I began this blog in part as an effort to understand the culture behind so many of the Japanese movies I had admired. As my viewing continued, I became interested in how Japanese culture had been influenced by and adapted to its conflict with Euro/American culture.
As we can see from almost any modern-dress movie mentioned in this blog, American culture has had an immense impact on Japanese society, but its impact was in the culture at large far more than in the movies made. By 2000, for example, the kimono had all but disappeared except for conservative families at home and ceremonial occasions, and daily dress was indistinguishable from that found in any place in western Europe or America. Even the weddings had become American, with the white dress all but overwhelming the bride’s traditional kimono and headdress. Christmas was celebrated everywhere, but as a cultural event rather than a religious festival. (Though there are strings of lights and decorated trees everywhere, the only time I can remember seeing gifts under the tree or a possible visit from Santa since Souls on the Road in 1921 was in 2005.) American music, from swing bands to jazz to rock ‘n’ roll, completely rebuilt the Japanese music world, and especially after the rock era began, the language of the songs was often American English as well. American fast food chains penetrated all areas of the country, often spawning imitations that challenged the old idea of the mom-and-pop quick diner that often served only one dish or provided sushi or pre-cooked Japanese foods to take home, where they were added to the rice. Likewise, the 7/11-style convenience store replaced the small grocery shop and chains much like Walmart dominated the countryside.
Curiously, though Euro/American movies were available, at least in large cities, except during the war years, the one profound influence they had was the introduction of the actress, who by the arrival of sound films had completely replaced the onnagata. Beyond that, though American blockbusters often topped the box-office charts after the war, and American stars often appeared in Japanese advertising, foreign movies themselves seem to have made little impact on the movies made by the Japanese film industry. Though the chanbara is often compared to the Western, the chanbara‘s stories and style of fighting came from kabuki and the form of its presentation on film was rarely in imitation of Westerns. Detective stories, though beginning with Edogawara Ranpo’s westernized pseudonym, were rarely like western detective stories. Nikkatsu in its borderless action movies tried to imitate American B movies for a youthful audience, but they died out with the early deaths or changes of direction by their major stars. Lacking a great victory in WWII, Japan’s war movies were quite different from those of America or England or Russia, and lacking Great Power status, movies about spies in the James Bond manner never took a real hold. Despite Godzilla and his imitators, we do not see much in the way of real science fiction or space travel movies, though movies like E.T. and Star Wars were big hits in Japan (probably more the result of far more limited budgets than of cultural interest). Yakuza movies have always been far different from Euro/American gangster movies, tracing their roots to the era before Japan was opened to the west when the yakuza were wanderers and gamblers. Horror movies almost always dealt with Japanese folk legends, especially the spirits of women seeking revenge, rather than the vampires or werewolves or the later slashers that had filled American movie theaters.
As I have often mentioned, the Japanese movie-makers seem to have developed New Wave techniques of filming and editing before the New Wave films actually appeared in France. The Japanese also began to convert comic books into film far earlier than the arrival of the Marvel and DC universe movies in America. And of course, many of the post-war technical advances that have transformed movie-making the world over often began in Japan, particularly the developments of the digital camera and of computer animation.
More often the movie influence has worked the other way so that Japanese films, though rarely seen outside the “art house,” have had an unexpectedly large influence on Euro/American entertainment. While a number of Japanese movies are now regarded as world classics for cinema enthusiasts, there are eight Japanese movies in particular that have had a serious impact on Euro/American culture. They are so well-known or so imitated that I have purposely written about only a few thus far. Four of these, as it happens, were directed by Kurosawa and three of those are genuine classics, while the other four are more recent and generally not regarded as classics per se.
Kurosawa’s four contributions are obvious. Rashomon told the world that, for the first time since the Japonisme craze swept through the French art world in the late 19th century, Japan had something of serious cultural value to offer to the rest of the world. In effect, it put Japan back on the world’s cultural map. It also provided a term that entered the language for millions who have never seen the movie but know immediately what is meant by a “Rashomon situation.” Seven Samurai became one of the handful of subtitled movies, Japanese or otherwise, that every educated person is assumed to have seen, and those who haven’t will have seen its American remakes as The Magnificent Seven. It defined for Euro/Americans an idealization of the samurai code that continues to color all of western culture’s understanding of Japanese history. It also provided a template for the “band of specialists” fighting against all odds on the side of the Good that can be seen in movies from The Dirty Dozen through Inglorious Basterds and American TV for a generation or so in series as varied as Mission: Impossible (later revived as a movie franchise), or The A-Team. And for many directors who came out of the new college film schools of the sixties, it became both the model and the practical handbook on how to make a movie. Yojimbo turned Toshiro Mifune’s local fame into international stardom, the only Japanese actor to achieve such prominence thus far. Through its remake as A Fistful of Dollars, it revived the moribund and exhausted American Western both in America and through the Spaghetti Western craze, as well as converting Clint Eastwood from TV cowboy to an international institution like Mifune. Hidden Fortress, though rarely seen in the west when it was made, through its influence on George Lucas and Star Wars changed modern science fiction movies into the vast franchises that still dominate our screens and introduced both the blockbuster concept and the shift of the franchise picture from B feature status to the main reason for Hollywood’s continued existence.
Another unexpected influence was Gojira, or Godzilla as he is known in the west. Made in 1954, it reached America in a much altered version in 1956 that immediately led to a wave of movies about overgrown monsters. America, of course, had had King Kong in the thirties, but there had seemed to be few followers in its tracks, even after its re-release in 1954 and endless TV showings. But after Godzilla hit, we had the Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman, Creature from the Black Lagoon, and endless pre-historic creature movies, each monster growing increasingly ludicrous until we reached Lupus. In a sense, Godzilla birthed the “drive-in movie,” a kind of movie made on a low budget and aimed primarily at teenagers and families viewing from their cars. After a brief pause, the giant monster returned both in the shape of the City Crusher movie in which the super-heroes fight it out by burning and crushing any recognizable urban area of America, just as Godzilla and his opponents kept doing to Tokyo. Trying to find alternatives to the Marvel and DC movies, Americans themselves produced Godzillas with state-of-the-art CGI, until the recent release of Godzilla Minus One has gone full circle and brought Godzilla back into Japanese hands and attitudes.
The powerful influence of Ghost in the Shell has already been discussed, both on animation and on the modern sci-fi movie, so I won’t go into it further here.
My other two seminal movies are less obvious and had oddly different impacts. One is Ringu, which re-defined the horror movie in Japan, and through its unexpected success in foreign countries made J-Horror both popular and influential. It changed the focus of international horror movies away from monsters or slashers or demons to more psychologically oriented situations, with wide distribution of the Ringu and Ju-on franchises as well as successful remakes from Hollywood and other Asian nations that reached audiences who never saw the Japanese originals, just as Yojimbo and Seven Samurai reached much of the world through their remakes and imitations. This craze eventually waned, to be replaced in America at least by the zombie. However, and perhaps most importantly, it introduced to mainstream entertainment the idea that technical progress was not necessarily automatically beneficial. This had always hung around since the Frankenstein era but had usually been seen as a problem of the single “mad scientist” whose awful creation could be destroyed, not a society-wide development that threatened all of our humanity but could not be contained, a concept that has since carried over into many other entertainment genres.
Much more odd was the influence of Shall We Dance? By the time it appeared, ballroom dancing was a thing for old fogies. Practically no one under the age of fifty could identify the tango or the paso doble or even the waltz, much less actually dance them. After Shall We Dance?, British broadcasters and many PBS stations began covering the Blackpool competitions that were depicted in that movie, while an American remake was generally sappier but equally successful among audiences that didn’t read subtitles. Then British TV introduced Strictly Come Dancing, soon imitated in the US by Dancing With the Stars. Both of those series continue into the present and continue to be ratings winners every year, with further franchises in about sixty other nations, and over the last twenty years have become entertainment institutions, with audiences rapt over dances they would never consider doing accompanied by music they would not listen to elsewhere. It did not change the world, but the bubble which it produced seems as if it will float along forever.*
Though they each have their strengths, the majority of these movies are not masterpieces by any stretch of the imagination but their influence outside of Japan makes them just as significant and remarkable as any of the classics of Japanese cinema history. They illustrate the originality of Japanese film-making and the outsized influence it has had on the rest of the world dominated by Hollywood output. They also illustrate the way Euro/Americans could quickly seize on the originality of Japanese film-making and then almost immediately forget that the original sources came from Japan, whose contributions to the world cinema remain for the most part unacknowledged.**
* In this sense another major entertainment influence came from Takeshi Kitano, but not from his movies. In the late eighties, he hosted a TV game show known as Takeshi’s Castle, of which bits and pieces were re-edited to be shown around the world. Its format of amateurs generally humiliating themselves as they faced silly or sometimes dangerous challenges to eventually face off against the host’s own team of stuntmen led directly to shows like the Gladiators franchise and with various modifications evolved into Survivor and its endless variations that came to define “reality TV” around the world, and ultimately gave the world the Korean Squid Game, which started a new round of TV competitive game shows.
** I won’t go into the influence of the ninja genre on Quentin Tarantino and Kill Bill in particular. That is well-acknowledged by Tarantino himself and his many fans, and Kill Bill itself seems to have had no followers, simply joining the ranks as a part of Tarantino’s oeuvre, so that the general influence is Tarantino, not the Japanese precedents.
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