Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [146]
Japanese film was not always unpopular. Kurosawa's Seven Samurai was one of the box-office successes of all time when it was released in 1956. This brings us back to «the image of a wilted peony in a bamboo vase, unable to draw water up her stem.» Every year, according to Richie, out of about 250 films, there are 10 to 12 really good ones. But by and large the public avoids them. Obviously there should be room in cinematic culture for small experimental or independent films that appeal to a specialist audience. Nevertheless, a successful film industry requires that some films of quality make money. Japan is not unique in that it produces a number of good independent or experimental films every year – practically every country in the world does so, including America despite Hollywood, India despite Bollywood, and Hong Kong despite kung fu. One could say that Japan is lacking the interface between quality film and the marketplace. The quality is there, but the skills of presenting that quality to the public in an entertaining and appealing way are missing.
Commercial success is important for another reason, which is that for most film industries, even in the best of times, the more experimental films survive as a luxury: the existence of a large moviegoing audience means that there can be art houses that show offbeat films and small groups of dedicated fans who see them. A successful film industry can afford offbeat productions. Richie notes, «Nowadays an Ozu or a Kurosawa wouldn't be allowed to make films because the film studios couldn't get their money back.» Thus a decline in the box office has eventually affected quality. Says Richie, «Thirty years ago, I was on a committee to choose the best Japanese films, and it was an embarrassment, there were so many of them. Now it's equally embarrassing because there are so few. With the failure of films to make money, producers tightened the moneybags. Only company hacks were allowed to produce films, because they followed the formulas.»
How is it that the nation which gave the world Kurosawa is now producing Pokemon and not much more? It has partly to do with the «autopilot» syndrome we have met in other fields, a dependence on patterns set in the 1960s and never revised. Shochiku became so addicted to the Otoko wa tsurai yo series that it couldn't stop making these movies even when the star died-and its dependence on the income from the series was so severe that when the series finally ended, Shochiku itself died. Another reason-perhaps the most important one-was the abandonment of the adult market in favor of children. In the 1980s, «studios devoted themselves instead to churning out light entertainment for the mass teenage audience,» the film critic Nagasaka Toshihisa says. As cinema expert Mark Schilling observes, «Mainstream Japanese cinema, which used to mean classics like Kurosawa's Shichinin no Samurai (Seven Samurai, 1954), and Ozu's Tokyo Monogatari (Tokyo Story, 1953), is now primarily entertainment for children on school holidays.»
Godzilla is worth looking at because it epitomizes this history. The monster Godzilla debuted in 1954, and by the end of the 1990s, he had appeared in more than twenty films. In the West, Godzilla is something of a joke, synonymous with campy low-tech effects, but standards in Japan are now so low that critics polled at the prestigious bimonthly Kinema Junpo (Cinema Journal) voted it one of the twenty best Japanese films ever made. Each Godzilla film since 1989 has been among the top five money earners of the year for Toho, the company that produces them; Godzilla vs. Destroyer was the top-grossing movie of 1996.
It is not only in Godzilla and Otoko wa tsurai yo that old themes are repeated endlessly. Ekimae (In Front of the Station) had twenty-four installments from 1958 to 1969; Shacho (Company President) had forty remakes between 1956 and 1971. And there are numerous others, including the popular new comedy series Tsuri Baka Nisshi (Idiot Fisherman Diary),