By Mark Schilling
Japan and Korea are not only close geographically -- the ferry trip from Hakata to Busan takes less than three hours -- but share similar cultural, social and religious roots. In the arts, the exchange goes back two millennia and more -- and is still continuing, as the flood of Korean films and TV dramas into the Japanese market shows.
For decades after Japan ended its occupation of the Korean peninsula in 1945, however, the Korean government forbade the import of Japanese pop culture products, including films. Officials cited fears of Japanese cultural imperialism, as well as the need to protect the country's fledging entertainment industry, . Meanwhile, the Koreans made little of interest to Japanese audiences, save for the occasional art or erotic film.
A breakthrough came in 2000 with the release of Kang Je-gyu's political thriller Shiri, which grossed $18 million -- a record for a Korean film in Japan. Even bigger was Winter Sonata, a Korean TV drama series that Japanese pubcaster NHK began broadcasting in April 2003. The show became a social phenomenon, with middle-aged Japanese women worshipping series star Bae Yong-jun like the second coming of John Lennon, while snapping up Winter Sonata DVDs, magazines and books. The total economic impact in Japan alone, according to the Dai-chi Life Research Institute: $1.15 billion. Now the floodgates are open, with the Japanese distributors importing seemingly every Korean film and TV drama produced.
What the Japanese call the "hanryu" ("Korean wave") has also washed over the domestic film industry. The most obvious manifestations are the Japanese remakes of Korean films. One Missed Call, Takashi Miike's reworking of the Korean horror hit The Phone, grossed Y14.4 million last year -- more than any local film in what is supposed to be a hot Japanese genre. In the works is Shunichi Nagasaki's Christmas In August, a remake of the 1998 Jin Ho-hur romantic drama that was an early hanryu hit in Japan.
In a broader sense, however, the entire Japanese film business is now a Korean remake in progress. The Korean film boom has had strong government support -- and now the Japanese government, after decades of ignoring the film industry, is following suit with far-reaching plans for regulatory change, financial support and infrastructure improvements.
Most of the Korean hits have been made by under-forty directors. Now the major Japanese producers, after years of relying on graying veterans for their big films, are hiring more young up-and-comers with backgrounds in television, advertising, music videos and indie films. The hottest director at the moment is Isao Yukisada, a 36-year-old former indie upstart whose romantic drama Crying Out Love In the Centre of the World grossed $82 million in 2004. Fuji TV, the most active and successful film producer among Japan's five networks, has entrusted one project after another to younger directors, beginning with TV-trained Katsuyuki Motohiro, the 39-year-old director of the megahit Bayside Shakedown films .
Successful Korean films may have fresh, catchy marketing hooks, but often rely on straightforward appeals to core emotions and cultural values. Forty-plus Japanese women adored Winter Sonata for its wholesome story of pure-hearted love that reminded them of the Japanese dramas of their youth.
Since the New Wave of the nineties, Japanese producers have tried to appeal to young trendies by upping the sex, violence and strangeness ante (see the oeuvre of Takashi Miike for fifty or so examples). Now, they are reversing course, with more inspiring, uplifting and tear-wringing films. Among those now on release are Takashi Minamoto's Tokyo Tower, whose story of a college boy's passionate affair with a wealthy but love-starved older woman is pitched directly at the Winter Sonata fan base, and Ryoichi Kimizuka's Makoto, a melodrama about a forensic doctor who gets clues to cases from the ghosts of victims, but agonizes over his inability to communicate with his dead wife.
Many more are on the way, including Fuji TV's Shining Boy and Little Randy, starring Yuya Yagira (Nobody Knows) as a troubled Japanese teen who gets his groove back working as an elephant trainer in Thailand, Toei's Fly Daddy Fly, a drama about an unusual friendship between a high school boy and a man wrestling with a mid-life crisis and Toho's This Heart Full of Love (Kono Mune Ippai no Ai o), a drama about a man who time-travels back to his boyhood and encounters a woman he secretly admired.
Japanese mainstream war films long tended to be feature-length memorial services for the heroic dead, pitched at the now quickly vanishing war generation. Meanwhile, Korea filmmakers have had more success in their local market with military-themed action films for a wider demographic. Now the Japanese have followed suit, with first-timer Eiichiro Hazumi's Umizaru, a 2004 film about Japan Coast Guardsmen training to be elite deep-sea divers, and effects specialist Shinji Higuchi's directorial debut Lorelei,, about a subarmine crew ordered to stop an American atomic bombing run in the final days of World War II.
The Japanese producers involved in these projects and others like them would probably deny any direct Korean influence, while pointing to local factors shaping their development decisions. (Strong cultural pride is another characteristic Japanese and Koreans share.) But the local audience, by buying into the Korean boom with unabashed enthusiasm, are sending them a message even the most chauvinistic of them cannot ignore: the Korean way works.
