Dogs and Demons_ Tales From the Dark Side of Japan - Kerr [148]
Cinema provides a superb window into Japan's modern troubles, because all the patterns that afflict other aspects of national life come together here. One is monopoly. Three large companies-Toho, Toei, and Shochiku-have controlled most of the theaters and monopolized the business. They are shackled by the same seniority system that rules the rest of corporate Japan, with the result that producers prefer to work only in-house or with established directors with whom they have long-standing ties. In contrast to the frenzied telephone calling and «pitching» of new ideas that goes on in Hollywood, a deathly calm rules in Japan's studio offices.
We can sense the dead hand of bureaucracy weighing upon cinema: for decades, zoning rules made it hard to build theaters in suburbs and newly grown «bed-towns.» Cinemas did not benefit any branch of officialdom-so they haven't been built. In contrast, pachinko is a huge source of income for the police, whose retired officers run pachinko associations. (The police also profit massively from prepaid pachinko cards through their ownership in the card finance companies.) Therefore every tiny village and hamlet must raise a pachinko parlor.
Monopoly bred boredom among the public, and this actually had some good results in that the Big Three ceased to rely on their own products and started to buy independent films and put their own logos on them. This has been one way that independents break through. The other way is to find motion picture houses that are unaffiliated, and quietly these are increasing. After 1996 the number of movie theaters began to grow, for the first time in half a century, as American-style multiplexes entered big-city suburbs. Most of these, however, have foreign backing, such as Warner Bros., so it remains to be seen what these new theaters will do for the domestic industry.
By the end of the century, the Big Three were quietly running out of money. The budgets of Japanese films ran to a few million dollars at most, a scale of magnitude smaller than Hollywood's. In 1997, Shochiku reached the point where annual receipts from its entire movie division totaled only ¥3.4 billion-approximately $30 million, which would hardly produce one modest Hollywood feature. By 2000, Shochiku had given up: it sold its famous studio complex at Ofuna, fired most of its production staff, and retired from filmmaking, keeping only its distribution licenses. The Big Three had become the Big Two. As funds dried up, technological advance in film simply ceased. There were few inventive minds to spur innovation and no money to pay for it.
In 1995, I helped prepare the English subtitles for a Shochiku film, and I visited the famous Nikkatsu studios where so many of Japan's postwar films have been produced. I felt I'd stepped into a time tunnel: machinery decades old, cameramen standing on old orange crates to get height, piles of wires snaking over earthen floors, almost no computerization, no advanced lighting techniques – all in an aluminum Quonset hut.
There are other problems besides lack of money and outmoded technology, notably the degraded environment. The cities and countryside are so changed that it is difficult to produce a film with a beautiful backdrop, which Kurosawa complained about in his last days. When he directed the van Gogh episode in his Dreams (1990), he had to scour the entire country to find a site with no modern buildings or electric pylons where he could reproduce a French cornfield. Most other directors don't have the time, the budgets, or the obsessive perfectionism of Kurosawa, so they make do with painted backdrops, close-ups of leaves and running water, well-manicured temple and shrine grounds – hence the stilted, artificial quality of most recent Japanese films that take place in a natural setting.
While Japanese film was slowly sinking into quicksand, the rest of the world