Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [144]
In any case, the youth fashion does underscore the extreme groupism of the young in Japan. Seventeen-year-old girls set the trend. «It's not how much they spend,» says Ogino Yoshiyuki, editor of a teen magazine, «it's that they all buy the same things. So if someone has a $10 product, they can sell lots of them.» Tim Larimer writes: «If an item is hot, like pagers – they're called pocket bells in Japan – a manufacturer can get almost 100% market penetration and fast. 'If it is really powerful, it can take less than a week,' says Ogino. Once 5% of the teen girl population takes a liking to something, he says, 60% will join the bandwagon within a month. A few weeks later, everybody will be on board. The hard part is predicting what the famously fickle teenage girls will next anoint as kawaii!'»
There is no better mirror of a nation's life than its movies, and Japan's cinema perfectly reflects the nation's modern cultural malaise, for it is a tale of nearly unbroken decline over three decades. Once boasting masters such as Kurosawa Akira and Ozu Yasujiro, Japan has recently produced only a few films of moderate world success. The number of good films is so low that at the 1994 Kyoto International Film Festival the usual Japan Film Today program was replaced by a retrospective of older films – the most recent from 1964. «Japanese audiences see Japanese art films as introverted, gloomy, and sentimental, and Japanese entertainment films as trash,» says Okuyama Kazuyoshi, a former vice president of Shochiku, Japan's largest film producer. «They've basically given up on them.»
Japanese cinema's golden age, from the 1950s through the early 1970s, coincided with the period of highest economic growth. In 1960, 545 domestic films captured almost four-fifths of the market. Admissions reached a billion people at 7,457 theaters. Since then, however, the industry has shrunk astonishingly, losing as much in quantity as in quality. In 1993, a mere 238 domestic films caught less than a 40 percent share. In 1996, admissions were 120 million people at 1,828 theaters. In other words, the number of films dropped to half, theaters declined to one-fourth, and admissions collapsed to one-eighth of earlier totals. Of this drastically shriveled market, foreign films captured a 72.4 percent share in 1998. In the past forty years, Japanese film has so thoroughly lost its audience that it exists more as a symbolic industry than as a real one.
Today, Kurosawa's and Ozu's films from the 1950s and 1960s stand as enduring masterpieces, exerting an incalculable influence on American and European directors. But, unfortunately, cinema followed a pattern similar to what we have seen in other areas of Japanese life: in the early 1970s, trouble set in, and the wind mysteriously went out of the sails. Studios found a way to take it easy by producing remakes of such comedies as Otoko wa tsurai yo, known for its star, the lovable vagabond Tora-san – of which approximately two were produced every year since 1969. In 1996, Otoko wa tsurai yo was showing in its forty-eighth episode, but then Tora-san died and everyone thought the series would finally be laid to rest. By that time, profits from Otoko wa tsurai yo accounted, by some calculations, for more than half of Shochiku's annual movie income. Even though Tora-san s audiences had been dwindling every year, and the longtime star was dead, Shochiku couldn't stop. That year, it announced that a replacement had been found and the series would go on as before – albeit under a different name. Only with the collapse of Shochiku as a movie producer, which followed soon afterward, did the series finally come to an end.
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