By Mark Schilling
The Japanese have long taken disaster movies to their hearts. In the genre's 1970s heyday
local audiences flocked to films like The Towering Inferno (Japan's biggest foreign hit of
1975) Earthquake (second only to The Exorcist in 1974) and The Poseidon Adventure
(second only to Enter the Dragon in 1973). Even Waterworld, proclaimed a disaster itself
in the US, did well in Japan, ranking fifth at the box office among all foreign films
released in 1993.
The latest attempt to revive the genre, The Day After Tomorrow, hit the Japanese box
office like a tsunami following its June 5 release. In its first week it entered the
nine-major-cities chart at number one, with a $95,440 screen average.
Distributor Fox expects the film to pass the Y6.0 billion ($55 million) mark in Japan --
about half the Japanese gross of director Roland Emmerich's 1997 Independence Day,
but entirely respectable given the summer competition, including Harry Potter and the
Prisoner of Azkaban (opening in Japan in June 26), Spider-Man 2 (July 10) and Shrek 2
(July 24), as well as the highly anticipated Katsuhiro Otomo animation Steamboy (July
17). Even so, if Emmerich and his producers had included a few scenes of Mt. Fuji
burying Tokyo in volcanic ash and glaciers advancing across Hokkaido -- they might have
added millions to their box office total.
The disaster genre is a natural for Japan, a land of earthquakes, volcanoes and, of course,
tsunami. In addition to every natural calamity known to man, Japan has frequently been
visited by man-made catastrophes in its long history, from the fires that devastated its
pre-modern wooden cities to the atomic bombings that obliterated Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. This history, particularly the nuclear part of it, found expression in Godzilla, a
fire-breathing disaster in monster drag who has stomped and blasted his way through
Japanese cities for 50 years. Now Toho is preparing the 28th and last installment of the
Godzilla series for New Year's release -- with the hope that it will finally outdistance the
Hollywood competition.
