Dogs and Demons

The question of how Japan's postwar educational system has affected its culture would make a book by itself. But certain trends are clear, as people's adult lives come to mimic the schoolyard, and can be summarized in a general way. Nakano Kiyotsugu has written:

Looking around modern Japan, I don't know why, but invisible rules have grown up everywhere. Lifestyle, human relations, clothing, deportment – each of these is enclosed in a framework. Just as the audience at a wedding stands up, sits down, and points their camera as directed by the MC, so people are bound up in rules. None of these rules is required by law, yet nobody dares disobey or they will be cast aside by the group. The younger they are the more people seem strongly attached to the rules, and they follow the others in their dress, possessions, hair styles, language, and topics of conversation. A foreigner would probably be surprised at the way they all seem to be dressed in uniform.

Magazines have observed that young wives with their children in Tokyo parks seem to form in cliques marked by similar clothes, hairstyles, and speech patterns-members of one, for example, will all have dyed hair. The groups even dress their toddlers in identical fashion. One woman, whom the others had initially shunned, later asked, «What did I do wrong?» It turned out to be the way she scolded her child – it wasn't the same way the other women scolded their children. The media call these groups Park Moms, as opposed to Park Gypsies, outcast mothers who are accepted by no group. A book published in 1996 entitled Park Debut counsels mothers on how to survive in the parks: «Newcomers should always take a low posture» and «Imitate the elder bosses.»

Once admitted to a Park Mom circle, one can participate in its joint activities. The group keeps the women busy with parties, excursions, and kairan-ban (revolving registers), in which they take turns looking after and calling up the others. This is an exact repeat of the uniforms, rules, and nonstop busyness these women experienced as students. It also repeats the school hierarchy and the bullying. One Western observer notes, «Some of these women have imposed a rigid hierarchical system not so different from that of the Japanese political and business worlds. Senior mothers pull rank, signal who is acceptable and who is not, and decide what activities will be engaged in and when. Some even set a dress code.»

And their husbands? They stay at the office until late at night, even if there is no work to do, and come home exhausted. Anyone who spends much time in Japan is struck by the obvious signs of sleep deprivation visible in the faces of the businessmen on trains and buses. The masochism these men learned so well at school has carried over into adult life.

When a woman complimented Whistler on his paintings of misty London bridges and remarked on how close they were to real life, Whistler replied, «Alas, madame, real life is catching up.» Real life in Japan is catching up with its grade-school regimen. Trained since childhood to follow orders broadcast on loudspeakers, the Japanese today are addicted to public announcements. Japan suffers from a severe case of noise pollution. Hotel lobbies, department stores, and train stations reverberate with taped messages advising people not to forget things, to hand in their tickets, to be careful of this and beware of that, and to walk on the left.

Loudspeakers are fitted into every new escalator in public places, with tapes advising people on the most rudimentary behavior. The escalators at the Kyoto railroad station say, «When getting on the escalator please hold the belt and stay behind the yellow line. For those with children, please hold their hands and stand in the middle of the step. If you are wearing boots or thin shoes, they can get caught in the cracks, so please take extra care. It is dangerous to put your head or hands beyond the belt.» There is an announcement at Narita Airport that reminds you to keep walking after getting off the escalator, and at the platform for trains to downtown Tokyo, a taped voice alerts passengers, «Your ticket is valid for the train and car shown on the ticket.»

People have become so addicted to recorded aisatsu and commands that they feel lonely without them. Nowhere in modern Japan can one get away from a recorded voice thanking you for coming, giving you information, apologizing for an inconvenience, commanding or warning you – all this accompanied by a chorus of beeps, buzzes, chirps, and gongs.

The most common words you will hear are kiken (danger) and abunai (hazardous). Daily life in Japan is filled with peril – unless people follow the rules. A ride on any public conveyance – bus, train, or subway – is an endless round of kiken, followed by orders: Don't leave anything behind; stand back while the train pulls in; don't rush to get in; don't get your fingers caught in the door; stay in line. National parks, rock gardens in Kyoto, ski resorts, university campuses, temples, and shrines reverberate with recorded messages and sound effects. There is no escape. With the clamor at home on television, the ear-shattering fanfare of sounds at the pachinko parlor, and recorded voices, beeps, and gongs in all public spaces, the Japanese spend a major part of their waking lives in a sea of noise.

Useless announcements are not, of course, unique to Japan. In New York City, public-address systems in the subway urge commuters not to make trains late by holding the doors open; taxis broadcast recorded warnings, spoken by celebrities, to fasten your seat belt and not to forget your belongings when getting in or out-something that even Tokyo's cabs haven't got around to doing. Nevertheless, the noise pollution in the West and in Southeast Asian countries (so far) is mostly limited to public transit – one would rarely expect to hear loud announcements on every escalator, in gardens, parks, and churches. And repeated not once but endlessly. In Japan, it's a case of excess, of announcements carried far beyond a reasonable limit. And uncontrollable excess is the defining quality of Japan's modern cultural crisis.

In a famous haiku, Basho wrote, «Silence / Into the rocks seep the voices of cicada.» Today, there would be no place for Basho to be alone with his thoughts, for seeping into the rocks would be an announcement from a chartered police-department Cessna overhead: «Let's remember to fasten our seat belts. When crossing the road, let's look left and right. This is Such-and-Such Police Department.» The writer Fukuda Kiichiro points out that public agencies spend tax money to broadcast this sort of message because they have misunderstood the concept of «public service.» Staffed with amakudari officials who have no idea how to benefit the public in any real way, agencies dream up these announcements so that «in the end it's a burlesque comedy put on by agencies such as the Transportation Safety Association as an alibi so they can say, 'Look! We're doing something!' » Another unstoppable tank of officialdom goes rumbling over the landscape. The same spirit of total dedication that has buried Japan's rivers takes over.

This, however, explains only the announcers, not the audience. The key question is why the Japanese public accepts and even craves all these commands and warnings. Fukuda writes:

One could say that social control in Japan has come to invade the private realm to an extreme degree. Of course «control» does not take place if we have only people who want to control. It's a necessary condition to also have a majority of people who wish to be controlled. It's the same mechanism that sociologists call «voluntary subjugation.» That is, people who wish to be controlled struggle to bring about control over themselves. It's related to the fact that chddren in high schools and students in universities never tire of having their teachers advise them what to do. Japanese college students are not adults who bear rights and responsibilities – they should all be called «children.»

The operative word in the above paragraph is «children.» Apart from the addiction to sound effects, the most remarkable aspect of Japan's public announcements is their sheer childishness. The level of nonsense in what Fukuda calls the Kindergarten State can strain credibility. Buses at Itami City urge riders to use soap. At Hayama, a beach south of Tokyo, a recorded voice tells bus passengers, «If you have come from a long way, please rest before entering the sea. If you are drowning, please shout for help.»

The long and the short of it is that Japan s postwar educational system is turning the Japanese into children. That the air everywhere rings with warnings of «Danger!» «Hazardous!» cries out for psychological study-it certainly gives insight into people's timidity in stepping out of line. Commentators in Japan have discussed the problem of this infantilization at length; the social critic Fukuda Kazuya wrote a book entitled Why Have the Japanese Become Such Infants? The effects of infantilization on Japan's modern culture are far-reaching. As we have seen, manga comics now account for nearly half of Japan's publishing business. The old words that defined Japanese culture – such as wabi (rough natural materials) or shibui (subdued elegance) – have been replaced by a new concept: kawaii (cute). Japan is awash in a sea of cute comic froggies, kitties, doggies, and bunnies with big, round, babyish eyes.

The big eyes are a favorite with young girls – the determining audience for modern Japanese design. One magazine editor claims that «the limit on eye size comes when they get so big the shape of the face is distorted.» You can hardly buy a household object – a bar of soap, a pencil, a blanket, a trash can, an electric fan, or a stereo set – without a big-eyed baby face printed somewhere on it. Gone are the days when the sleek Walkman defined Japanese industrial style. Today, while American and Taiwanese computer makers sweep the world with innovative and elegant designs, the main thrust in Japan is toasters in the shape of Hello Kitty.

The educational system has the effect, as Dr. Miyamoto has noted, of freezing children's emotional development at the level before they need to take adult responsibility for their lives; after decades of such a system, the end result is a massive national nostalgia for childhood. Comments Merry White, the author of The Material Child: Coming of Age in Japan and America, «We in the US are said to be a youth society, but what we really are is an adolescent society. That's what everyone wants to go back to. In Japan, it's childhood, mother, home that is yearned for, not the wildness of youth.»

In this there is a sobering reminder for those who expect that the new Japanese youth are going to cast off the trammels and bring revolutionary change to their country. If wild hairdos and tattoos meant wild and liberated people, then perhaps there might be some hope. But wild is not what it's about; it's about becoming a baby again.

If one were to look for the chief influence of Japanese modern culture on the outside world, it would definitely be in toys, games, comics, and fashion for children. In the United States and Europe, Japanese products such as Hello Kitty and Pokemon have been huge hits, but they appeal abroad almost exclusively to boys younger than twelve and girls younger than fifteen. As they mature, adolescent boys turn from Pokemon to games created by Americans and British designers, such as Myst or Doom, girls set aside Hello Kitty and start reading Seventeen or Elle. The same is true of anime (animated films), very few of which appeal to adults as did Disney's The Prince of Egypt; most series, such as Dragonball Z, beloved of nine-year-old boys, and Sailor Moon, a favorite of ten-to-fourteen-year-old girls, appeal to preadolescents.

It's a very different story inside Japan. Cute creations like Pokemon are targeted largely at adults, and the manufacturers of cute are among the few Japanese companies whose domestic profits actually grew during the 1990s stagnation. Sanrio, the maker of the Hello Kitty line (now expanded to more than fifty cute characters), grosses more than $1 billion a year through sales and licensing. Since the 1980s, animated films have taken first and second position in domestic cinemas almost every year, leaving films with real-life adult actors dead at the box office. Today, about half of all domestic film revenues come from anime.

The conquest of cute happened slowly, taking about thirty years to sweep all before it. The first step was when cute toys of the 1970s became cult objects for adult women in the 1980s; the next step was when, as Japan sank into recession in the 1990s, young male wage earners developed a taste for big-eyed cuddly creatures, and by the end of the century the conquest was near-complete. In 1999, a stuffed doll called Tare Panda with a round face, droopy eyes, and a soft body swept Japan, selling $250 million worth that year alone; most of the buyers were adult men. Takemono Katsunori, a thirty-four-year-old company worker in Tokyo, enthused, «A mere glance at it makes me melt.»

Mary Roach powerfully evokes the extent to which cute has conquered:

To anyone who knows Japan... the pull of the cute is a powerful and omnipresent force. The Japanese are born into cute and raised with cute. They grow up to save money with cute (Miffy the bunny on Asahi Bank ATM cards), to pray with cute (Hello Kitty charm bags at Shinto shrines), to have sex with cute (prophylactics decorated with Monkichi the monkey, a condom stretched over his body, entreating, «Would you protect me?»). They see backhoes painted to look like giraffes and police kiosks fixed up like gingerbread houses... Teenage boys tattoo themselves with Badtz-Maru, the Sanrio company's mischievous lumpy-headed penguin. Salarymen otherwise indistinguishable in their gray suits and cigarettes buy novelty cell phone straps adorned with plastic charms of their favorite cute characters: Thunder Bunny, Cookie Monster, Doraemon the robot cat. Cute is everywhere. They're soaking in it.

Japan is indeed soaked in cute, to the extent that it is no longer merely an amusing sidelight – one could fairly call it the cultural mainstream, and its influence reaches everywhere, from cinema to traditional arts.

Ikebana flower arranging provides a good opportunity to see how Japan's new environment and educational system are influencing the traditional arts. At the March 1997 official ikebana showing of the Tokyo Branch of Ikenobo School, Japan's oldest and most prestigious, with a lineage that dates to the sixteenth century, it could be seen that about half of each arrangement consisted of plastic. Flower arrangers wrapped petals around glitter hearts; they stapled stems to wires and rods; they draped branches with fiberglass mist and hung them with cutouts made from sheets of blue and orange vinyl; they painted thorns with acrylics, and encrusted leaves with Christmas-tree icicles. A lifetime spent in an ugly city surrounded by a degraded countryside will have its effect. Nature, for Japan's new flower masters, is half vinyl, wire, rubber, and paint. The one thing one might say in defense of this is that it honestly reflects the environment.

Even more thought-provoking in this Ikenobo show was the technical level of the arrangements. Those stapled and cutout leaves, glitter hearts, and the rest were put together with the amateurish zest one might find in a fourth-grade classroom. Flowers glued with epoxy mingled with bits of metallic foil and tubes of pink jelly – these are the work of children, not of adults.

While we are on the subject of flowers, there is no better field than this to study Japan's new «manual approach» to the arts, an outgrowth of the educational mode of telling students exactly what to think and do about everything. Flower schools such as Ikenobo and Hara have taken to diagramming their arrangements. Branch A stands at an 87-degree angle to the ground; Branch В turns away at a 32-degree angle to the right; and Branch С leans at precisely 55 degrees to the left. The tips of the branches must end within a triangle, with sides of such-and-such length.

Foreigners, and even Japanese new to a study of traditional arts, may assume that this rigid diagrammatic approach is a part of the tradition. But the opposite is true. Ikebana was a meditative practice, heavily influenced by Zen, taxing to the utmost the artist's spontaneous skill and sensitive observation of nature. Trying to duplicate a geometric shape was definitely not the point. Ikenobo Senno, the founder of the Ikenobo School and the father of ikebana, in the famous preface to his seminal essay on flowers in 1542, went out of his way to stress that the aim of ikebana was not to enjoy a shape but to bring out the basic nature of a flowering branch or tree, thereby mystically pointing the way toward the secrets of the universe.

From this point of view, what we see in modern ikebana books is a denial of everything that ikebana once stood for. The same goes for the modern tea ceremony, which also has manuals demonstrating how to sit and stand at every instant of the ceremony, and where to lay the utensils – exactly so many centimeters from the edge of the tatami, no more, no less. All this has the look and feel of tradition, but it's definitely not tradition. The rules in these manuals are newly invented, written especially for adults who have graduated from Japan's postwar schoolrooms.

All of this is not to say that Japan's culture, modern or traditional, has become hopelessly childish. The great fashion designer Miyake Issey, the inspired flower arranger Kawase Toshiro, the architect Ando Tadao, and other fine contemporary artists have shown a profound understanding of Japanese tradition and combined this with a contemporary outlook. The world rightly admires these great artists, yet back home in Japan they do not represent the mainstream, and in private they despair at what they see going on around them. For every exquisite pleated Issey vest sold in Aoyama, youngsters in Harajuku are buying myriad kawaii garments with oversize socks, sailor suits fringed in lace, purses embellished with the smiling face of adorable three-year-old Chibi Maruko-chan, and shoes that squeak. In the time that Ando completes one pure abstract structure, Hasegawa Itsuko and her followers have raised dozens of fuyu-type monuments across the land, each a kindergarten-style concatenation of fiberglass, metal cutouts, and plywood. For every lady pleased by Kawase's simple arrangements of a few flower petals and branches, tens of thousands of Ikenobo followers labor on manga-esque creations of foil and vinyl. The future belongs to them.

Well, not completely. I had an interesting encounter at that ikebana show that illustrates in a nutshell the difference between how the Japanese and foreigners look at Japan's cultural crisis. As I was walking down the rows of flower arrangements, I came across a young American woman who was studying ikebana in Tokyo and her middle-aged Japanese lady friend whom she had brought along to see the show. «Isn't the Japanese love of nature wonderful?» the American woman commented to me. «I guess so,» I replied. «But I see here some vinyl, here some fiberglass and leaves stapled to painted cardboard. Where's the nature?» The American ikebana practitioner grew angry. «Treating flowers this way is traditional!» she exclaimed.

The Japanese woman, who had not said a single word, joined in at this point. It turned out that she was not an ikebana practitioner herself; she had come along merely to see the art form that her foreign friend was so enthusiastic about. She had been walking around feeling vaguely uncomfortable, but in such a prestigious location and with her friend oohing and aahing, she had not felt confident in expressing her doubts. Hearing me, she relaxed and gave vent. «Yes!» she exclaimed. «These things are monstrous. This is environmental degradation, that's what it is!»

The American woman was typical of a phenomenon: the foreigner who converts to Japan, as one might convert to a religion. For her, announcing that flower arrangements of this type were «traditional» had all the weight of quoting the Bible. Tragically, she was unaware of how removed such arrangements really are from tradition; but she exemplified the many foreign writers, especially on culture, who continue to purvey modern Japanese arts to the world as unquestioning devotees. It's because of the existence of such converts that the real troubles in Japans environment, design, architecture, and cinema have never been expressed in the foreign media. For foreign students of Japan, it has been a long and chronic case of the Emperor's New Clothes.

The Japanese woman, however, had a healthy and natural response; she didn't care about tradition: ugly was ugly. Or, at a deeper level, she instinctively understood what the tradition should have been, and could feel without knowing exactly why that these arrangements were all wrong. The Japanese are not so nostalgic about their own culture that they have become blind to its problems. And in this lies the hope for revitalization and change.

One of the most fascinating phenomena of the new Japan is the explosion of wacky youth fashion, which is hugely influencing young people all over East Asia, and drawing a lot of attention in the Western press. The «look» is by now familiar from many a magazine article: spiky dyed hair, face entirely smoothed in heavy makeup to a shiny copper or caramel complexion, shaved and painted eyebrows, and high clunky shoes-plus lots of cute Hello Kitty accessories. The impact on East Asia is, in a sense, a healthy one, in that Asians are finally discovering their own identities, and the new styles coming out of Japan are in many ways better suited to their local cultures. Terry McCarthy writes: «Despite the marketing muscle of American record companies and film studios, there is an inevitable cultural shortfall – Asians may watch the American shows, but the bronzed, buffed bodies of Baywatch are not something that most Asian teens could (or even would) aspire to.» Nineteen-year-old fashion student Watanabe Eriko puts it succinctly: «It's stupid for the Japanese to compete with Western designers. . . .We should be selling our own Eastern styles to Asia, because Asians have the fashion sense and bodies to complement Japanese designs. Why must we go to Europe to dress tall blondes? Our aesthetic matches black hair and slimmer bodies better.»

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.

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.

There is one bright spot in this otherwise gloomy picture: anime. In contrast to the independent films, whose self-conscious artistic inventions do not attract a mass audience, anime have been top grossers for more than a decade. Innovative and visually striking, anime shared the lead box-office spots with foreign films for most of the 1990s. They tackle taboo subjects rarely seen in mainline film, such as war crimes and unethical business practices. The Heisei Badger War (1994) vividly depicted modern environmental destruction.

One could argue that independent films and the repetitive products of the Big Three filmmakers are both irrelevant to modern Japanese cinema. Porn and anime are overwhelmingly where the money and the audiences are. Japanese anime are the industry's most profitable export item. Those by the renowned producer Miyazaki Hayao (the director of 1997's hit Princess Mononoke, the highest-grossing Japanese film ever, and The Heisei Badger War) rise to a very sophisticated artistic level, yet unlike independent films, they are loved by the public – not only the Japanese public but young people worldwide.

Yet, as great as their success has been, even in anime we can see the telltale marks of stagnation. For one thing, anime never developed technically: while Japanese studios continued to paint pictures on celluloid with skills little changed from the 1930s, Pixar and Disney were inventing brand-new digital technology with dazzling visual effects that amazed the world in Toy Story, A Bug's Life, and Fantasia 2000. Furthermore, nothing can disguise the fact that in the end anime are essentially a children's medium. The really big hits, such as Pokemon and Sailor Moon (a favorite of the early-teen girl set), have none of the intellectual or aesthetic appeal of the famed works of Miyazaki Hayao – they are simply cute screenplay for little kids, and their very success underscores the vacuum at the adult end of the spectrum. In his closing years, Kurosawa sighed in an interview, «There is no hope for Japanese film companies. They have to be destroyed and rebuilt... The people accept only films they can understand, and what they can understand are only films with cats and dogs in them, not the modern world.»

Cinema provides a superb window into Japan's modern troubles, because all the patterns that afflict other aspects of national life come together here. One is monopoly. Three large companies-Toho, Toei, and Shochiku-have controlled most of the theaters and monopolized the business. They are shackled by the same seniority system that rules the rest of corporate Japan, with the result that producers prefer to work only in-house or with established directors with whom they have long-standing ties. In contrast to the frenzied telephone calling and «pitching» of new ideas that goes on in Hollywood, a deathly calm rules in Japan's studio offices.

We can sense the dead hand of bureaucracy weighing upon cinema: for decades, zoning rules made it hard to build theaters in suburbs and newly grown «bed-towns.» Cinemas did not benefit any branch of officialdom-so they haven't been built. In contrast, pachinko is a huge source of income for the police, whose retired officers run pachinko associations. (The police also profit massively from prepaid pachinko cards through their ownership in the card finance companies.) Therefore every tiny village and hamlet must raise a pachinko parlor.

Monopoly bred boredom among the public, and this actually had some good results in that the Big Three ceased to rely on their own products and started to buy independent films and put their own logos on them. This has been one way that independents break through. The other way is to find motion picture houses that are unaffiliated, and quietly these are increasing. After 1996 the number of movie theaters began to grow, for the first time in half a century, as American-style multiplexes entered big-city suburbs. Most of these, however, have foreign backing, such as Warner Bros., so it remains to be seen what these new theaters will do for the domestic industry.

By the end of the century, the Big Three were quietly running out of money. The budgets of Japanese films ran to a few million dollars at most, a scale of magnitude smaller than Hollywood's. In 1997, Shochiku reached the point where annual receipts from its entire movie division totaled only ¥3.4 billion-approximately $30 million, which would hardly produce one modest Hollywood feature. By 2000, Shochiku had given up: it sold its famous studio complex at Ofuna, fired most of its production staff, and retired from filmmaking, keeping only its distribution licenses. The Big Three had become the Big Two. As funds dried up, technological advance in film simply ceased. There were few inventive minds to spur innovation and no money to pay for it.

In 1995, I helped prepare the English subtitles for a Shochiku film, and I visited the famous Nikkatsu studios where so many of Japan's postwar films have been produced. I felt I'd stepped into a time tunnel: machinery decades old, cameramen standing on old orange crates to get height, piles of wires snaking over earthen floors, almost no computerization, no advanced lighting techniques – all in an aluminum Quonset hut.

There are other problems besides lack of money and outmoded technology, notably the degraded environment. The cities and countryside are so changed that it is difficult to produce a film with a beautiful backdrop, which Kurosawa complained about in his last days. When he directed the van Gogh episode in his Dreams (1990), he had to scour the entire country to find a site with no modern buildings or electric pylons where he could reproduce a French cornfield. Most other directors don't have the time, the budgets, or the obsessive perfectionism of Kurosawa, so they make do with painted backdrops, close-ups of leaves and running water, well-manicured temple and shrine grounds – hence the stilted, artificial quality of most recent Japanese films that take place in a natural setting.

While Japanese film was slowly sinking into quicksand, the rest of the world did not stand still. The contrast with the popular success of Chinese filmmaking in recent years could not be more striking (although when we speak here of China, we are combining three very different societies: mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong). Chinese films not only won awards from international juries but packed audiences into theaters worldwide. Ang Lee's 1993 The Wedding Banquet received an Oscar nomination and racked up global profits. Chen Kaige's Farewell, My Concubine took top prize at Cannes in 1994 and was named best foreign film in polls of Los Angeles and New York film critics.

In contrast to Japan's focus on the under-sixteen market, Chinese films appeal to adult audiences at three levels: high, middle, and low. There are the grand historical dramas by Chen Kaige; the domestic comedies of Ang Lee; and action thrillers by Jackie Chan and John Woo. Chinese society, with all its injustices, offers rich ground for the cinematic imagination. Japan's controlled modern life seems to offer little room for either grand drama or action thrills. If there is any hope for Japanese film, it lies in comedy, as is evidenced by the fact that the two most internationally successful Japanese films of the past fifteen years, Tampopo and Shall We Dance?, were both comedies. When a director like Suo takes Japan's bland society for his springboard, as he did in Shall We Dance?, there are rich comic possibilities. Unfortunately, very few directors are able to make Suo's leap. As Nagasaka has written, «The same narrow, insular, and complacent attitude that explains Japan's response – or better, the absence of a response – to the gulf war can be seen in the repetitive and unadventurous products of this country's motion picture industry.»

Finally, there is the problem of insularity. While Japanese directors went on making movies in the vein of self-pity and fear of foreign monsters, the Chinese walked right into the lair of the Hollywood beast and won him over. Ang Lee and Emma Thompson worked together on 1995's award-winning Sense and Sensibility. John Woo's Broken Arrow, starring John Travolta, and Jackie Chan's Rumble in the Bronx fought for the lead spot in U.S. box offices in March 1996, and since then Lee, Woo, and Chan have continued to produce hits. In 2000, John Woo swept America once more with M:I-2, the Mission: Impossible sequel. So many ambitious Chinese directors and actors have followed them that Hollywood now sports a mini-Hong Kong in its midst.

Chinese contemporary film is notable because it sought a new market abroad. Hong Kong directors moved to Hollywood because their own film industry declined. As for the mainland, most of the films by internationally renowned Chinese directors have not been popular at home, and the ones that had the potential to be were held back or repressed by government censors. Chinese directors began, as Japanese independents did, with niche marketing, aiming their products at foreign festivals. In the next stage, however, Chinese films parted ways with Japanese. They moved out of the art houses and became international hits.

By 2000, U.S. studios were producing movies by Tsui Hark and Ang Lee in Hong Kong. «What makes Hong Kong cinema successful is its energy and spirit, and I was mindful to harness that,» said Barbara Robinson, the manager of Columbia Pictures Film Production Asia. Meanwhile, Peter Chan, freshly returned to Hong Kong from directing The Love Letter for Dreamworks SKG, announced in May 2000 that he was founding a company to produce Asian films for Asians-and that he would begin by linking up with Thai and Korean directors.

As for Japan, there has never been a successful joint Western-Japanese or Asian-Japanese film, or any highly regarded Japanese film set in another country. There are no crossover directors or producers; and since Toshiro Mifune in the 1960s and 1970s, there has never been a major crossover actor from Japan, as there have been from Hong Kong and China. In recent years, Taiwan-born Kaneshiro Takeshi has made a name for himself in the avant-garde films of Wong Kar-Wai, but he is no match for the big international stars such as Chow Yun-Fat, Michelle Yeoh, Jet Li, and Vivian Wu. Thomas McLain, a film-industry lawyer in Los Angeles, sums it up: «The Japanese entertainment industry is in the dark ages.»

Education is a subject fraught with emotion, given that it is one of the chief means whereby a nation maintains its cultural identity. Conservative politicians and the Ministry of Education vigorously defend Japan's educational system for doing just that, but the problem is: Which cultural identity is being preserved? As we have seen in the case of ikebana and the tea ceremony, much that masquerades as hallowed tradition today is in fact brand-new.

The uptight manual-bound tea masters of today bear very little resemblance to their playful forebears. Now a tea master has to consult a reference book to tell him which flower to place in the tokonoma alcove during the rainy season. But in early Edo, Kobori Enshu, when his guests entered the tearoom after an afternoon shower, simply took a bucket of water and splashed it in the tokonoma. Students of ikebana diligently calculating the exact angle of each flowering branch may think they are studying «tradition,» but the angles and triangles come from another planet from the mystical world of Ikenobo Senno.

When Nakano Kiyotsugu confessed himself baffled at the new rules that seem to have sprung up in daily life, he was telling us that the rigidly conventional lifestyle of today is in fact something new Nothing like the strict adherence to rules we see today ever existed in Japan before. For all the shoguns' attempts at control, the Edo period was a riot of variety and eccentricity. Saikaku and his freewheeling townsmen friends would find today's incessant announcement of aisatsu greetings, the rules telling everyone what to do at every moment, very much at odds with their experience.

Even at the height of mid-twentieth-century militaristic fanaticism, there was more room in Japan for characterful individuality than there is today, as one discovers when one meets older Japanese. People who were educated before the war (now in their seventies and eighties) seem to have kept more of their humanity than students of recent years. Among this older generation, one constantly meets cultured, questioning people, often with a sly sparkle in the eye and a wicked tongue. And, of course, in the confused years immediately after World War II, education was especially relaxed. This relative openness in education bore fruit in the 1960s and 1970s in a cultural rebirth similar to theTaisho Renaissance of the 1920s. In business, this was the era when upstart entrepreneurs at Honda and Sony created giant international corporations not linked to the large keiretsu groupings. In the cultural sphere, the cinema directors Kurosawa and Ozu, the fashion designer Miyake Issey, the writer MishimaYukio, the architect Ando Tadao, the Kabuki actor Bando Tamasaburo – names that symbolize Japan's modern cultural achievement – all of whom were educated before the war or in the two decades after it, did their finest work.

The window of opportunity stayed open only for one generation, about twenty years. Behind the scenes, opposing forces were at work as the bureaucrats solidified their grip on power and the cement began to set on the teaching system. While artists flourished in the 1960s and 1970s, schools were training the next generation according to a detailed regimen more far-reaching than anything Japan, or the world, had ever seen. By 1980, these students had matured and the story of the Taisho Renaissance repeated itself. A gray curtain-or, rather, a colorful banner decorated with big-eyed baby faces – descended over Japan. Among the artists who dazzled the world so briefly, few have any successors who can hope to duplicate or transcend their achievements. From here on in, it's Hello Kitty, and ikebana flowers glued to tubes of pink jelly.

In the 1930s, the secret police stifled Japan's intellectual and artistic freedom with the help of truncheons and handcuffs. In the 1980s and 1990s, kindergarten teachers, armed only with loudspeaker systems, do the same work much more effectively.