LA Times--April 4, 1990; Section F, p1, column 4

 JAPAN'S MOTION-PICTURE INDUSTRY IS LEARNING THAT THE SUN ALSO SINKS
 FILM: Despite the reputation of it's classic cinema, the business is
starving for good scripts but churning out plenty of movies that
rarely make a profit.

 by Karl Schoenberger

  TOKYO--After nearly 11 years of reveiwing Japanese films in a
weekly column for the Asahi Evening News, critic Alan Booth threw in
the towel last December with a one word verdict on the latest
Godzilla movie:
  "Monstrous."
  He went on to pan the state of contemporary Japanese cinema.
Booth, a trenchant British writer who first came to Japan in 1970 to
study noh drama, confessed that he enjoyed only a couple dozen of the
510 Japanese movies he had reviewed.  A mere handful had been
"memorable."
  "Most of the time, buying a ticket and going into a cinema has been
a chore, not a pleasure,"  Booth wrote. "In all honesty, I think that
a weekly review of Japanese films is an unnecessarily promiscuous use
of recycled rain forest timber."
  Such peevishness may seem at odds with the international reputation
of Japan's classic cinema.  Only the other day, Hollywood paid homage
to one of the great Japanese directors--the venerable Akira Kurosawa,
80, creator of "Rashoman," "Seven Samarai" and "Ran"--with an
honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement.
  But from the vantage point of the theatre seat in Tokyo, Kurusawa
and his ilk are phantoms of the past.  The Japanese motion-picture
industry is now at its nadir, starving for good scripts, stifling
creativity with miserly production budgets and churning out a lot of
trashy movies that rarely make much money.
  Consider last year's No. 1 box office hit, "Kiki's Delivery
Service," which pulled in about $35 million in ticket sales.  This
was an animated  film about a clumsy adolescent witch who delevers
packages by broomstick.  Animator Hayao Miyazaki lumped dirigibles
with television sets in an oddly incoherent European landscape, where
signs at the boulangerie are written in (missing part here, I don't
know what happened..a Times Boo-boo I think)
  Miyazaki's fable about the rite of passage into teen-age
self-confidence still managed to outshine most of the rest of the
domestic film industry's 1989 crop, at least in term's of  screenplay
and production quality. And Kiki's acting was arguably more realistic
than the melodramatic outbursts of her human colleagues.
  "Why is it that contemporary Japan is so advanced economically, but
has so few serious movies to show the world it's culture?" asked
Kazuki Komori, a veteran film critic and James Dean fanatic who
visits her idol's grave in Indiana every summer.
   "I see a lot of foreign films, so when I review Japanese
productions I've got to lower my standards drastically," said Komori,
81, who wore gold tights and pancake makeup during a recent interview
at the "movie cafe" she runs in Tokyo's Roppongi entertainment
district. "The scripts are so bad to begin with [that] there's not
much you could do, even with the best of actors."
   Japan's most prestigious film of 1989 was "Black Rain" (Kuroi
Ame), in which director SHohei Imamura ministers over an agonizing,
sentimental adadptation of Masuji Ibuse's classic novel about a
family's suffering caused by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
   "Black Rain" swept the Japanese equivelent of the Academy Awards,
garnered two prizes at the Cannes Film Festival and drew enthusiastic
audiences in Paris and New York.
   Curiously, the movie's cinematographic style-grainy black and
white-is a throwback to the 1950s.  The viewer looks back with
nostalgia to the "golden era" of Japanese cinema, when directors like
Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasajiro Ozu attracted international
acclaim--Imamura himself did some of his better work.
  Although the A-bomb melodrama was an artistic success, it put on a
flat performance at the box office. "Kiki" the colorful cartoon
movie, took in 27 times more in receipts than "Black Rain." But the
little witch earned only half as much as the top imported film of
last year, the latest Indiana Jones installment, according to the
trade magazine Kinema Jumpo.
   "You have to be a little crazy to make quality films in Japan,"
Imamura said the other day. "My work may have a high artistic
reputaion, but I don't make any money at this.  I'm not starving, but
I have lot's of debts."
   Imamura, 63, lives on a modest salary from a filmmaking school he
founded.
   Ironically, while independant producer-directors like Imamura are
struggling to raise cash for their films, a surge of Japanese capital
is now flowing into Hollywood.