The 2000s was an era of chaos. The malaise of Japanese society continued, with the economy unable to recover and the continuing failure to get to the heart of the problems stemming from the Aum Shinrikyo events. Just as it became clear that North Korea had been abducting Japanese citizens for many years, the prime minister decided to visit Yasukuni Shrine, considered by many to be a symbol of Japanese expansion into Asia, deepening the diplomatic isolation between Japan and other East Asian nations. The films that most directly characterize this decade are Higuchi Shinji’s 2006 remake of Moritani Shirō’s 1973 hit film Japan Sinks (Nihon chinbotsu) and Kawasaki Minoru’s 2006 parody of it, Everything but Japan Sinks (Nihon igai zenbu chinbotsu). The prediction of Japan sinking could be said to have finally came true on March 11, 2011, with the Great Eastern Japan Earthquake. This chapter will take up the eleven years leading up to this event.
By the 2000s, it was no longer possible for a single film critic to have a total view of all the Japanese films of that time, and film criticism no longer served as a standard for viewers to choose what films to watch. All that was left were television ads, chanted over and over into its audiences’ ears. Although film studies began to be taught in Japanese universities, scholars were not involved with actual film production. Journalistic criticism based on French-style auteurism disappeared, leaving almost no trace. Writing about cinema went in two directions equally unrelated to true criticism: it became either anonymous childish personal reactions to a film or an effort to compile great masses of information about film in databases. No film research could overcome such a degraded state of affairs. It is true that anyone with an internet connection could post their thoughts on film, but now no one was paying attention.
With developments in media and technology, the ways that ordinary people can access film have changed with increasing rapidity over the past ten years. From movie theaters to video, and then DVD and Blu-ray, and further, to internet downloads, the content that once was called “a film” has gone through a dizzying series of changes in media, and the act of watching a film has thus lost its weight and the feeling of an occasion removed from ordinary daily life. Without regard for national borders, the worldwide movement of homogenization called globalization has stolen away any form of refuge from people everywhere. Despite these international developments, in Japan, out-of-date comedies like My Darling Is a Foreigner (Daarin wa gaikokujin, dir. Ue Kazuaki, 2010) become big hits as though nothing had changed. Averting its eyes from the theme of “what is a Japanese person?,” Japanese cinema has sunk into one-off comedies and cynicism. As a result, it keeps losing ground. It cannot compete with Korean cinema, which is firmly based on a fierce concern for the questions of “what is a Korean person?” and “what is Korean history?” Japanese cinema only speaks Japanese and is aimed at a solely Japanese audience. It stubbornly resists all change in this insular mentality.
The universalization of digital cinema has made it inaccurate to call a work of cinema by its once-standard designation of “film.” Whether it is on videotape or it is considered to be “data” or “content,” what has emerged is something utterly different from the films that had been produced over the past 110 years. YouTube and Nico-Nico Dōga have reduced movie theaters to little more than empty ruins. Now that backgrounds and composition can be achieved with computer-generated (CG) compositing, the artistic sense and passion of seasoned art directors is no longer considered necessary, making Japanese cinema visually flat and flavorless.
Strangely, in terms of the sheer number of films produced, this period witnessed a bubble phenomenon. Although that number had dropped to the two hundreds at the end of the twentieth century, it began to rise again in the 2000s little by little, and in 2006, 417 films were released in theaters. If we were to add to this number low-budget video works that did not pass through Eirin—Japanese cinema’s self-regulating agency—the number of Japanese films would easily be at least seven hundred. When we analyze audience preferences, we see that the popularity of Western films declined, while the percentage of those watching Japanese films rose. In the year 2002, the share of Japanese films reached its historic nadir at 27 percent, and on top of this, the top-five films were all children’s films. Japanese films began to gain ground gradually, however, and in 2006, their box office profits topped that of Western films for the first time in twenty-one years. But a shadow loomed over this phenomenon of a “Falling West, Rising Japan” because it accompanied the shuttering of mini-theaters for Western art-house films and a slump in Hollywood.
Toward the end of the 2000s, Tōhō was far in the lead in terms of box office returns, with more than double the revenue of Tōei and Shōchiku combined. Tōhō’s hit strategy was called the “production committee” method. Production decisions were made with an eye toward marketing the films and were made by a committee with television stations and advertising companies at their core. The publishers of the original novels were also involved. Other film production companies that had been making all the production decisions on their own came to follow Tōhō’s multifaceted market strategy. As a result, the market was dominated by films that were finely calibrated to avoid all criticism and to fill all possible needs to capture as big an audience as possible. The participation of television broadcasters meant the appearance of television actors and celebrities in the movies and, in turn, the performers in the movies could appear as guests on television programs, raising the visibility of cinema as a whole. In return, however, works all started to look the same with the mass production of cheap melodramas characterized by “pure love” and what was purported to be “deep emotion.”
In terms of exhibition conditions, multiplexes—the convenience stores of the film world—continued to proliferate. Movies were increasingly shot and projected digitally. In 2006, there were more than three thousand screens, and it almost looked like a return to the 1970s. Because the majority of multiplexes were set up only for digital projection, audiences had fewer opportunities to encounter older works that were available only on film.
Mini-theaters died off. Theaters specializing in classic films struggled. Film audiences aged. The magazine Pia, first published in 1972 and long the central source of information on films, theater, and other forms of performance, ceased publication in 2011. All of these phenomena came at the same time, demonstrating in a striking manner just how removed cinema had become from the lives of many young people. People have become accustomed to watching DVDs on tiny screens in the cramped confines of their homes, and a new generation lost the experience of going to a theater to see a movie. At the same time, however, increasing numbers of film commissions help support the regional production of films, producing some striking works centered in the outlying regions of Japan.
Nostalgia was the basis of the appeal of a few exceptional works in the 1990s and, in the 2000s, it gave birth to sequels that became commercial hits. Always: Sunset on Third Street (Always: Sanchōme no yūhi, dir. Yamazaki Takashi, 2005) and Tokyo Tower: Mom and Me, and Sometimes Dad (Tokyo tower: Okan to boku to tokidoki oton, dir. Matsuoka Jōji 2007) were both melodramas that looked nostalgically at Tokyo during the era just before the period of high economic growth, using CG compositing to recreate the look of that era. It is easy to try to aestheticize the past, and in these films, all the social contradictions and political struggles that existed during the Showa era were carefully eliminated. After the collapse of the bubble economy and with a Japanese society perpetually stuck in a deep malaise, many Japanese people welcomed this regressive trend. Yukisada Isao’s film Center of the World: Crying Out Love (Sekai no chūshin de, ai o sakebu, 2004), while covering a shorter time period by comparison, joined these other works in singing the praises of the feelings of loss and mourning, which it depicted as something pure. In tandem with the establishment of multiplexes in every last corner of the country, love stories and stories about young girls aimed largely at women viewers flourished, including Be with You (Ima, ai ni yukimasu, dir. Doi Nobuhiro, 2004) and NANA (dir. Ōtani Kentarō, 2005). Such films avoided confronting the topic of national self-identity directly; their reliance on emotional appeal contrasted with South Korean cinema during the same period. Although the films of the South Korean New Wave present themselves as entertainment, they sharply pose questions of national identity and what it means to be South Korean.
Melodramatic films often aim to seal up and cover history, but at the same time, melodrama sometimes can aim to reconstruct the past as an actual time continuous with the present. Although few in number, some films had this goal. By focusing on youths at a Korean school who spend all their time fighting, and a young woman who can make her debut as an actress only by hiding her zainichi Korean identity, the films Break Through! (Pacchigi, 2004) and Pacchigi: Love and Peace (2007), directed by Izutsu Kazuyuki and produced by Lee Bong Ou, attempted to foreground the existence of minorities who had been forced to live at the edges of postwar Japanese society. After that, Lee Sang-il directed and produced Hula Girls (Fura gāru, 2006), which was set in a mining town in Fukushima after the mine has closed. The narrative revolves around attempts to revitalize the town through Hawaiian hula dance.
Until recently, Japanese cinema has seen few female directors of feature films. Two examples are Sakane Tazuko, a one-time assistant to Mizoguchi Kenji who directed A Kimono for the New Year (Hatsu sugata, 1936), and Tanaka Kinuyo, who directed six films during the 1950s and 1960s following her long career as an actress. But after them, there were no successors. Depressingly, time and time again a well-known actress would direct a film, but the demand for her to show “femininity” would be so excessive that she would end up never making a film again. Japanese women filmmakers bear the burden of being women, and because they are expected to be feminine and become symbols of femininity, they give up.
The sole exception to this is in the world of Pink Films, which are forced to have low budgets and short production schedules. There, from the 1970s to the present, Hamano Sachi has directed more than three hundred films. By the 1980s, her artistic and technical skills made her into an unshakable part of the adult film world. In the films In Search of a Woman Writer: Wandering the World of the Seventh Sense (Dai nana kankai hōkō: Osaki Midori o sagashite, 1999) and Cricket Girl (Kōrogi Jō, 2006), she plunged into the imaginative world of the prewar woman novelist Osaki Midori. Women critics, however, held strong prejudices against Pink Films from the beginning, and it took an extremely long time for her cinematic passion to be recognized as legitimate.
From around the time that Kawase Naomi won the new director’s prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1997, the situation for women started to change little by little. One after another, women in their twenties and thirties who until then had not particularly been film fanatics, began to shoot films. This trend became increasingly strong from the beginning of the 2000s, with many female directors debuting in 2003 and 2004. Of course, they cannot be referred to simply as “women directors” as with Sakane and Tanaka in a previous age. This new generation of female directors feels no special responsibility or need to maintain an image just because they are women, but they also do not have any of the excessive attachment to film felt by the young male film enthusiasts of a previous generation. They give the strong impression that they simply happened to pick up the medium of film as the tool most useful for self-expression because it was nearest at hand. Their idols as female directors were neither Reifenstahl nor Varda. The director these women admired the most was Sofia Coppola.
In Dogs and Cats (Inu neko, 2004), Iguchi Nami turns her attention to the overlapping animosity and intimacy in the relationship between two women who live together and constantly fight like cats and dogs over their male friends. Tadano Miako, in Three Years Pregnancy (Sannen migomoru, 2005), depicts a pregnant woman who steadily watches as her husband cheats on her and waits for the birth of her child. Three years pass without the baby being born. Ogigami Naoko, in Kamome Diner (Kamome shokudō, 2005), tells the story of a Japanese woman who goes alone to Helsinki and opens a cafeteria that becomes a place for women to gather. Through this woman’s story, she depicts the ways in which woman can care psychologically for one another. One common feature of the worlds created by these directors is that all of them are small worlds supported by a casual intimacy and are separate from larger society. This representation of a world of intimacy among women leaves little room for the male gaze as the “other” to enter. The technical staff of many of these works include women, while viewers also are mostly women.
Ninagawa Mika invented a fictional space with a sense of kitsch, portraying a brothel during the Edo period through the distorting glass of a fishbowl in her work, Sakuran (the title literally means “derangement,” 2007). She followed this with Helter Skelter (2012), which pursues this sense of kitsch to the point at which it gives off the grotesque stench of rot. Furthermore, Yoshiyuki Yumi took up beauty contests with Miss Peach: Peachy Sweetness Huge Breasts (Misu pi–chi kyonyū wa momo no amami, 2005), a cheerful, erotic comedy, which began her series of films about huge breasts.
Among this multitude of women filmmakers, one particularly exceptional case stands out: Nishikawa Miwa. In Wild Berries (Hebi ichigo, 2003), she depicts an urge to kill that arises while caring for the elderly, and in Sway (Yureru, 2006), she demonstrates her writing and directing talents by taking up a challenging narrative of two brothers who fight over the same girlfriend and reconcile when the older brother returns from prison after serving a sentence for murder. In Dear Doctor (2009), Nishikawa tells the story of a phony doctor who settles in a village in a depopulated area with no real doctors, and the exchanges he has with the elderly villagers who adore him. Her fierce attitude, which aims to utterly affirm humanity in its entirety—with all its petty evils, vanity, and cowardice—make Nishikawa’s works truly compelling.
The works left by women directors as of the current moment include a mixture of good and bad, but this will likely be sorted out over time. Here, I consider the reason for the appearance of so many women directors during the 2000s. Incidentally, exactly the same phenomenon occurred in South Korea during this period.
The first reason is rooted in the boom in mini-theaters during the 1990s, in which cinema left a strong impression on female viewers as a form of self-expression. In contrast to men who brought home DVDs, women discovered the pleasure of going to movie theaters and enjoying movies there by themselves. Second, as if to answer their desire for self-expression, film schools and organizations like the Pia Film Festival were actively seeking new talent. Third, access to photography and editing equipment became almost unbelievably easier than it was before. Camera equipment also became much lighter, and digitalization progressed within film production. Just by combining high-definition photography and editing through personal computers, anyone could easily produce films on their own. Fourth, and most important, the male-centered system of film production that had been in place for so long gradually but unmistakably was breaking down. Thus, it was in the 2000s that an environment was built little by little in which young women could easily start directing films without having to go through the apprenticeship of first being an assistant director.
The strong influence of Kabuki and storytelling arts like rakugo on film has meant that from the prewar period, ghost stories and horror stories have existed as a distinct genre in Japanese cinema. The horror films that started in the 1990s, and reached maturity in the 2000s, created a new territory different from the traditional psychological karma and moral consciousness that shaped earlier works. These came to be known as “J-Horror.”
J-Horror was initially produced under extremely low budgets as either video works aimed directly at the rental market—not slated to open in theaters—or as tales of the bizarre that would appear only on regional television stations. This movement was spearheaded by True Horror Stories (Honto ni atta kowai hanashi, 1992). Eventually, these films made their way to the world of regular movie theaters, creating their own particular genre. They were remade by South Korea and Hollywood and have come to exert a significant influence across a vast region, including Southeast Asia. Dilapidated factories. Dark waterfronts. School bathrooms and other marginal spaces. Memories buried in sealed-off places. Madness and rage that move like a disease from one person to the next without regard for kinship or social status. J-Horror repeats these tropes persistently and loves to reveal the cracks that erupt suddenly in places that are extensions of everyday life.
This expansion of the horror genre was carried out by the producer Ichise Takashige and scenarists Konaka Chiaki and Takahashi Hiroshi. They wanted to eliminate the standard image of monstrous ghosts appearing in exaggeratedly horrific settings. As a result, they focused instead on the problem of how to make the natural human body seem inhuman and to express this visually. Without relying on gruesome make-up effects or editing tricks, they presented the sheer physical existence of human beings as an event of inescapable horror. Naturally, ghosts have no human interiority that ordinary people could understand. Their actions are limited entirely to simply existing.
I would like to discuss a few representative filmmakers and works. Nakata Hideo depicted a ghost who appears from an undeveloped canister of film discovered in a film studio in Don’t Look Up (Joyūrei, 1996), and in Ringu (1998), he introduced a videocassette that kills anyone who watches it. Then Dark Water (Honogurai mizu no soko kara, 2001) further developed these themes. What each of these works share is the idea of ghosts emerging from inside technical image media. Nakata is a member of the last generation to learn through the studio system, so for him, Don’t Look Up provides an elegy to the studios, while Ringu offers a critique of human-centric assumption that the camera always operates according to the intentions of the photographer. Thus, a ghost whose image is unexpectedly captured on film crawls out of the television tube and attacks the person viewing the screen.
Kurosawa Kiyoshi, who once declared that “all cinema is horror cinema,”1 tried to create and maintain a subtle distinction from the suspense and sense of mystery of usual horror cinema in the films Doppelgänger (2003) and Retribution (Sakebi, 2006). His critical view of existing genres at times turned the works into comedies in the guise of horror films.
Shimizu Takashi, who belonged to the second generation of J-Horror, brought innovation to the genre by completely changing the grammar that had been built up by his predecessors. In Ju-On: The Grudge (Juon gekijōban, 2003), frightening ghosts never appear, despite this being a haunted house movie. Spectators are not frightened by ghosts; rather, they feel fear when they see the fear on the faces of the human characters in the film who witness a ghost near them. Shimizu casually deploys forbidden moves—taking the perspective of ghosts, running the camera from over their shoulders. In The Stranger from Afar (Marebito, 2004), a man who always carries a camera with him wants to see the greatest fear experienced by a human being, which is the moment before committing suicide. After repeated adventures in the underground world, he asks a young girl who appears out of the depths of his own psychology to film the moment of his death. The philosophy running consistently through this film is that a person’s subjective self is no more than a phenomenon that comes into being only through the mediation of multiple photographic images.
When we compare these films with those of Hollywood or Southeast Asia, the idiosyncratic position of J-Horror is evident. They are made with no specific religious ideology like Christianity or Buddhism in the background, and they downplay scenes of cruelty and explicitness as much as possible. There is nothing farther from J-Horror than a series of terrified screams. What is considered most important in editing the film is the “space” (ma) that is created in the gaps between sound effects and physical sounds, and this is not totally unrelated to the Japanese aesthetic sensibility of sound, from Noh drama to the music of Takemitsu Tōru. In this way, even in the genre of horror, which is generally looked down upon, Japanese cinema could come to embody the unique qualities of Japanese culture.
Finally, I introduce the experiments of several filmmakers who have looked sharply at the contradictions left behind in postwar Japanese society. In Blood and Bones (Chi to hone, 2004), Sai Yōichi depicts the brutally violent love–hate relationship between a father and son within the setting of a household of Korean laborers who emigrated from Cheju Island to Osaka. Miike Takashi, in Ley Lines (Nihon kuro shakai, 1999) and The Hazard City (Hyōryūgai, 2000), depicted Chinese war orphans and foreign laborers in a picaresque manner as they eke out a living on the bottom of Japanese society. With Rainy Dog (Gokudō kuro shakai, 1997), and The Guys from Paradise (Tengoku kara kita otoko tachi, 2001), he crosses over blithely to Southeast Asia, depicting a drama of men who relentlessly mock Japan. In addition, Zeze Takahisa, in the four-and-a-half-hour Heaven’s Story (2010), presented a narrative of Japanese people who no longer have a concept of hometown, playing out repeated cycles of animosity and vengeance within a dilapidated danchi apartment complex. These directors, who from the 1980s through the 1990s made innumerable idol films, Pink Films, and V-Cinema (a straight-to-video genre), all started making films depicting the underbelly of postwar history when we entered the twenty-first century. They are also all enormously productive.
Among these films, however, the most idiosyncratic of all was Akame 48 Waterfalls (Akame shijūya taki shinjū misui, 2003), directed by Arato Genjirō, who produced Suzuki Seijun’s late films. This solid film, shot as if to burst the bubble of frivolous cinema, perfectly captures the intense nihilism and passion that is carried by those at the bottom of society, as if it were a destiny. It was a virtual parade of the kind of awful aspects of society from which Japanese people have averted their eyes since the late 1960s.
As far as the older generation goes, Shindō Kaneto and Kuroki Kazuo presented numerous films in their late years as if trying to use up all their remaining energy. The majority of these films were about the wartime experiences of the common people. In Owl (Fukurō, 2003) and A Postcard (Ichimai no hagaki, 2011), Shindō directed humorous dramas of fate about returnees from Manchuria and their incidents of prostitution, swindles, murder, and draft orders. The characters he depicts are all antinationalist and against state power. In contrast, through the three-part series A Boy’s Summer in 1945 (Utsukushii natsu kirishima, 2002), The Face of Jizō (Chichi to kuraseba, 2004), and The Blossoming of Etsuko Kamiya (Kamiya Etsuko no seishun, 2006), Kuroki depicted the tidy and frugal everyday lives of the Japanese people in the desperate final days of the war and, through these films, searched for a way to calm the spirits of these people. Yoshida Yoshishige, in Women in the Mirror (Kagami no onnatachi, 2002), depicted in a tragic style a narrative of confession and denial among three generations of women who were victims of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima.
Another characteristic of Japanese cinema in the 2000s was that it showed the will to directly face and examine the political upheavals that began in 1968. Adachi Masao left the world of Japanese film in the 1970s and was involved in the making of newsreels for the liberation of Palestinian refugees. When he returned to Japan in the 2000s, Adachi marked his return to the film world with Terrorist (Yūheisha, 2006), a prison film based on the life of Okamoto Kōzō, a former member of the Japanese Red Army. One person who offered a rereading of history on a truly grand scale during this period was Adachi’s friend, Wakamatsu Kōji. Within the string of works he made between United Red Army (Jitsuroku rengō sekigun: Asama sansō e no michi, 2007) and 11.25: The Day He Chose His Own Fate (11/25: Jiketsu no hi: Mishima Yukio to wakamonotachi, 2011), Wakamatsu presented both the lynching murders of the Red Army in the Mt. Asama lodge incident and Mishima Yukio’s suicide by seppuku as deaths produced within homosocial communities. These films are an indictment of society today, which suppresses discussion of the thoughts and intention of the people involved in these incidents.
Here, I take up some of the directors who are the backbone of cinema and who left astonishing work in the 2000s. Ishii Takashi accelerated more and more the fetishism around demonic women in his films Flower and Snake (Hana to hebi, 2003) and A Night in Nude: Salvation (Nūdo no yoru: Ai wa oshiminaku ubau, 2010). With Poison Insect (Gaichū, 2002) and Canary (Kanaria, 2004), Shiota Akihiko took up the issue of the kind of vulnerability that seems to invite attack, focusing on the politics that arise among children. Kore’eda Hirokazu seems to change style and genre with every film. As though filled with the ambition of answering the question of what cinema is, he made Nobody Knows (Dare mo shiranai, 2004), which shows the ways children struggle to survive after the collapse of their family, and Air Doll (Kūki ningyō, 2009), which by contrast was a farce in which an inflatable sex-doll comes to life. Aoyama Shinji in Eureka (2000) and Eli Eli Lema Sabachthani (2005) confronted the issue of whether it was truly possible for Japanese who are in a state of perpetual wandering to have some kind of internal resurrection. Among these filmmakers, the person who staged the most boisterous scenes, presenting gleeful depictions of human relationships as they seep into petty desires, was the director Sono Sion in works, such as Love Exposure (Ai no mukidashi, 2008) and Noriko’s Dinner Table (Noriko no shokutaku, 2005).
Finally, I discuss the activities of Satō Makoto and Mori Tatsuya in the sphere of documentary films, which developed a great deal in the 1990s. In Memories of Agano (Aga no kioku, 2004), the sequel to Living on the River Agano (Aga ni ikiru, 1992), Satō returned ten years later to film the residents who live along the Agano River. He then shot Out of Place: Memories of Edward Said (2005), following the path of this contemporary Palestinian intellectual. Mori made A (1998) and A2 (2001), focusing on one of the important individuals in Aum Shinrikyo. These works drew attention for sharply interrogating the ethical principles of documentary cinema, including the use of film images as legal testimony, the myth of the neutral director, film censorship, and disruptive incidents at screenings. Mori consistently causes scandals and considers himself to be the bad boy of the documentary world. Note here that Li Ying, who had come from China, infuriated some Japanese nationalists with his film Yasukuni (2007).