The 1990s in Japan were an era of unprecedented continuous bad economic conditions. With the end of the prosperity of what was called the “bubble economy” of the late 1980s through the early 1990s, corporations suddenly reduced the scale of their economic operations and unemployment rose. Moreover, in 1995, Japan was hit by a string of incidents that left long-lasting psychological traumas. An earthquake of unprecedented scale hit Kobe, while the Aum Shinrikyo religious group scattered poison throughout the Tokyo subway system, committing indiscriminate mass killing. The number of non-Japanese living in Japan illegally increased sharply. These various social currents were signs that the ways of thinking and acting that the Japanese had believed were perfectly normal could no longer function as in the past. Although the effect of these changes was by no means immediate, slowly and steadily they had a tangible influence on the shape of Japanese cinema.
The recession meant that the big business groups that had set up companies to try their hand at film production withdrew their support for cultural activities. The Seibu trading corporation closed its Saison-affiliated theaters as well as their film production and distribution companies. Even though things were still in progress, Seibu largely abandoned its cultural activities. In 1990, a group of six producers, including Sasaki Shirō, gathered to establish Argo Projects and made it to the point of launching the opening of theaters exclusively dedicated to independent film. This plan, however, was also dogged by management difficulties and the theaters were forced to shutter. The Director’s Company, founded in 1982 by the new directors Kurosawa Kiyoshi, Sōmai Shinji, and Ishii Sōgo, dissolved in 1992. This cast a vague sense of unease over the future of independent film just as it was beginning to flourish.
At Shōchiku, to break through two decades of malaise, the producer Okuyama Kazuyoshi proposed the Cinema Japanesque line in the late 1980s. It was through this reform movement that artists like Kitano Takeshi and Bandō Tamasaburō were able to venture into a new field as filmmakers. Originally, Shōchiku, unlike Tōhō and the other companies, had been a corporation in which it was rare for producers to be more powerful than directors. Thus, it was groundbreaking that as a producer Okuyama was able to push through this plan. He was also quite driven. When he was dissatisfied with director Mayuzumi Rintarō’s work on Rampo, a film he was producing about the mystery writer Edogawa Ranpo, he decided to direct it himself and released an alternate version with the same title. In 1997, Okuyama was suddenly driven out of Shōchiku. Around the time that this was happening, the actor Atsumi Kiyoshi died. Atsumi had played Tora-san for so many years that, without him, it proved to be impossible to continue producing the It’s Tough Being a Man series, which was the backbone of Shōchiku cinema. An opportunity for Shōchiku to revive as a cinematic power was thus snatched away once more.
At the same time, in the 1990s other incidents also pointed to a renewal of Japanese cinema.
Throughout the decade, around two hundred films were produced annually, and by 1996, that number had reached 289. The number of theaters continued the decline that had begun in the 1960s; however, from 1994 onward, the number began to climb, although slowly, and by 1998, there were 1,988 theaters. This rise showed that multiplexes had become an established presence. They are the convenience stores of the film world. Annual viewership reached its lowest point in 1996 with 119,580,000. After that, it climbed slowly, and in 1998, it exceeded 150 million. Although this increase can be attributed partly to the fact that Miyazaki Hayao’s Princess Mononoke was a record-breaking hit in 1997, it also gave distributers hope that good enough movies could attract people to movie theaters again. Of course, these changes are solely at the level of aggregate figures. Note also, however, that after these numbers had declined consistently for more than thirty years since around 1960, such an increase, which took place in spite of an overwhelming recession, provided small signs of recovery.
Another striking characteristic of the 1990s is the fact that for the first time since the 1950s, a succession of Japanese films became the focus of attention at international film festivals. In 1997, in particular, there was a cluster of international prizes for Japanese films. In that year, veteran director Imamura Shōhei took the Grand Prix at the Cannes international film festival with Unagi, and the new director Kawase Naomi received the New Director’s Prize for Suzaku (Moe no suzaku). Kitano Takeshi’s Fireworks (Hana-bi) won the Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival. All at once, Japanese journalists united in using the catchphrase “Renaissance of Japanese cinema.” Setting aside for the moment whether or not we can call the events of a single year a “Renaissance,” such trends had been anticipated for several years. Before that year, a flourishing new generation of independent filmmakers—including Rijū Gō, Iwai Shunji, Hayashi Kaizō, Kore’eda Hirokazu, Hashiguchi Ryōsuke, and Aoyama Shinji—had appeared one after another at international film festivals. In addition, such films as Suo Masayuki’s Shall We Dance? (Shall we dansu, 1996) and Oshii Mamoru’s Ghost in the Shell (Kōkaku kidōtai, 1995) experienced box office success in numerous countries, beginning with the United States. This competition as to who would be at the forefront of new Japanese film helped create the foundation for an increase in global interest in Japanese cinema.
Ghost in the Shell (dir. Oshii Mamoru, 1995).
From the late 1970s through the early 1980s, new waves appeared simultaneously in Hong Kong (Hong Kong New Wave), Taiwan (New Taiwanese Cinema), and mainland China (Fifth-Generation Films). All were instantly acclaimed internationally. By the 1990s, filmmakers in this region overcame differences in their political systems and began producing films cooperatively. A work could have a producer from Taiwan, have a director from Hong Kong, and be filmed on the mainland in the People’s Republic of China. One after another, major works that were produced in this way took prizes at international film festivals. Ironically, many of these films did their postproduction work, such as film development and editing, in Tokyo. In other words, in a reversal of the flow during the days of the Japanese Empire, now the facilities that originally had been constructed for Nikkatsu were being used in the service of East Asian cinema.
These trends in East Asia naturally stimulated young filmmakers in Japan. There had already been Chinese-Japanese coproductions beginning with 1982’s The Go Masters (Mikan no taikyoku), but such films were produced as part of the policies of the Communist Party, and as movies, they were only a hackneyed celebration of friendly relations between Japan and China. In the same way, in the 1930s, there was fanfare over Nazi Germany and Japan cooperating to produce The New Earth. Ultimately, these films were no more than a political tool. A continental divide existed between such efforts and the developments in the 1990s. Japanese actors like Kaneshiro Takeshi and Tomita Yasuko appeared in films in Hong Kong and Taiwan, achieving mass popularity, and Ishida Eri was cast by South Korean director Kim Soo-Yong to star in Revelation of Love (Ai no mokushiroku, 1997). Japan was one step behind the New Waves in the other countries across East Asia, but Japanese cinema was finally beginning to take baby steps in learning how to position itself within a larger East Asian context.
Ōmori Kazuki’s Godzilla (Gojira) at Tōhō and Kaneko Shūsuke’s Gamera at Daiei were remakes that became successful series. In particular, Gamera brought innovation to Japan’s kaijū monster movie for the first time in forty years by not concentrating on those battle scenes between two monsters that look uncomfortably like pro-wrestling bouts and instead never wavering from the point of view of the terror of ordinary Japanese. Although I have mentioned both Tōhō and Daiei individually, the major studios were no longer vertically integrated monoliths with a unified style. From the 1990s on, it is no longer useful to divide the discussion studio by studio. Starting with the films of the 1990s, it is easier to gain the whole picture by grouping films by common theme.
The overwhelming stimulus that came from East Asian cinema, along with the presence of foreigners whose numbers had rapidly increased since the 1980s, gave Japanese film a theme that had not existed previously: the encounter with the ethnic other. That is not to say that all films were successful in dealing with this topic. In About Love, Tokyo (Ai ni tsuite, Tokyo, 1992), Yanagimachi Mitsuo hesitatingly confessed his sympathy for resident Chinese, but this never went beyond the boundaries of the patronizing feelings of a Japanese. In Sleeping Man (Nemuru otoko, 1996), Oguri Kōhei picked out first-rate actors from Indonesia and South Korea without any particular necessity and then placed them in symbolic sets that had no relationship to these performers. Such directors had no connection with the reality of East Asia, but simply adeptly folded “the other” into their existing mind-set, resulting in little more than masturbatory self-indulgence.
Directors of a younger generation, such as Yamamoto Masashi and Tsukamoto Shinya, had extremely radical views of the concept of the other, and fearlessly inscribed this stance on film. In What’s Up Connection (Tenamon’ya konekushon, 1990) and Junk Food (Janku fūdo, 1998), Yamamoto Masashi set Tokyo, Yokoyama, and Hong Kong on exactly the same footing as places that could no longer belong completely to any one nation-state. He made slapstick comedies about groups of the vulnerable people who are forced to wander constantly, but who can upend the efforts of massive authorities to control them. Tsukamoto Shinya went beyond issues of ethnicity, grotesquely depicting his humble view that the contemporary world is one in which humans are forced to face nonhuman directly. In Tetsuo (1989) and Bullet Ballet (1998), an ordinary protagonist, bullied on account of his vulnerability, is suddenly transformed by some event into a metal monster or a gun fanatic and carries out a gigantic and horrifying solitary struggle against what could be called his own monstrous identity. Tsukamoto’s inborn grotesque imagination instantly made him into an international cult star.
Of course, the problem of encountering the other is not necessarily limited to those who came to Japan from the outside. Many people from Japan’s former colonies on the Korean Peninsula and from Cheju Island and their descendants—around six to eight hundred thousand people—reside in Japan. To this day, they have received no compensation or voting rights in the postwar period and must endure all manner of discrimination and disadvantages. The makers of postwar Japanese films, apart from a few brave exceptions like Uchida Tomu, Imamura Shōhei, and Ōshima Nagisa, were utterly silent about these ethnic minorities. It is true that in To’ei’s ninkyō and jitsuroku yakuza films, under the banner of entertainment films, it was possible to introduce elements that dealt passionately with the situation of minorities even if the ill-informed general public remained oblivious to these elements. It was exceedingly rare, however, for any resident South or North Korean to be able to present the conditions within which they were placed as an issue in Japanese cinema. Sai Yōichi, who made idol films at Kadokawa in the 1980s, took up this problem head-on in All Under the Moon (Tsuki wa dotchi ni dete iru, 1994). It is a work both comical and radical about a female cabaret owner who comes to Japan after she escapes the massacre at Cheju Island as a child. The film follows her life in Japan, her relationship with her son, and a Philippine woman her son is courting and who works as a hostess at her bar. In addition, just as his mentor Ōshima Nagisa never forgot the issue of Korea, Sai was dedicated to Okinawa, one of contemporary Japan’s peripheral areas. He shot four films set in Okinawa.
In Japan during the 1980s, the philosophy of postmodernism was initially taken as the latest variant of modernism. The age of the masters like Ozu and Kurosawa was already a thing of the past. After this, what new thing could possibly be created? Perhaps the only possibility was to quote older films or make some kind of pastiche. Among filmmakers obsessed with this problem, a trend was born in which elements assembled from the memory of film history and combined like a mosaic became the basic support system for their own works. The classical example of this is Itami Jūzō, whose works are noted in chapter 10. The definition of film was no longer self-evident, and this trend developed against the background of the complete dissolution of the studio system. Now those who tried to make new films had no choice but to grope about in the darkness for random fragments from the past to find their concept of what a film is.
By the 1990s, the cinephilic sensibility of boastfully speaking about memories of film history as privileged experiences had already withered and died. The overwhelming spread of video transformed these experiences into something common and ordinary, and the ideal of making films that draw on the memories of films a director once saw lost some of its glamor. The passion of cinephilia in the classical sense that had existed in the 1960s was already long gone and all that remained was the snobbism of young people pretending to a nostalgia that was now impossible. Film criticism became a kind of “otaku-ism”1 and lost its way as serious intellectual discourse.
Directors of a new generation had to free themselves from the imprisonment of such film-historical memories that had cast a spell over the films of the 1980s. Suo Masayuki began with Abnormal Family (Hentai kazoku: Aniki no yomesan, 1983), a daring parody in which he recast the characters of an Ozu film as an incestuous family. From the late 1980s through the 1990s, he went on to take up Buddhist temples, sumo, and social dance—themes that appear outmoded to an average young person today—and one after another, Suo turned them into cheerful comedies. Shall We Dance?, in particular, depicted the quiet hopes of people living in a contemporary businessman-oriented society with a light melodramatic touch. In this way, the most ideal form of the shōshimin films made at Shōchiku during the 1930s was reborn sixty years later, far beyond the confines of the studios of Shōchiku.
Oshii Mamoru and Kurosawa Kiyoshi are representatives of the generation who started making movies under the influence of Godard. Oshii, an anime director, is an artist whose essence is in complete contrast with that of his predecessor in anime Miyazaki Hayao. Miyazaki is the embodiment of postwar democracy who makes films to raise the consciousness of ecology, and with his films My Neighbor Totoro (Tonari no Totoro, 1988) and Princess Mononoke (1997), he became a favorite of the Japanese people. By contrast, Oshii featured protagonists who constantly fight against postwar society in sci-fi anime set in the near future like the two-part series Patlabor (1989) and Patlabor II (1993). Ghost in the Shell narrates a moment of crisis in an apocalyptic world in which human beings, through the development of technology, cease to be human beings. Kurosawa opted for a critical reexamination of horror and mystery films that had been made into fixed genres by Hollywood, consciously undertaking the anachronistic work of making program pictures in the 1990s when the studio system had long since collapsed. His horror films Cure (Kyua, 1997) and Charisma (Karisuma, 1999) clearly showed the extent to which the fear of mind control and mass killing from Aum Shinrikyo left a profound trauma in the psyche of the Japanese people.
Cure (dir. Kurosawa Kiyoshi, 1997).
Of course, a few directors also made films by purposefully using nostalgia as a methodology. Ichikawa Jun had a homesickness for the “Good Old Japanese Movies” of Ozu and Kinoshita, and in films like Kaisha Monogatari: Memories of You (1988) and Tokyo Lullaby (Tokyo yakyoku, 1997), Ichikawa continuously depicted the feeling of hopelessness of Tokyo’s middle classes. Bandō Tamasaburō is not only an extraordinary Kabuki actor, but as a film director, he skillfully reenvisioned the shinpa world of Izumi Kyōka in Operating Room (Gekashitsu, 1991) and Yearning (Yume no onna, 1993). From the earliest days of film, the activity of the best onnagata female role specialists of different eras always has been notable, including the director Kinugasa Teinosuke, who was originally an onnagata; the actor Hasegawa Kazuo; and the shinpa star Hanayagi Shōtarō. Tamasaburō is a fitting member of this tradition. Hanayagi also occasionally has appeared as a film actor, including in films directed by Daniel Schmid and Andrzej Wajda.
The appearance of Kitano Takeshi was the event that most directly showed the flourishing of Japanese cinema in the 1990s. He started as a stand-up comic who stirred controversy with his barbed tongue and an antihumanism akin to that of Lenny Bruce. He appeared in Ōshima Nagisa’s Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (Senjō no merii kurisumasu, 1983) as an actor who had already developed a highly idiosyncratic style. Then he debuted as a director with an equally idiosyncratic style in Violent Cop (Sono otoko kyōbō ni tsuki, 1989). Kitano specialized in excising all emotion from violent scenes, coolly portraying the sudden eruption of brutality into the quiet of everyday life. Sonatine (1993) is the film that most forcefully captures this necrophiliac desire, combining it with a child-like sense of play. In the late 1990s, however, bit by bit, emotion began to creep into Kitano’s world, which originally was remarkable for the absence of emotion. Hana-bi and Kikujiro’s Summer (Kikujirō no natsu, 1999) give the impression of being part of a tentative process of trial and error in trying to show human solitude and salvation. Sakamoto Junji’s action films, which appeared after Kitano, are profoundly imbued with a forceful sense of ethnic tensions in Osaka.
Sonatine (dir. Kitano Takeshi, 1993).
Although studio films disappeared in the 1990s, as if to fill the gap, action films produced directly for immediate release on home video rather than for a primary movie theater market were established as a genre. This was Tō’ei’s “V-Cinema” series. These were original films shot with low budgets on quick production schedules, but they ended up producing new directors in the world of action cinema, such as Mochizuki Rokurō and Miike Takashi.
In closing out this chapter, I touch briefly on those directors who debuted in the mid-1990s. Iwai Shunji started as a television director and then shifted to the film world, capturing the attention of young people with his lyrical style. Love Letter (1995) was a deft adaptation of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s La double vie de Veronique (1990) with the Catholicism removed. Swallowtail (1996) caused a stir by focusing on an increasingly multiethnic Tokyo in which most of the main characters speak Chinese. This was little more than a superficial feature, however, and he adroitly avoided any serious examination of the concept of “Japan,” unlike the sustained questioning of Yamamoto Masashi and Zeze Takahisa. Kore’eda Hirokazu tried to cast a new light on Japanese views of life and death with his films Maboroshi (Maboroshi no hikari, 1995) and Afterlife (Wandafuru raifu, 1999). It remains unclear at this point whether this will end up either as an internalized form of Orientalism or as the crystallization of metaphysical searching along the lines of South Korea’s Bae Yong-Kyun.
With Suzaku (Moe no suzaku, 1996), Kawase Naomi became the youngest director to be celebrated internationally. Showing none of the interest in contesting the state or history that drove directors like Ogawa Shinsuke and Tsuchimoto Noriaki, Kawase aims instead at making movies by limiting her focus to the issue of communication with those in her immediate surroundings. What Iwai, Kore’eda, and Kawase share is an aversion to bombast, and with a minimalist philosophy they protect—if not necessarily establish—their own worlds. They were fortunate to be recognized internationally as soon as they debuted, a first in the history of Japanese cinema.