The Problem

Japan is the third-largest box office market in the world, behind the shared US/Canada market and China, which only passed Japan as recently as 2012. It’s a huge market, and for years and years Japan has watched the same Hollywood movies that the United States watches. Look at the top earning movies in Japan over the past decade and it won’t look too different to the top movies in the United States: Harry Potter, Pirates of the Caribbean, and so on. Of the top ten opening weekends in Japanese cinema history, only one isn’t American-made: One Piece Film Z. The biggest Hollywood films will gross 80 to 120 million dollars in Japan, such huge jumbo numbers that it’s hard to get your head around.

But in 2012, that changed. While The Avengers was setting box office records around the world and other movies like The Dark Knight Rises and The Hunger Games, Skyfall, and the Spider-Man reboot were making hundreds of millions of dollars, Japan had no interest in any of it. Every single Hollywood movie was beaten that year by Umizaru 4, a Japanese Coast Guard drama based on the manga of the same name; Thermae Romae, another manga-inspired live action film about an ancient Roman bathhouse architect who finds a tunnel to modern Japan; the millionth Bayside Shakedown movie, a spectacularly successful Japanese police comedy-dramas; and the aforementioned One Piece Film Z. The top-earning American-made movie was Les Miserables, which earned a relatively weak $62 million. The blockbuster of the year, The Avengers, only earned $42 million in Japan, and Hollywood realized that they might be about to lose the world’s third-largest box office to the suddenly dominant Toho and Toei studios.

The Plan

So Hollywood set out to make movies that they thought would appeal to Japan. Of the Big Eight studios, four released films within the past year and a half that seemed to take on this basic goal of “doing something Japanese to recapture their market”:

Disney produced an animated film about video games called Wreck-It Ralph in most of the world, but called Sugar Rush in Japan. The basic idea for Wreck-It Ralph had been sitting on a desk at Disney since the late ‘80s, but it got picked up and quickly produced with an unprecedented amount of Japanese cooperation: Licensing deals with Nintendo, Sega, and other Japanese companies, a marketing campaign starring the Japanese geek comedy duo Yoiko, and even an AKB48 song and video with the same name as the movie.

Warner Bros. released Pacific Rim, a Guillermo del Toro tribute to kaiju films. The movie includes characters and segments about the defense of the Japanese, American, Chinese, and Russian Pacific coasts (Hey! Can you name four of the five largest box office markets?), and Pacific Rim also cast Japanese actress Rinko Kikuchi as the female lead.

Fox bewildered some people when they announced they were making another Wolverine movie, only this time set in Japan and with a number of Japanese actors, including Hiroyuki Sanada. Yes, even though The Wolverine may have had a fairly weak plot justification for sending Hugh Jackman to Japan, the economic factors may have been a bit stronger.

And finally, Universal gave us 47 Ronin, an American version of a classic Japanese tale with virtually all Japanese actors besides Keanu Reeves. Fraught with re-writes and re-edits to determine exactly how Japanese the movie should be, the film was such an overt attempt to earn Japanese box office that it was a marketing disaster when 47 Ronin debuted at #5 in its opening weekend in Japan, ahead of its American release.

The Results

And the beautiful part is that all this effort, all this extra attention toward trying to bring Japan back into the Hollywood fold, resulted in a second straight year of Japanese ambivalence to American movies, with the Japanamerican movie attempts doing even worse than normal. Monsters University was Hollywood’s only clear hit in the Japanese box office, earning $90 million, followed, surprisingly, by a subtitled version of Seth MacFarlane’s wise-cracking stuffed animal bro-comedy Ted at $44 million. The rest of the Japanese box office top 10 are domestic products like Miyazaki’s latest film The Wind Rises and Lupin III vs. Conan.

Wreck-It Ralph earned a disappointing $30 million, worse than Cars 2 or Up or Tangled did in Japan in previous years, and only slightly better than Brave. Yet it was the best success of these four “Japanamerican” movies. Pacific Rim made $14.5 million. The Wolverine earned $8 million. And 47 Ronin: Only $2.8 million.

Besides 47 Ronin, the movies all made a modest profit (going by the standard rule of thumb: movies generally break even when they gross twice their production budget worldwide), but none of them did well in Japan, the place they were supposed to win back for Hollywood. If the studios’ strategy with these curiously Japan-heavy films was in fact to win back the Japanese box office, then they failed miserably. (If their objective was to get Rinko Kikuchi some more work then hey, good job.)

The plan didn’t work, and it’s not terribly hard to see why. Japan has never had a problem with non-Japanese actors and non-Japanese settings before, so giving them that is a very shallow approach to the problem. An anonymous U.S. studio marketing executive told Variety that he thought Hollywood had a tone problem and an audience problem in Japan: “What we’d like to see are more family-oriented films. Too many films coming out of Hollywood are rather dark and depressing — there’s not a lot that families can take their kids to.” And media consultant Geoffrey Bossiere attributed Japanese disinterest to the tone of violence and destruction in even the more light-hearted American blockbusters like The Avengers.

One last diagnosis: America (and many other countries) love comic book adaptations, and Japan loves to go see manga adaptations. Hollywood can’t stop making Marvel and DC superhero movies, which take in boatloads domestically and in other English-speaking countries like the United Kingdom and Australia. But with the slight exception of Spider-Man movies, superhero movies have never made much money in Japan, whether that’s a tone problem (dark, violent, and so on) or just a lack of interest in the characters.

So, although a new Godzilla movie is on the horizon, this is probably the end of this swath of American movies with Japanese actors, themes, and settings, at least if Hollywood does what it usually does, that being going where the money is.

If you’ve seen any of these films, you’ll probably intuitively understand why they didn’t do well in Japan… and in some cases America as well. And, if you haven’t heard the bad news yet… check out John’s Tofugu review of 47 Ronin. Basically, don’t spend your own money on going to see it, especially if those moneys are counted in yen.

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Bonus Wallpapers!

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Sources:

• The Wall Street Journal – China Is Now No. 2 Box Office Behind U.S.
• Motion Picture Association of America – Theatrical Market Statistics, 2012
• Box Office Mojo
• Edge – Sonic Team’s Sugar Rush
• Variety – Japan: Hollywood No Longer Dominates Box Office

Nintendo is one such magical company of magical products, so we’ll be looking today at their founder, Hiroshi Yamauchi, pictured below.

Before you start thinking that this is a tale of another Walt Disney-esque creator, I should stop your expectations right there. Sure, his results with Nintendo prove his genius, but you’ll have to leave the ウィリー・ウォンカ fantasies aside… that is, unless you want to imagine Shigeru Miyamoto as an Oompa Loompa, and nobody wants that.

Harsh Hiroshi

Look at that whimsical, magical place. You know they’ve gotta have an underground ice cream roller coaster in there!

Hiroshi Yamauchi was the president of Nintendo from 1949 to 2002. He led the company not only to financial success in the video game era, but was the reason the company made video games at all. It would be easy enough to say that Yamauchi saw the future and transformed his family’s playing card company into one of video games through sheer vision. But it was more of an accidental process than that, and it certainly had nothing to do with whimsy.

Unlike Wonka, who brought prosperity to his company with trippy boat rides and musical numbers, Hiroshi Yamauchi did it with harsh criticism and mass firings. When he was asked to become president in 1949 by his dying grandfather, Hiroshi agreed on one condition: the firing of all other family members at Nintendo. This resulted in only one person, his older cousin, being let go and is also a really roundabout way of telling this cousin, “I hate you.” Immediately after becoming president, Yamauchi faced a strike of factory workers who thought he would fold on account of he was only twenty-one years old. Instead, he fired them all on account of he was the president. This led to a clean sweep of the company during which the young prez fired many long-time employees who had dedicated their lives to Nintendo.

During the video game years of the early eighties, Hiroshi Yamauchi hired his son-in-law, Minoru Arakawa, to run Nintendo operations in America and he was smart to do so. Arakawa wasn’t hired because of family ties. He was a solid businessman with an MIT education and a reputation for successfully managing a Japanese construction firm in Canada. But when Arakawa had a hard time gaining a foothold in the American market with the Nintendo Famicom (Japanese NES), Yamauchi was not hesitant to remark “a more competent person would have no trouble marketing the Famicom in the United States.” Straight to the point, that one is.

Risky Business

Young Yamauchi with Roy O. Disney during a meeting that actually made Nintendo a lot of money, which Yamauchi would later lose on three bad business deals.

The image most projected of Yamauchi was his severity. But as a businessman, he was also shrewd, very forward-thinking and not all that conservative. Certainly by our modern standards for a “forward-thinking” boss, Hiroshi Yamauchi looks conservative, though. There was no ping-pong table in the break room or “bring your shorts to work day.” But when it came to taking a chance on young talent or uncertain ideas, he was certainly not playing it safe.

Yamauchi realized early on that the world of playing cards was only so big. After a recon visit to the world’s largest playing card company (in beautiful Cincinnati!) he was disappointed to find it was a fairly small-scale operation. Upon returning to Kyoto, he took his company public and started a series of risky ventures to bring Nintendo greater success than it had ever seen with stupid ol’ playing cards. He started with instant rice packets, which immediately flopped. Apparently people like waiting for their rice. The anticipation is what makes it taste good. Then he started a taxi company called Daiya, but he quickly grew tired of negotiating with the unions over ridiculous demands like getting paid. Finally, he started a love hotel (which is exactly what you think it is), but ended up being his own best customer and this venture was also a failure.

Though these examples do not display Yamauchi’s business acumen, it certainly shows his bold and non-conservative nature. A conservative businessman would have stuck with playing cards. Actually, at the time he took over, Nintendo was doing so well with its playing card business that there was no reason make a change. But Yamauchi was ambitious and willing to try something different even if it made no sense. Really, if you think about it, it’s the same as if I became president of a greeting card company and said, “Hey guys! I know we’re really successful making greeting cards, but I’d like to take our money resources and start producing cat sweaters.” I would immediately be thrown out the window. But no one dared to throw Yamauchi out the window because he would’ve fired them before hitting the ground.

Whispers of the Art

Gunpei Yokoi and Shigeru Miyamoto, two of Yamauchi’s best decisions.

Yamauchi had brought Nintendo to the brink of bankruptcy with his ideas and it was only the 1960s. He was going to have keep the company going until at least 1982 when they could start making the big money. Thankfully, almost every decision Yamauchi made from 1966 onward was successful. As Nintendo transformed into a toy company, he began to display what was arguably his most visionary aspect: his ability to take chances on young talent.

Contrary to the Mr. Burns stereotype we are wont to place him in, Hiroshi Yamauchi recognized brilliant people who had talents he did not, and gave them opportunities to create. He handpicked Gunpei Yokoi, creator of the Game Boy, from his factory floor and gave a job to Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of Mario and Zelda, despite Miyamoto’s dreamy and incredibly non-businesslike persona. A real stuffy businessman would have turned these two daydreaming ne’er-do-wells away, along with the countless other Nintendo innovators over the years. The book Game Over by David Sheff has the best insight on this:

“Nintendo would, Yamauchi decided, become a haven for video-game artists, for it was artists, not technicians,who made great games.”

Growing Up

So Hiroshi Yamauchi was smart at business and a little harsh. Actually, most sources I’ve read describe him as “notoriously harsh” or “imperialistic.” He was quick to dish out criticism and made his employees compete for his approval. In my research on Nintendo over the years, I have mostly focused on the creators and innovators at Nintendo and only read about Yamauchi as it related to them. This had cemented a picture in my mind of Yamauchi as the uncreative business-oni that sucked money from his hard working, jovial video game creators. Certainly there is a lot of truth to this oni image, but it wasn’t until after his recent death that I discovered a different side of him.

Hiroshi Yamauchi’s father, Shikanojo, abandoned his family when Hiroshi was five years old. Hiroshi’s mother then threw him into the care of his grandparents, who raised him with the same strictness that they used on their employees. During the War, Hiroshi was still too young to fight, so his studies were put on hold for an assignment in a military factory. When he finally returned to his studies, he gained entrance to the prestigious Waseda University to study law, but was forced to drop out yet again, this time to take over the family business.

Shortly after Hiroshi became Nintendo’s president, his father, Shikanojo, returned to see his son. Whether by anger or pride, Hiroshi refused to see his father and turned him away. When Hiroshi was close to thirty, he got word that his father had passed away and immediately regretted missing the chance for reconciliation. He grieved openly for days and regularly visited his father’s grave for the rest of his life. This made Shikanojo the second father figure with whom Hiroshi lost his chance for acceptance. Hiroshi’s grandfather had died regarding his grandson as impudent and foolish, never seeing his years of success. Though Hiroshi’s mother was around, she became more like an aunt than a mother and his grandmother was no different. In essence, between four parental figures, Hiroshi Yamauchi received plenty of material care and support, but little else. His history really helps to explain his style of business.

Retirement And Beyond

Upon his retirement, Yamauchi refused his pension of close to $14 million, stating that he felt Nintendo could put it to better use. It’s not that he was without avarice. You don’t become the 12th richest man in Japan without liking money just a little. But unlike the bloated CEOs who get fired and take a hefty severance at the expense of the company, Hiroshi Yamauchi looked out for his company’s and employees’ well-being, albeit firing them / squashing their pride from time to time.

So was he Wonka, Mr. Burns or Scrooge? Really, none of the above. We like it when people in high positions are easy to define. This guy’s bad, this guy’s good, this guy was bad but is now good because some ghosts scared him, etc. I read some comments about Yamauchi shortly before he died and they were all about how he was a vampire and evil and crazy (he did say some nutty stuff over the years). But after his death, articles all over the web were touting him as a visionary genius. The truth is that Hiroshi Yamauchi was a human man. He treated a lot of people badly, got hurt a lot in his early life, made good and bad decisions, donated a lot of money to charity, and gave opportunities to artists that made a lot of us really happy. He was complex and the story of his life is incredibly interesting. And that is perhaps the best and truest way to remember his personal legacy.

Sources Referenced:

• Game Over by David Sheff
• The First Quarter by Steven L. Kent
• http://thepunkeffect.com/?p=11804
• http://www.usgamer.net/articles/hiroshi-yamauchi-the-iron-fist-in-the-velvet-glove
• http://www.n-sider.com/contentview.php?contentid=224
• http://www.nindb.net/feature/history-of-nintendo.html

And while it’s true that there are clearly big, fundamental differences between Western and Japanese animation, there’s a lot more similarities than people acknowledge. One of the best examples I can think of is Kimba the White Lion, a manga-turned anime series from the 60^s.

Kimba (or “Jungle Emperor” in Japanese) has existed in virtually every form of media in Japan. Like most franchises, Kimba started out as manga, but was turned into an anime, a made-for-TV movie, and an actual movie with a theatrical release.

The series itself is interesting now mostly because of its creator, the Godfather of Anime, Osamu Tezuka; but it’s also interesting because of how it influenced a Disney movie: The Lion King.

The Two Lions

Even if you’ve never seen Kimba the White Lion before, you can tell that the anime and The Lion King share more similarities than can be coincidental.

From the names of the two protagonists (Kimba and Simba), to the character designs of the two franchises, to even some of the scenes and shots, the two franchises have a remarkable amount in common.

Rotten Tomatoes has a quick video recap of some of the more obvious similarities, and Cracked has a pretty good roundup of some of the similarities too.

Kimba is not, by any means, the first story that Disney has borrowed heavily from; just look at Grimm’s fairy tales or The Thief and the Cobbler (seriously, look at The Thief and the Cobbler).

And while the similarities are pretty jarring, it might be a little too hasty to say that Disney just completely ripped off Kimba wholesale. Not only are there pretty significant differences between the two stories, but it wouldn’t be fair to have this discussion without talking about what anime took from Disney.

Disney’s Contributions to Anime

The creator of Kimba, legendary manga artist Osamu Tezuka, was an enormous fan of Disney back in the day. Tezuka devoured Disney comic books and movies, reportedly seeing the movie Bambi 80 times. I don’t think I’ve seen any movie that many times (nor do I want to).

It’s clear that the characters and stories of Disney had an incredible impact on Tezuka. His large-eyed character design, which became a hallmark of Japanese art, was influenced by the style of Western characters like Bambi and others.

“Thumper-kun, stop being so tsundere!”

I guess the takeaway with Kimba and The Lion King is that culture is an exchange, not a one-way street. Artists get inspiration indiscriminately from all over the place, regardless of where in the world they’re located; and especially more recently with the advent of the internet, Japanese and Western artists are influencing each other more than ever before.

Even though Disney doesn’t acknowledge any relationship between The Lion King and Kimba the White Lion, maybe it’s best to think of The Lion King as an homage to Tezuka and Kimba.

But if Pixar’s next movie is about a robot boy named “Astro Dude,” we might not be able to let Disney off the hook.