustifiably self-important melodrama that misses the great thriller lurking right under its nose.

Early in the morning of August 15, 1945, a group of young Imperial Japanese Army officers attempted to forcibly prevent the Emperor's surrender address from being broadcast that afternoon.

It was an eerie repeat of the "February 26 [1936] Incident" (and even the Satsuma Rebellion in 1877), when a similar coup d'état was launched with the goal of "purging the government and military leadership of their factional rivals and ideological opponents."

The "August 15 Incident" ran out of steam when die-hard War Minister General Korechika Anami refused to lend his moral or material support (unlike Saigo Takamori back in 1877, whose participation ensured a lot more people dying for no reason).

The best cinematic account of the events of August 15 is Japan's Longest Day.

Kihachi Okamoto's 1967 docudrama (based on the book by Kazutoshi Hando), with Toshiro Mifune as General Anami, is rather too hagiographic about Hirohito's role. But it faithfully portrays the suicidal spasm of fanaticism that ended the war for good.

What makes it all the more fascinating is that, almost immediately following a "war without mercy," the war did indeed end for good, as John Dower lays out in detail in his history of the Occupation, Embracing Defeat.

Popular culture perhaps makes an even stronger argument. A number of surprisingly decent Hollywood movies with marquee stars were set in—and even made in—Japan not long after the end of the war.

• Tokyo Joe (1949, with Humphrey Bogart)
• House of Bamboo (1955, with Robert Ryan and Robert Stack)
• Teahouse of the August Moon (1956, with Marlon Brando, Glenn Ford, Eddie Albert, and Harry Morgan)
• Sayonara (1957, with Marlon Brando, Patricia Owens, James Garner, Miiko Taka, Red Buttons, and Ricardo Montalban!)
• Escapade in Japan (1957, with Jon Provost of Lassie fame)

Go for Broke! (1951, with Van Johnson) is about the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, composed of Japanese-Americans. They fought in Europe. It depicts the Nisei soldiers in a quite positive light. The screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award.

Then into the 1960s, we have:

• Cry for Happy (1961, with Glenn Ford, Donald O'Connor, and Miiko Taka)
• My Geisha (1962, with Shirley MacLaine, Yves Montand, and Edward G. Robinson)
• Walk, Don't Run (1966, with Cary Grant, Samantha Eggar, Jim Hutton, and Miiko Taka)
• You Only Live Twice (1967, with Sean Connery as James Bond)

You Only Live Twice canonized the silliest of modern stereotypes about Japan. Japanese audiences, though, were delighted with the whole thing. The same can be said about The Last Samurai, which is about as historically insightful as an old western B movie.

It seems a little Orientalism can be good for art. I'm sure Hollywood found the "exoticism" of Japan fascinating. But it was exactly this fascination that allowed them to take the non-exotic parts at face value, rather than filter them through their own biases.

Labels: embracing defeat, history, japanese movie reviews, movie reviews, movies about japan, showa period, ww2

Hulu has a decent catalog of Japanese movies, though it's the same sort of selection you'll find at Netflix (and, back in the day, Blockbuster): heavy on the classics, art house, and genre flicks, especially samurai, yakuza, and horror. A handful of anime movies and remakes.

The Japan box office is, in fact, not that different from the U.S. box office--only delayed a few weeks--plus a bunch of home-grown films you will never hear about unless the list includes a feature-length anime or the odd Takashi Miike production.

Think Disney and Quentin Tarantino. That's the kind of artistic range we're talking about. In other words, the same as in the U.S., where you'll find Frozen and Captain America on the same list with RoboCop.

Then there's the old complaint that while PG and PG-13 movies make all the money, far more R movies are made. I suspect, though, that in bottom-line terms, R-rated movies are a safer bet. A studio can buy in with less risk and be sure to at least break even.

And those R-rated movies are easier to export. Takashi Miike cranks out a couple of low-budget films a year, producing a bona fide hit now and then. With low sunk costs, licensing is less of a concern. The licensees, in turn, can fill an established "same only different" niche.

By contrast, Japan's biggest big-budget film this year is Eien no Zero ("Eternal Zero"), a Gallipoli-style companion piece to another war movie you'll never see, Otoko-tachi no Yamato ("Our Yamato"), about the doomed crew of the fabled battleship.

After a film festival or two (though even that's doubtful), it will go straight to DVD when it arrives in the U.S. (and who knows when).

The better box office of big PG movies notwithstanding, U.S. audiences are less forgiving. Despite the marketing muscle of Disney behind it (its distributor in Japan too), Ghibli's most successful U.S. release, Arrietty (based on The Borrowers), grossed only $20 million.

Spirited Away, the top-earning film in the history of Japanese cinema, took in barely half that, despite an Academy Award.

An "agnostic" Hollywood hit in the U.S. will probably be a hit in Japan. (Frozen is huge.) But not the other way around, and that isn't going to change anytime soon. This is where the long tail could come to the rescue. As with ebooks, streaming media need never go out of print.

To be sure, to really work, streaming will turn every ISP into a CDN, but that was going to happen anyway. The only question is who will pay what to whom to make it so.

Infrastructure problems aside, there's a lot in the streaming universe to look forward to. Instead of gathering dust in a warehouse, content can be left on a server to find an audience. As Joe Konrath puts it, "Ebooks are forever. Forever is a long time to get noticed."

But the perennial problem is, that long tail will never get noticed if nobody's wagging it. Japanese distributors of live-action television fare are notoriously slow off the mark in this regard, especially compared to their South Korean counterparts.

Speaking of which, Crunchyroll recently gave the long tail a shake. It announced a partnership with Fuji TV to stream 21 live-action television series, including the classic GTO and the great police procedural Galileo (like Bones except the scientist is a physicist).

I can only hope that Japan's other TV networks and studios--especially NHK--will take note and soon follow suit.

Related posts

Netflummoxed
Full stream ahead

Labels: business, crunchyroll, hulu, japan, japanese culture, movies, movies about japan, netflix, nhk, yakuza