Although not so long ago you could count the number of world-famous

Japanese people on one Yakuza's hand, these days the country is producing
more and more figures, human and otherwise, that have grabbed the attention
of a global audience. The mantle of the country's most famous film director has
passed from the late Kurosawa Akira to Kitano Takeshi - better known in Japan
as an irreverent slapstick comedian. J-pop, as Japanese pop music is called,
has long been popular across Asia. But now a generation of young, bilingual
artists may help to globalize the phenomenon. And then there's cute. The
names Pokemon and Hello Kitty might send your kids into spasms of
commercial greed but imagine if they had the same effect on the entire
population! Well, in Japan they do. Cartoon characters, comic books and allround cuteness are pervasive - some might even say downright invasive. But
'Japanimation' has a more serious side to it. Movies like Spirited Away and
Ghost in the Shell made even Hollywood sit up and take notice.
Japanese companies may not dominate the Global 500 listings quite like they
used to but they aren't out for the count, either. Japan's top electronics brands,
such as Sony and Panasonic, continue to dominate the world. And Toyota
leads the world in car manufacturing efficiency. The almost insatiable demand
for new gadgets in Japan means that new products come out on almost a
weekly basis and some of them never make it to foreign markets. A Big Bang in
the financial industry has caused major upheaval and some ground-breaking
changes in the way Japan does business.

Modern Japan is cool, and Japanese pop culture has fans world-wide

Although the first home-grown movies appeared before the end of the last
century, it wasn't until after World War I that they became something more than
adaptations of stage plays and kabuki. The Nikkatsu and Shochiku film
companies started at this time. From about 1920, Japanese film was divided
into two main categories: Jidai-geki, or period films and Gendai-geki, or films
with modern settings. The jidai-geki usually centered around a lone
swordsman, who struggled to reconcile the conflict between his obligations
(giri), and his true feelings (ninjo). This theme later became central to the
gangster, or yakuza genre, originated by the Toei comapny in the 1960's.
Gendai-geki reflected social changes of the day and individual director's views
on life and society.
Related content: check out our many profiles of
Japan's top movie directors and actors & actresses.
Censorship by the increasingly militaristic government continued through the
1930's and World War II, although its guidelines were largely ignored. The US
occupation temporarily banned pre-1945 films and clamped down on the
sword-wielding jidai-geki. But after control of the movie industry was handed
over to the independent Motion Picture Code Committee in 1949, they soon
came back in force.

From Kurosawa Akira....

... to just plain Akira.

By 1953, the industry was controlled by 6 big film companies and had entered
its Golden Age. The best works of Kurosawa Akira, Ozu Yasujiro and Mizoguchi
Kenji from this period remain among the greatest ever made. A huge number of
films were made about the war - about life in the military and about the effects
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of the war on life at home. The first color feature appeared in 1951. The Toho
company's Godzilla roared onto the screen for the first time in 1954, starting a
flood of monster movies that continues to this day. 1955's novel Season of the
Sun by present-day Governer of Tokyo Ishihara Shintaro launched a series of
movies about the new generation of post-war teeenage hedonism. By the end
of the 1950's, the number of movie theaters reached its peak of almost 7,500.
By 1969, television sets were in just about every home in Japan and movie
theater attendances were at a third of their peak level. Half of the country's
theaters closed during the 1960's. This decade also saw the arrival of a new
wave of directors, chief among them being Oshima Nagisa. Among other
themes, they questioned prejudice in Japan against minorities. Meanwhile the
major studios continued to churn out films in assembly-line fashion. The studios
concentrated on different genres. Shochiku, for example, made 'women's
melodramas' and family dramas. From 1969, they turned out the Tora-san
series, the most successful movies series in history. The Toei studio nurtured
the yakuza genre, making stars of actors Takakura Ken and Tsuruta Koji.
During the economic bubble years of the 1980's, Japanese money was put into
Hollywood movies and Sony bought Columbia Pictures in 1989. At home, the
industry was enjoying something of a revival, although many of the most
famous films of the time were at least partly financed by foreign money. Among
the most successful films were the comedies of Itami Juzo, Tampopo (1985)
and A Taxing Woman (Marusa No Onna, 1988); Oshima's Merry Christmas,
Mr. Lawrence (1983) and Kurosawa's The Shadow Warrior (Kagemusha,
1980) and Ran (1985), which won an Oscar for costume design. The late 80's
also saw a breakthrough for animated movies. Otomo Katsuhiro's Akira (1988),
with its spectacular and nihilistic view of a post-apocalyptic Neo-Tokyo, was a
hit worldwide. Miyazaki Hayao's works such as Princess Mononoke (Mononoke
Hime, 1997) rival those of the Disney studios in terms of universal appeal,
storytelling and breathtaking artwork and always beat them at the local box
office. With Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (Spirited Away) in 2002, he even
won a coveted Oscar, a ground-breaking achievement for anime that showed
that they are taken seriously even outside Japan.

Although the end of the 20th century saw the

movie industry dominated by Hollywood
blockbusters, it also saw the arrival of a new
directorial master. With the death of Kurosawa in
1999, Kitano Takeshi (right) became the leading
Japanese director on the world stage. His works
have continued the trend started by Kurosawa in the 1950's, picking up prizes
at the European festivals. While better known in Japan as a cynical TV
comedian and entertainer, Kitano has become the darling of the international
movie world and led the Japanese movie industry into the new millenium. In
2000, he made Brother, his first movie to appeal more to a western audience.
1999 saw Oshima's long-awaited comeback with the well-received film
Gohatto (though the director fellinto ill health soon afterwards) and also the
period-film When the Rain Lifts (Ame Agaru), with a script by the late
Kurosawa Akira and directed by his longtime assistant Koizumi Takashi.
Director Yamada Yoji, the man behind the Tora-san series, had great success
with his first samurai movies after the actor who played Tora-san (Atsumi
Kiyoshi) died in 1996. He won multiple awards with The Twilight Samurai
(Tasogare Seibei, 2002) and The Hidden Blade (Kakushi-ken: Oni no Tsume,
2004). But he has kept his light touch, working as a writer on the long-running
Tsuribaka Nisshi series.
The new century has seen another new boom for Japanese cinema Hollywood remakes of Japanese horror movies. The local industry has been
turning out spooky flicks mainly for the summer market for years. But in 1998,
The Ring (Ringu) really caught the public imagination. It also caught the eye of
folks in Tinseltown, and was re-made in 2002. Nakata Hideo, director of the
original and its Japanese sequel, even managed to make the leap Stateside to
direct The Ring 2. Shimizu Takashi went the same route, taking the helm for
the US versions of his 2003 Juon (The Grudge) movies.
Related content: Come join other fans in our Japan
Forum Movie Board.

For those of you who haven't been to a Japanese movie theater, the steep
ticket price (1,800 on average) may come as a shock. But advance tickets
(mae-uri ken) are available, usually at a 2-300 discount. They are available
from special 'playguide' shops or from any ticket outlet, such as PIA or Ticket
Saison. Besides the discount, they also make good collector's items or
souvenirs as they are designed with the movie's artwork, unlike the plain ticket
stubs issued at the theater. Most cinemas also have big discounts for Ladies'
Day (usually Wednesdays) and Movie Day (1st of the month).

To many Westerners, one of the hardest things to understand about the

Japanese is their voracious appetite for manga or comics (though the recent
launch of an English version of Shonen Jump manga in the US was hugely
succesful). In particular, the fact that middle-aged men can sit with their heads
buried in comic books on rush-hour trains without any sense of
embarrassment. While in the West mainstream comics are almost entirely for
children, in Japan there many types of manga and some of them are very
definitely NOT suitable for children. Graphic violence and sex (but with
restrictions on the visibilty of actual organs) have been commonplace in manga
for years. A law introduced to curb child pornography (most of the world's
supply being from Japan) for some reason excluded manga - probably
something to do with it being a 500-billion-a-year industry.
Manga come in two main forms: weekly, twice-monthly and monthly magazine
style manga and paperback books, usually in a series. These series often spin
off from the magazines and in turn are made into TV shows or movies. For
some examples, see the sections on Animated movies and TV cartoons.
Mangajin was a classic magazine that used manga as a fun
and effective way to learn Japanese. Published between
1990-97, it also included interesting features on various
aspects of Japanese culture. It's now out of print, but back
issues are still available from Wasabi Brothers. Your support
might even help them in their efforts to revive one of the best
magazines to come out of Japan.

Many manga carry full-color advertisements for muscle-building devices and

pheromone sprays. As you might have guessed, most manga are geared
toward shonen (young guys). But there are also shojo (young girl) manga.
They deal mainly with science-fiction, sports and romance and tend to portray
male characters as stereotypically as the guy's manga do with female
characters. A popular girl's manga is Sailor Moon, which also became a
successful TV show and several movies. Naturally, they're popular with girls but
also with a certain number of boys and young men. This and the popularity of
animated porn is, I'm afraid, beyond my understanding. Suffice to say that the
world of manga and anime (animation) is huge in Japan and beyond and there
are countless Web sites dedicated to it.

Margaret (left) and Sailor

Moon (right) are popular
shojo manga.
Evangelion (above) was
hugely popular in 1997.
Most weekly manga are the thickness of a telephone book. Even though they
are printed on recycled paper, the price of around 200 yen seems ridiculously
cheap. But with weekly sales in some cases of over five million copies and the
most popular stories going on to become paperback collections, TV cartoons or
dramas and even full-length movies, manga are very big business. Just two
examples are given below.
Shonen Magazine
One of the pioneers of the fat shukan manga (weeklies),
along with Shonen Sunday, Shonen Magazine debuted in
1959 and is still one of the most popular boy's manga (shonen
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means young boy). With over 200 pages and a cover price of
230 yen, it seems like pretty good value. All the stories use
kana (phonic) characters next to the kanji (Chinese
characters), which makes them readable for the younger or
less literate Japanese and useful for students of the language.
As well as the manga stories and advertisements, the
magazine has full-color photo spreads of a couple of teenage
bimbos, usually in bikinis and with a contact address for fanmail. The October 27th, 1999 issue (right) includes the
Click for larger
mangas GTO (Great Teacher Onizuka), which has been made format (87k)
into a TV drama and a movie, and Psychometora EIJI, made
into a TV psycho-drama starring heartthrob Matsuoka
Masahiro. Other subjects include soccer, fishing and sushi,
while with some of the manga it's hard to tell what exactly
they're about.
The magazine is published by Kodansha, who also publish a
variety of other magazines in six categories: General/Men;
Women; Children; Literature/Arts; Comics for Men; Comics for
Women.
Shukan Shonen Jump
Launched in 1968, Jump tried to do things differently
from the start. In order to compete with the already
successful Shonen Magazine and Shonen Sunday,
Jump concentrated on hiring and hanging onto talented
but as yet undiscovered cartoonists and keeping a
close eye on what its readers wanted, through surveys
and polls. This approach helped Jump become by far
the biggest manga in Japan with sales as high as six
Click for larger format
million copies a week. Its most successful series have
(24k)
been spun off to create TV cartoons, movies and video
games including Dragonball Z and Dragon Quest
which have been hugely popular both in Japan and
abroad. Other huge domestic hits include Kinnikuman
(Muscle Man) and Slam Dunk, which capitalized on the
NBA craze of the early and mid-90's.

The publisher of the manga, Shueisha has dozens of

other publications, including Ultra Jump, Business
Jump, Young Jump, Monthly Jump etc and women's
manga like Margaret, Young You and Ribbon and
magazines such as the Japanese editions of
Cosmopolitan and Playboy.
Related links:
Check out our background info on anime,anime movies, TV anime and
selection of Japanese movie posters.
Join the other fans talking about anime and manga on
the Japan Forum

Links

Japan Zone Friends 3 million+ Members

For many people around the world, the first word

that comes to mind when talking about Japanese
pop culture is anime. Like manga, it has entered
the youth vocabulary and needs no translation.
Perhaps the main reasons it is such a big industry
in Japan are that it has always been taken
seriously and it has the diversity to appeal to all
age levels, as has the manga format that gave birth to it and continues to seed
it with new ideas. Popular manga sell in the tens of millions, so the fan base for
any new manga-based anime is huge and loyal. Commercialism is never too
far away, of course, and many popular kid's anime series have been developed
to further the interests of toy and game makers rather than artistic integrity.
Tezuka Osamu (1928-89) is considered the father of anime in Japan. Like his
U.S. counterpart Walt Disney, he was a renowned mangaka (cartoonist). He
adapted one of his own manga to bring anime to the TV screen for the first time
in 1963 with the legendary Tetsuwan Atomu (Mighty Atom), better known
outside Japan as Astro Boy. The boy robot may have been cute, but the robot
"mecha" genre that Tezuka and his disciples developed in the 1970s were far
less so. The huge popularity enjoyed by series such as Gundam in the 80s still
continues today and has spawned many other successes. Perhaps the most
notable was 1995's ground-breaking Neon Genesis Evangelion (still image
above) and its three movie spin-offs. That series started out as a postapocalyptic mecha action series but later branched into the psychoanalysis of
its characters. This is said to have been based on director Anno Hideaki's
personal battles with depression and psychotherapy. Such is the depth and
seriousness that underpin many anime productions.

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There are as many anime genres as there are

types of live action movies, varying from science
fiction to melodrama to porno. There'sshojo (like
Sailor Moon) for girls, shonen(Dragon Ball Z, pic)
for boys, kodomo(Anpanman or Doraemon) for
younger kids. And then there's ones focused on
baseball (Kyojin no Hoshi), soccer or just about
any popular sport, street racing (Initial D), historical themes (Hotaru no
Haka)...you name it.
Because of the language barrier, it was long thought that
Japanese anime feature movies would probably never achieve much
commercial success outside their homeland. But among those in the know and following the 2002 Academy Awards that meant just about everybody they have recently become so successful and popular that a special category,
'Japanimation', has been created for them. Usually people think of cult classics
like Akira or Ghost in the Shell, both of which live up to Japan's image as a
futuristic techno-world, or the elaborate fantasy worlds created by Studio
Ghibli.
Ghibli, Japan's answer to Disney, is also home to its most famous anime
director,Miyazaki Hayao. The studio has turned out a string of hit fantasy
movies during the last few decades, such as My Neighbor Totoro, Princess
Mononoke, Oscar-winner and the most successful Japanese movie of all
time, Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi, 2001), and Howl's
Moving Castle. Like the recent Hollywood animated features from Pixar or
Dreamworks, these movies can now enlist the voice talents of major stars,
giving them yet more marketability. The success of the Ghibli productions,
supported by distribution through Disney, has given a real impetus to the
industry and helped raise the profile of other recent big productions
likeInnocence and Steamboy. Despite all this success, the vast majority of
anime movies never make it beyond Asia or last beyond the life of their
marketing campaign even at home.
Hit TV anime series continue to be a popular source for movies. But these are

11

almost always just extended versions of the TV shows and have little appeal
beyond their captive audience. Many, such as Pocket Monsters, Anpanman or
Crayon Shinchan, are also aimed very much at younger kids. They draw fans
to theaters - especially during summer vacation - but make most of their money
from the rental market and merchandising.

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