The question is whether the new fashion means a cultural renaissance is on its way, as many of its supporters believe, or whether it is just, well, fashion. Ever since World War II, one of the favorite themes of Western journalism about Japan is the New Youth, and regularly, about once every year or so, Time or Newsweek devotes special articles to this subject. The youth are going to change, they are going to overturn the old order, because they wear miniskirts, or because they sport nose rings and dye their hair. It's a natural inference to make, because in the West free sexual and fashion mores have traditionally been linked to free thinking, viz. Woodstock. However, in Japan the situation is different in that such freedoms have always been allowed so long as people toe the line with regard to their families, work, social hierarchies, and so on. In other words, sex and fashion are delinked from politics. This was true even in the seventeenth century, when Jesuit missionaries fresh from imperial Beijing, where most people dressed in drab blue or black, arrived in Japan to find a colorful «floating world» of brilliantly dyed silks, incredible towering hairstyles, and long flowing sleeves. Compared to that in China, life in Japan looked like wild abandon, and yet at the time Japan was one of the most tightly controlled societies on earth.
Ian Buruma quotes an essay by movie director Oshima Nagisa (known for the film In the Realm of the Senses) in which he describes a meeting with a conservative politician. The politician says mores have the power to change society, but the director thinks otherwise. «Here Oshima puts his finger on the sorest point of Japanese politics-'it is not, as the LDP Dietman said, that mores have more power to change society than politics; rather the forces unable to change society through politics shift to manners and mores.' » One could argue that the extreme fashions of the youth represent precisely that: a veiled protest against the established order. Whether it signifies real change in the society is still an open question.
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.
In 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.