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ABSTRACT
For the last seventeen years in a row, domestic Japanese cinema has trounced imported Hollywood fare at the box office. Anime-related films are one source of Japanese cinema’s strength, but there is another key factor: revisionist, right-wing historical films. A new extremist ‘mainstream’ has emerged, one in which Japan’s present and future seem increasingly unsatisfying, her past ever more appealing.
This article examines several recent Japanese blockbusters and their production contexts. In both the ‘rosy past’ type and the ‘bleak future’ type of rightist film which these industrial conditions have produced, the message is essentially the same: things were better before, and only by spiritually returning to the past can Japan be made great again. If audiences continue to endorse this extremist right-wing vision of the once and future Japan, another generation of young, impressionable viewers might conclude that Japan’s only way forward is to retreat deeper into the beautified past.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Watson Citation2020 provides a general sense of the scale of the U.S. film industry in the twenty-first century.
2 Reliable box office data, including comparative box office share for domestic versus imported films, for the last 60+ years is available on the website of the Motion Picture Producers’ Association of Japan, Inc. (often abbreviated ‘Eiren’, a contraction of the official Japanese title). Box office figures are also available in English; see http://www.eiren.org/statistics_e/index.html.
3 A representative year heavily dominated, as always, by animated films’ success at the box office was 2017, in which the top-grossing film was the then-latest sequel in the Detective Conan series; number two was Doraemon; number three was Gintama (live-action adaptation of the manga/anime); and number four was a Pokemon movie. Added together, just these four films, by themselves, grossed about 18.7 billion yen (roughly $180 million USD), or just under 15 percent (18.7 billion out of 125.483 billion) of the total box office gross of domestically produced films, and over 8 percent of the total box office returns for all films released in 2017.
4 Taking as a starting point the film output in Japan in 2000 of 282 films, and comparing this to the average of 471 films per year for 2000–2022, this means the Japanese film industry grew in size and scale by 67%. Moreover, for the last decade (2013–2022) with the exception of slightly lower totals during the pandemic-affected 2020 and 2021, there have consistently been around 600 Japanese films released per year, so by one metric the film industry has more than doubled in size.
5 The U.S. film industry also experienced growth in the twenty-first century, but it was not quite so rapid or dramatic as in Japan; taking the U.S. film output in 2000 of 371 films as a starting point, the average per year for 2000–2022 was 584, for a 57% increase in the US film industry's size.
6 Since it was released in Dec. 2013, it is counted as a 2014 film for the purposes of estimating its box office gross.
7 The label of ‘extremism’ is inspired by Peter Biskind's theory of how pop culture in the U.S. – by embracing vampires, zombies, superheroes, and the like – has increasingly rejected ordinary stories in favor of exceptional, stronger-than-human characters with the intoxicating power to slice the Gordian knot of messy politics (and ethics) and cut right to the chase, providing instant, feel-good solutions instead of debate.
8 In this, filmmakers were perhaps influenced by the ‘perpetrator’ turn in Japanese war cinema then occurring, with high-profile releases like part I of Kobayashi Masaki's The Human Condition and Ichikawa Kon's Fires on the Plain both also coming out in 1959 and painting a very harsh picture of early Shōwa Japan; with the then-recent past consistently shown to be so bleak, it would be perhaps difficult to portray the war-torn Sengoku period very positively.
9 As an NHK Taiga drama, Japan's flagship history program on TV each year, this show featured an hour-long episode every Sunday all year about the man and his times, a story of such length it would presumably be impossible to maintain a tone of disapproval for his villainy without losing audiences’ interest.
10 According to data on viewership in 1992, provided by Video Research, Ltd. in an unfortunately now-defunct link.
11 Among many other such gulf-narrowing projects, Kurosawa Akira’s 1980 film Kagemusha is perhaps also worthy of mention, as it shows Nobunaga to be a sympathetic and capable, even wise leader.
12 It earned 4.61 billion yen upon its release in 2016, placing sixth for the year among Japanese films and ninth of all films released that year.
13 Which was also a blockbuster by virtue of being in the top 6% of Japanese films for the year; it grossed more than one billion yen at the box office, unlike the 94% of the 594 Japanese films in 2017 that failed to reach this mark.
14 Washi wa odayaka ni waratte kuraseru sonna yo wo tsukuritai (the line is in a flashback starting in minute 75).
15 35 percent of respondents of the late 2014 survey listing the Honnōji Incident as Japanese history's greatest ‘mystery’ (the second – and third-ranked were Himiko at 11 percent and Sakamoto Ryōma's assassination at 10 percent, respectively, with all other choices taking less than 5 percent, and most less than 2 percent).
16 The Abe cabinet can and did intervene in NHK's management (and in fact the prime minister is the one whom, with Diet consent, appoints the twelve governors of NHK), ensuring that the organization will provide positive coverage of governmental positions and downplay or ignore newsworthy criticism, which has not helped Japan in the annual ranking of press freedom; a particularly egregious example came in June 2014, when a man set himself on fire in Shinjuku station as an explicit and certainly dramatic political protest against Abe's policies. It was an event widely covered by the global press, but not even mentioned on Japan's premiere news source, NHK, whose then-president, Momii Katsuto (also appointed by Abe) infamously said ‘When the government is saying “right” we can't say “left.”’
17 There are reasons to doubt that even NHK has been consistently nefarious in its popular cultural output, however. For one thing, the Tsukuru-kai was not even founded until 1996, and the LDP was in the process of (briefly) losing its stranglehold on power in the early 1990s, when Nobunaga, King of Zipangu aired.
18 Chs. 1 (historical revisionism, discussing Nikkatsu's revisionist pro-Ii Naosuke 1927 film Kenkokushi sonnō jōi) and 2 (history as nonsense, analyzing films like PCL’s 1935 Enoken no Kondō Isami, which humanizes Sakamoto Ryōma and especially Kondō Isami – both played by comedian Enomoto Kenichi – as sympathetic if faintly ridiculous heroes) are most relevant here.
19 This article relates one representative young man's reasons for seeing The Eternal Zero: his stated dissatisfaction with contemporary ‘herbivorous’ masculinity and preference for the manliness of wartime Japanese men.
20 The coordinated effort in March 1999 by right-wing revisionists, specifically the ominously titled Association for Rectifying the Distorted Exhibitions of War Materials, to hijack the museum space by arranging a film screening of Pride has been well documented by Yoshida, among others.
21 Miura Haruma embraced his metrosexual ikemen public image by taking on projects which highlighted his ambiguous sexuality, like his starring role as drag queen in the Japanese adaptation of the musical ‘Kinky Boots.’
22 With Miyabe as heroic model, the film seems to suggest that, by implication, many if not all of the other tokkōtai members also chose freely, despite the abundant evidence in the historical record of tremendous pressure placed on the pilot recruits to make this ‘voluntary’ choice.
23 Kimi no tame ni koso shini ni iku grossed 1.08 billion yen at the box office.
24 The tongue-in-cheek formal psychological label for this social anxiety is Fear of Missing Out, commonly referred to as ‘FOMO.’
25 Released in December 2013, The Eternal Zero reached number one for its year (counted as 2014) at Japan's box office, outperforming all other Japanese films and all imported films except the children's juggernaut Frozen.
26 More precisely, there were probably about 6.8 million tickets sold, impressive since Japan in 2013–2014 had a population of about 127 million. Millions more have likely seen the film since, once it was released on home video.
27 Indeed, despite years-long combat in and occupation of China starting in the 1930s, which properly speaking began Japan's engagement in World War II, to many Japanese even today, the term ‘Second World War’ is less familiar than the widely used ‘Pacific War’, a name which entirely glosses over continental fighting and attempts to re-conceive the war as occurring only in 1941–1945 as a bi-national conflict between Japan and the United States (suggesting rough equality between the combatant nations), not – as was actually the case – Japan facing the combined ire of the Allies (presumably since this inconvenient truth would force people to acknowledge the reason much of the world had condemned Japan, namely its conduct in China in the 1930s and early 1940s).
28 I have not been able to find evidence of substantial right-wing objections to this film, so it is not clear to what Hyakuta was referring, or if there is even truth to the both sides-ism claim at all.
29 Two very commercially successful examples from 1943 are Ina no Kantarō and Meijin Chōji hori, both starring Hasegawa Kazuo as a young man in 1860s Japan who is initially reluctant to join the fight to defend the country but experiences an almost spiritual awakening and conversion to political activism: he sees the light. Both of these films, moreover, also police the concept of proper masculinity, insisting that a man must fight and die to be a man at all. In Meijin Chōji hori, Hasegawa's Chōji is being interrogated by the police who demand he betray his antiforeign allies and the cause, but he begs to die instead with the words otoko ni shite kure (‘make me a man [by killing me]!’).
30 Wartime Japanese films on the war which culminate in (or strongly imply/demand) the protagonist's death are not rare. A good example would be The Legend of Tank Commander Nishizumi (1940), an embellished account of the eponymous Nishizumi, a real-life casualty of the war in China.
31 These efforts to inculcate patriotism throughout society also found expression (and potent symbols) in a 1999 law formalizing the Kimigayo as the national anthem of Japan and the Hinomaru as its national flag.
32 The controversy erupted in 2017 but Motoya doubled down rather than bowing to international pressure, insisting his hotels would keep featuring his written denial of the Nanjing Massacre and denial of guilt for comfort women.
33 For example, Gerow (Citation2006) identifies several circa-2005 film projects with a revisionist slant on wartime Japan (he argues this revisionism is ultimately unsuccessful, with the films being mere ‘empty’ entertainment, though as gulf narrowing projects, they could have an important impact even if their own revisionist formulas fail), and Gerow (Citation2011) continues exploring the intersection of war and nationalism in film, as does Stegewerns (Citation2014; Citation2019).
34 The political conversion narrative of selfish individual into selfless patriotic warrior does occasionally feature female protagonists, as in The Woman Who Wields a Sword (1944). O’Reilly (Citation2018), ch. 5.
35 For more evidence of the larger twenty-first century revisionist trend within film output on World War II in Japan, see Gerow (Citation2006).
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Sean O’Reilly
Sean O’Reilly is a graduate of Harvard University’s History and East Asian Languages doctoral program and completed a secondary field in Film and Visual Studies (in 2015). His research, which began with a Fulbright Scholarship to Japan in 2012, concerns the ways Japanese history has been reinvented in film and popular culture. In 2022-2023 he was the recipient of the Margaret Thatcher Japan Foundation grant for a research sabbatical in the UK. Publications include Re-viewing the Past: the Uses of History in the Cinema of Imperial Japan (Bloomsbury, 2018). As Associate Professor of Japan Studies at Akita International University, he teaches courses on the history, popular culture and cinema of Japan. He is currently serving as editor of a volume on 1930s Japanese cinema, slated for publication in 2024.