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By Root 1106 0

the late 1980s, there was a brief resurgence in Japanese cinema with the director Itami Juzo's off-beat comedies, notably the 1986 film Tampopo. Twelve years later, in 1997, Suo Masayuki's Shall We Dance? achieved some success in the United States, yet in between there were very few films that have been popular at home or abroad. Curiously, like the decline in the Japanese environment and the decay of its old cities, the collapse of Japanese cinema has gone nearly unnoticed abroad. In general, there is a persistent time lag in the world's perception of Japan. In the mid-1970s, American industry failed to perceive quality in Japanese cars, steel, and electronics, even though companies such as Honda and Sony had established themselves as powerful competitors since the early 1960s. Michael Crichton's 1992 novel Rising Sun (filmed in 1993) depicted an all-powerful Japan about to gobble up a defenseless America – by which time the Bubble was burst and Japan was headed into a decade of stagnation and retreat from world financial markets.

For manufacturers the gap was about ten years; for Crichton it was only three years; but for foreign filmgoers the gap stretches back decades. Nostalgia for a great aesthetic era has made time stop: After all, Kurosawa's and Ozu's great films, far from being «contemporary cinema,» as they are usually portrayed, go back nearly half a century; they belong to the vintage of The King and I and Lawrence of Arabia. When it comes to more recent productions, what gets shown abroad is highly selective. Foreign art houses screen only the best of Japan's independent filmmakers, and this small but talented group saw a small renaissance in the 1990s. Beat Takeshi's Hana-bi and Imamura Shohei's Unagi received critical acclaim abroad, Unagi as co-winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1997 and Hana-bi as winner of the Golden Lion at the 1997 Venice Film Festival.

But independent art films do not a cinema industry make. While Japanophiles at international filmfests are enthusiastic about pictures the Japanese audiences have shunned-or never heard of--the domestic industry has continued its downward slide. A big percentage of movies produced in Japan today are porno flicks (as much as 50 percent in the early 1990s, somewhat lower today, since porno is moving to television, depriving filmmakers of even this market), and a high proportion of the rest are made for children. In the summer of 1998, the top domestic film was Pokemon, aimed at six-to-ten-year-old boys. It was the sixth-highest-grossing Japanese film ever, and in November 1999 a sequel grabbed the top of the charts in the United States, grossing $52 million in its first week-success like this among ten-year-olds blows adult art-house favorites like Hana-bi, Unagi, Tampopo, Shall We Dance?, and the rest right out of the water.

To give Japanese cinema its due, box-office success is a contentious issue among film lovers. Cinema critic Donald Richie comments, «World success is based on whether the pictures sell themselves or not. They are in the category of products – judged not by how good they are but by whether they sell. Since Japan's independent films are not intended for that, to judge them by this standard is a false equation. Every year there are a few good films that reflect Japanese realities, unlike the others that reflect no such thing, and a small but highly articulate audience goes to see those.» This brings us to a core question: What constitutes «art» in film? An argument could be made that art lies in achieving creativity within the constraints of an art form: hence it's essential to a sonnet that it have fourteen lines, to a haiku that it have seventeen syllables. In the case of cinema, which was from its very inception a popular art, one of the necessary constraints would seem to be that it appeal to the public. From this point of view, winning the hearts and minds of viewers is not an ancillary issue; it's central. When a director creates a film that entertains and at the same time establishes his unique aesthetic viewpoint, he has created