By Mark Schilling
Japan and Korea are cultural cousins, with ties that go back thousands of years. Their
languages, customs and even cityscapes bear striking resemblances. Not surprisingly,
Japan is the biggest overseas non-expat market for Korean popular culture, including
films. But as the recent Japan release of Kang Je-gyu's war drama Brotherhood
(Taegukgi) shows, gaps still exist in the way Japanese and Koreans consume each other's
cultural products. Released in Korea in February, this film about two brothers who end up
fighting on opposite sides in the Korean War soared to 10 million admissions in only 39
days and started a national conversation about the war and its aftermath.
Released in Japan by UIP on June 26, Brotherhood was expected to surpass the Japanese
box office record for a Korean film of Y1.85 billion ($17.0 million) set in 2000 by Shiri,
a spy thriller also directed by Kang. But while debuting strongly on the nine-major-cities
chart, with a screen average of $43,309, Brotherhood is, said a UIP publicist, "performing
a little below expectations." Japanese fans, he said are less interested in the film's titanic
battles, reminiscent of the D-Day assault in Saving Private Ryan, more in the drama of
two brothers separated by war and the two stars -- Jang Dong-gun and Won Bin -- who
play them. Both have become popular in Japan for their appearances in Korean TV
dramas, which have become hot import items following the smash ratings success of
Yoon Suk-ho's 2002 mini-series Winter Sonata on pubcaster NHK.
These two factors carry more weight with female fans, who account for 50 percent of the
film's audience -- just as UIP planned. "Japanese aren't that interested or familiar with
the Korean War," explained the publicist, "so we've tried to sell the film in other ways."
Meanwhile, Japanese films and TV dramas have struggled to find audiences in Korea. Six
months after the Korean government opened cable and satellite pay channels to
broadcasts of Japanese TV dramas in January, hardly any of the 40 aired have become
hits, according to a recent governmental survey. Only one, NTV's Gokusen, has passed
the 1 percent ratings mark considered the measure of a hit. Would a Japanese war movie
make a bigger impression? Don't count on it. Koreans still have bitter memories of the
long Japanese occupation of their country that ended in 1945 -- and are unlikely to thrill
to the Japanese counterparts of Jang and Won's uniformed characters, brothers or no.
