A Critical Handbook of Japanese Film Directors. Alexander Jacoby

exclusively to a slightly more decorous form of sex film, often based on respected novels, known as Roman Porno. A handful of interesting directors, notably Noboru Tanaka, worked in this sector, although most of its products did little more than fulfill their intended function. By the seventies, too, “pink” cinema was beginning to lose any political impetus, though, in fairness, a number of the more critically and commercially successful directors of the eighties and nineties, such as Kazuyuki Izutsu and Shun Nakahara, started out in “pink.”

      Film in the Bubble Era: Endings and New Beginnings

      A paradox of the era of Japan’s booming “bubble economy” was that the nation’s growing prosperity did not translate into money for film production. Consequently, the seventies and eighties marked a low point in the Japanese cinema’s international reputation, at least as far as new films were concerned. While touring retrospectives introduced appreciative audiences to a wider range of classics, including the films of Naruse, Gosho, Kinoshita, and Shimizu, the number of recent Japanese films exported had plummeted. Those which did obtain foreign distribution were made by older, established figures: the later works of Kurosawa and Imamura were respectfully received, but international exposure of films by younger directors was restricted to the isolated success of specific titles, one example being Mitsuo Yanagimachi’s much-feted Fire Festival (Himatsuri, 1985). The only younger filmmaker to establish a truly international reputation at this time was Jūzō Itami, whose witty satires of Japanese life and society earned him wide praise. While his films were uncompromisingly modern and engaged directly with the peculiarities of society at the time of the bubble economy, Itami was also the standard bearer of a family tradition, doing for the eighties what his father Mansaku had done for the thirties. By this time, however, the traditions of the Japanese cinema must have seemed on the verge of extinction to foreign viewers.

      Inside Japan, however, the picture was not entirely bleak. During the 1970s, a number of younger filmmakers, frustrated with the difficulty of entering an industry which no longer operated the traditional apprenticeship system, took matters into their own hands, and made independent films on 8mm. Some of these, like Yoshimitsu Morita and Kazuki Ōmori, became successful commercial filmmakers in the eighties. At that time, independent directors like Yanagimachi and Kōhei Oguri generally struggled to find funding, but intermittently made works of outstanding distinction. In the mainstream, publisher Haruki Kadokawa had entered the market, and produced a series of big-budget, glossy genre films; these included some rather individual works, such as Nobuhiko Ōbayashi’s silly but engaging fantasies set in his native Onomichi. Among the most important directors to work for Kadokawa was Shinji Sōmai: initially making youth films, he developed an imaginative style using long takes and long shot, which somewhat paralleled the classical styles of directors such as Mizoguchi and Shimizu. Ultimately crossing into the art house market, Sōmai became one of the era’s most distinguished filmmakers. At the same time, a theoretical impetus came from Rikkyō University, where the influence of scholar Shigehiko Hasumi encouraged such students as Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Shinji Aoyama to experiment, like Sōmai, with austere long takes. These directors were to become some of the most interesting artists of the 1990s. Another significant development was the success of the PIA Film Festival, set up to discover talented young directors. From 1984, winners were awarded scholarships to direct their own features, and PIA thus kick-started the careers of several of the most interesting newer talents, such as Ryōsuke Hashiguchi, Akihiko Shiota, and Tomoyuki Furumaya.

      Genre and Art: Japanese Film in the 1990s and Beyond

      The last decade or so has seen an improvement both in the quality of work produced and in its international stature. The Japanese cinema of the 1990s and the first years of the twenty-first century has been varied enough to defy summary. On the one hand there are the genre filmmakers, such as Takeshi Kitano and Hideo Nakata, who have specialized in gangster and horror movies and who have gained the Japanese cinema an appreciative new audience, both at home and abroad. Their approach was unashamedly commercial, but was also personal—the melancholy fatalism of Kitano’s yakuza pictures is as recognizable as was the delicate realism of Ozu. On the other hand, there are those directors who have tried to uphold the established traditions of Japanese filmmaking, looking back to old masters such as Ozu and Mizoguchi or to modernists like Ōshima for inspiration, while forging individual styles and examining modern concerns. They include such artists as Hirokazu Koreeda, whose affecting studies of loss and isolation have been among the most moving of modern Japanese films, and Jun Ichikawa, whose best films, such as Tokyo Marigold (Tōkyō marīgōrudo, 2001), have subtly conveyed the emotional dislocation of contemporary life. Such films are more clearly aimed at the art house market, and their commercial success has been limited; nevertheless, they have achieved critical esteem both at home and abroad, and testify to the continuing vitality of a tradition. There are also directors who have struck a balance between the two approaches: Kiyoshi Kurosawa, to my mind the most distinguished modern director of horror, makes genre films that look like art movies, and states that he works in genres “in order better to distance myself from them.” This fusion of art house and genre traditions also testifies to the fact that the distinction between studio and independent production is becoming less clear-cut.

      One of the most basic signs of the continuing richness of the Japanese cinema is that films are still made and shown in decent numbers. This is no longer a given anywhere apart from the United States: Hollywood films constitute the majority of films exhibited in most countries today. Some take this as a symptom of American cultural imperialism, but it is also a fact that international audiences choose to support Hollywood productions instead of local ones. Those national cinemas which maintain a healthy level of production and continue to produce work of aesthetic distinction have usually legislated to counter the operation of the free market. The Korean cinema, one of the most fertile in the world today, has relied on government quotas guaranteeing that 40% of screen time is devoted to domestic product. In Iran, purveyor of some of the world’s most individual contemporary films, strict censorship ensures that many foreign films are never released; meanwhile, art films are produced with an eye on the export market. Japan, by contrast, now neither restricts the importation of foreign films nor legislates to support her own film industry. And yet, in 2004, 247 out of 622 films released in Japan were domestic productions, and Japanese films commanded about a third of the total market share in their native country. These are totals that would be envied by any other country in the world, except India and the United States. The relative commercial success of new Japanese films goes hand in hand with a continuing niche interest in the classics of Japanese cinema. Admit­tedly this is sustained in large part by an older generation of viewers, but Tokyo still has several repertory cinemas devoted solely or mainly to the revival of old Japanese films. It is difficult to imagine the equivalent in London. At the same time, the growth of the DVD market has begun to make the classics available to a wider audience.

      In the West, too, Japanese films old and new continue to inspire interest and admiration. Among their admirers, auteurism, unfashionable in academic circles, still lives: which is to say that interest continues to be focused on the work of certain directors. Almost every recent major international retrospective of classic Japanese cinema has been a tribute to an individual director, whether already in the pantheon (Mizoguchi, Ozu, Kurosawa) or hitherto little-known (Masumura, Uchida). Interest in modern Japanese films, commercial or art house, also focuses on individual talents: the release of new films by directors such as Nakata, Kitano, Koreeda, and Shin’ya Tsukamoto is as eagerly anticipated in some quarters as the appearance at festivals of the latest Kurosawa was in the fifties. Donald Richie has spoken disparagingly of the way in which directors such as Ozu have become “brand names”; the problem is not that Ozu does not deserve plaudits, but that, for many viewers his films are the Japanese domestic drama, just as, in the modern era, Kitano is the yakuza thriller. In reality, Japan has produced dozens of directors who remain barely known in the West, yet whose work is richly deserving of wider distribution. I would cite, of the classical generation, Yoshimura, who has still never had the major international retrospective he deserves, or, of the younger, Furumaya, responsible for some of the most humane and unassuming dramas of recent years.

      For many of these artists, the difficulty of seeing their films is exacerbated by the difficulty, for the non-Japanese-speaking reader, of learning about them in the first place; it can be almost impossible to locate factual information