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 a work of cinematic art. Otherwise, his film is lacking a core ingredient.
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), headed for its tenth installment. Repeats dominate the market: in 1996, thirteen of the top twenty films were installments in series. Hollywood is not averse to series, viz. James Bond, Indiana Jones, Star Wars, Lethal Weapon, and so forth, but generally speaking these are not cookie-cutter series but sequels based on a successful first movie, with very different stories, casts, directors, and actors. Formulaic series of the Japanese type flourished commonly before World War II: Westerns, Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, etc., and they exist today at the lower end of the movie market in the horror and high-school genres: A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, and so forth. But they are sideshows to the real business of Hollywood. Outside of Japan, producers learned long ago that cookie-cutter series, unless aimed at a niche market such as teenagers, soon lose their audiences.
In light of what we know about Japan's educational system, it should come as no surprise that cinema would devolve into this endless repetition of old formulas. In Godzilla we can also see the way in which insularity, another trait perpetuated by the school system, manifests itself in film. In 1962's King Kong vs. Godzilla, Arikawa Sadamasu, the cinematographer, recounts, «director Ishiro Honda saw King Kong as a symbol of America, Godzilla as a symbol of Japan, and the fighting between the two monsters a representation of the conflict between the two countries.» In one striking scene, Godzilla's burning breath sets fire to King Kong's chest hair. The theme continues in later films such as 1990s Godzilla vs. King Ghidora, in which Godzilla battles U.S. troops fighting the Japanese in 1944. Caucasians from the future then capture him and devastate modern Japan with a three-headed dragon – their aim being to force the country to buy foreign computers. Such is the level of «internationalization» in Japanese cinema: filmmakers cannot get beyond the idea that the Japanese are all alone, victims of foreign monsters.