Contemporary Japanese Cinema Since Hana-Bi (2025)

who I am proud and thankful to call my friends as well as (inspirational) co-workers and who have always been more than helpful and supportive. I must also mention and thank Steve Marsh, my partner in (cinema-going) crime for almost a lifetime and someone with whom I have spent literally countless hours, days, weeks and more discussing films and filmmakers, always illuminating, engaging and entertainingly so. Thanks and gratitude to Tom Mes at MidnightEye.com for his help and useful comments and feedback, and to the director Fujiwara Toshi, who has been very generous (both in person and as an interlocutor via email) with his time and replies to my questions and enquiries. My editors and contacts at EUP have been very helpful and supportive, and to my many students and Twitter friends who have provided numerous useful discussions I offer thanks. My gratitude also to the friends I made at Sheffield Hallam University and The University of Sheffield (both students and staff), whose help and friendship has always been valued. the Iron Man, which unexpectedly won a prize at the FantaFestival in Rome-they were by and large national rather than international pictures. 1997, by way of contrast, saw Japanese cinema return to international prominence and visibility. Kitano Takeshi featured prominently when his seventh film, Hana-Bi (Fireworks, 1997), won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, whilst earlier that same year Imamura Shohei had shared the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival (with Abbas Kiarostami) for his drama The Eel (Unagi, 1997) and the Camera d'Or at the same festival was awarded to Kawase Naomi's feature debut The God Suzaku (Moe no Suzaku, 1997). Moreover in this year Miyazaki Hayao's fantasy adventure Princess Mononoke (Mononoke hime, 1997) eclipsed Spielberg's E.T. (1982) as the most successful film at the domestic Japanese box office, and Suō Masayuki's Shall We Dance? (Sharu we dansu, 1997) became the highest grossing Japanese film ever released in the US, taking over $10 million from only a limited theatrical run. Hana-Bi, then, was notable for its international visibility and success. Its Venice prize and attendant festival screenings at Toronto, New York and Thessolaniki (in Greece) secured its place at the head of a resurgent Japanese cinema. The film in turn performed respectably abroadearning an initial $59,508 on only nine screen across the US before a three-week run grossed almost $250,000-and on the strength of this went on to facilitate a number of reviews and essays celebrating the return of Japanese cinema 1. Indeed when Darrell William Davis stated in 2001 that 'for Western critics Kitano "Beat" Takeshi is the greatest filmmaker to come out of Japan since Akira Kurosawa', (2001, p. 55) he is alluding to Hana-Bi's comparable status to Rashomon (1950) in (re)opening Japanese cinema to the west (a comparison that Miyao Daisuke has reaffirmed [2003, p. 15]), and in Japan the response was not dissimilar. The Japanese Journal Kinema Junpō ranked the film the best of the year for 1998, and was greeted with critical enthusiasm from the leading Japanese critics. (Hiroo/Morton, 2003, pp. 234-238) Neither was this an isolated trend; figures in 1997 were the best since 1980 for domestic releases, achieving 41.5% of box office grosses with over 32.5 billion Yen from Japanese films. Audience figures continued to improve in all but one of each successive year (2002), leading to 107 billion Yen and 53% of the market in 2006 and similar numbers in the successive five years, whilst the number of films made per year also increased, reaching 356 in 2005 and 417 in 2006. (Bingham, 2009, p. 162) In addition to Hana-Bi Kitano himself help to spearhead this uptake in audience figures, 2 and it led the Japanese newspaper the Yomiori Shinbun to declare 1997 to be 'the year of the Japanese film phoenix'; the year when an almost moribund national industry rose from the ashes to reclaim a measure of the success and more importantly the visibility it had once enjoyed. Furthermore a book entitled Japan Movies Now (Nihon eiga sangyo saizensen) discussed in depth the film renaissance of the late 1990s and beyond, something that Murakami Yoshiaki and Ogawa Norifumi relate back to Kitano and Hana-Bi; (1999, pp. 35-43) Indeed there was so much international cache for Japanese cinema after this film that the producer Sento Takenori established (in 1999) a concern named New Project J-Cine-X that was entirely devoted to films and filmmakers who had made an impact at European film festivals with an eye to making works primarily aimed at overseas markets. The Japanese have tended to follow international canonization of their films, to value at home what has been successful abroad. As Kawakita Nagamase stated in 1956: 'It must be admitted that the excellent reception abroad accorded many Japanese films in recent years has come as a surprise…[t]oday, many Japanese are finding attractions in their native films which until recently they did not realise existed, thanks to the appreciation of these films by audiences overseas'. (p. 220) since 1998 has exhibited on eight separate occasions after only one previous exhibition in the 1990s (in 1991). This was by no means a totalizing or all-encompassing feature of Japanese cinema, certainly before the new millennium had begun. Indeed Iwai Shunji said in the mid-1990s that young filmgoers did not really know the work of Kurosawa (Akira) or Ozu and that contemporary films should reflect their lives and tastes (1999, p. 38). However Mark Schilling noted even in July 1998 that 'I've seen a lot of younger Japanese directors try to make films like Yasujiro Ozu': (1999, p. 94) a point that reflects a general trend not only today but in the history of the industry. Thus, if it is true that a 'pattern of initial Western influence followed by the development of "purely" Japanese forms has been repeated again and again, not only in individual careers but throughout the culture', (Schilling, 1997, p. 10) then post-1997 Japanese cinema upholds this cyclical model. In other words, following the 1980s and early 1990s (especially the latter, whose perceived new new wave was described in some quarters as the 'Japanese cinema after Mr. Pink' generation because of a perceived debt to Quentin Tarantino) there was what Donald Richie terms a 'Japanification', (2001, p. 217) a return to Japanese forms, in the years following 1997. The Japanese Critic Yomota Inuhiko, who himself concurs with a significant uptake in audience figures even between 1996 and 1998, has also found Japanese themes and genre material more prominent as of 1999, (2000, pp. 215-221) whilst a new narrative focus on ethnicity, he notes, increasingly helped to frame and refract questions of Japaneseness. (Ibid. p. 222) This broad picture offers a starting point for a reflection on post-1997 Japanese cinema as one that experienced a significant upturn in its commercial fortunes and a transformation of some of its defining creative tenets. As such, this study will be Abe, K., 2003. beat takeshi vs. takeshi kitano. Translated from the Japanese by William O. Gardner and Takeo Hori. New York: Kaya Press.