1989, The Year in Japanese Cinema: An Introduction

Chief Cabinet Secretary Keizo Obuchi
announces the Heisei era

I was recently watching a few films in my collection and happened to notice how many great films were released in the year 1989 in Japan. It was a very interesting year in Japanese entertainment as it was the last hurrah of the opulent bubble economy, right before the eventual crash. This ten part series will look at nine films released that year, from big budgeted anime epics, family films, low budget off the wall guerrilla filmmaking, the trend in ero guro (erotic grotesque), and a resurgence in both tokusatsu film making and yakuza cinema. While most retrospectives of any film era just dive straight into the films themselves, I thought it might be a better idea to look at the political and social landscape of Japan and more broadly the world beforehand to understand how these films where shaped and what kind of social environment they were being released into.

Japan was on the cusp of a new era, quite literally. In early January of that year, Emperor Showa (better known as to the public as Hirohito) eventually succumbed to a long, drawn-out battle with duodenal cancer. It was the end of the Showa era which began in 1926. With his son Akihito ascending to the throne the following day, this new era was declared to be Heisei era. Turbulent social issues and changes, and economic events dramatic reshaped society and the entertainment industry over the next decade and beyond.

Funeral of Emperor Showa (Hirohito)

If you’re around my age, you might remember 1989 as being quite a turbulent period full of change but also an era of hope. It was the year of a wave of revolutions sweeping the Eastern Bloc in Europe, with the eventual tearing down of the Berlin Wall in November. The Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing began which led to a horrifying massacre. F. W. de Klerk was elected as State President of South Africa, where he soon announced the scrapping of the Separate Amenities Act which would lead to the end of apartheid a few years later. The Soviet Union declared the end of Soviet–Afghan War with withdrawal of the troops. Exxon Valdez ran aground off Alaska and spilt 240,000 barrels of oil off the coast. The Supreme Leader of Iran issued a fatwa calling for the death of Salman Rushdie over the content of his novel “The Satanic Verses”. The first written proposal for the World Wide Web was announced as well as New Zealand, Japan and Australia being connected to the internet for the first time. And the first episode of “The Simpsons” aired in the United States.

Japan was no less turbulent than the rest of the world. As I previously wrote, Emperor Showa died on 7 January that year, ending the Showa era and ushering in the Heisei era. As it was widely known that the emperor was on his death bed, new year celebrations that year were rather solemn. In the wake of the emperor’s death, all Japanese TV stations, excluding educational channels, ran programs back-to-back focusing on the emperor and the images and history of the Showa era for three days. This led to a flood of people rushing to video rental stores to alleviate the boredom of these broadcasts.

1989 saw the introduction of a consumer tax on goods, with the Mazda Roadster, Nintendo’s Game Boy and Sony’s Handycam Hi8 becoming massive consumer good hits. The Yokohama Bay Bridge opened, Sony acquired Columbia Pictures, and the fertility rate dropped significantly from 1.66 per woman in the previous year to 1.57. Fashion became more casual and sportier with a look dubbed Shibuya Casual, which was favoured by private junior and senior high school students. Italian fashion became popular amongst adults, as well as brands like Ralph Lauren. The buzzwords that year were sexual harassment (the more things change…) and “Obatarian”, which was a popular manga series by Katsuhiko Hotta.

The year also famously marked the culmination of one of the most rapid economic growth spurts in Japanese history known colloquially as the bubble economy. The Bank of Japan kept interest rates low due to the rapidly rising yen, sparking an investment boom that drove Tokyo property values up 60 percent in a single year in the mid 1980’s. But by Christmas 1989, the Bank of Japan announced a major interest rate hike, with the Nikkei reaching a record high by the end of the year. Within a couple of years, the bubble had well and truly burst and the period of economic decline later dubbed the Lost Decade, had begun.

Osamu Tezuka's funeral

An insider trading scandal, called the Recruit scandal, had rocked the ruling party, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) the previous year. Investigations stretched into 1989 with the eventual resignation of several ministers and politicians in the LDP including Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita. The scandal was so widespread that leaders of the Komeito (formerly New Komeito Party), Democratic Party of Japan, and Japan Socialist Party were also found to be involved. This eventually led the LDP to be temporally ousted from government in 1993 via a coalition of parties, the only time they had not held power since 1955.

A month after the passing of the emperor, manga author Osamu Tezuka died of stomach cancer in a Tokyo hospital. As you probably already know, Tezuka had an amazing, prolific career writing and drawing over 700 volumes of manga, with more than 150,000 pages. His manga delved into many genres from children’s stories to darker adult orientated ones. He truly earned his God of Manga title. In addition to his manga output, you could also argue he single handled created the anime industry with the establishment of Mushi Production and export of anime TV series such as “Astroboy” and “Kimba the White Lion”. Supposedly his last words were; “I'm begging you, let me work!”, to a nurse who was attempting to take away his tools for drawing manga.

The 1980’s had brought juvenile delinquency into the public consciousness with stereotypical archetypes like the sukeban, “bancho” type gangs and bosozoku motorcycle gangs. While fictional depictions of these groups satirised them, there was still an underlying unease in the public consciousness around juvenile delinquency. A new type of delinquent developed in this era; “Teamers”. Like other juvenile delinquents before them, many of these Teamer gangs were involved in significant crime of one sort or another such as blackmail, theft, assault or even rape. However, two significant cases involving teenagers and young people turbo charged a moral panic in regards to juvenile crime.

In early 1989, the body of Junko Furuta was discovered inside a 55-gallon drum which was filled with concrete. The perpetrators were four senior high school boys who had kidnapped, tortured and raped Furuta during the previous 40 days. Already malnourished and severely injured from the abuse, she was then beaten and tortured by the boys who took out their frustrations on her after losing a game of mahjong. She eventually succumbed to her accumulated injuries, and the boys then dumped her body inside the drum and filled it with concrete. The shocking case became known as the “concrete-encased high school girl murder case” and easily ranked as the worst case of juvenile crime in post war Japan. The ring leader was eventually given a 20-year sentence, which was the second-highest sentence given in Japan before life imprisonment. The other three boys were given lesser sentences of four to seven years, which where were perceived to be quite lenient by most of the public, considering the seriousness of the crime.

Investigators escort Tsutomu Miyazaki
to the park where he was first arrested

While that crime was horrendous, another act of depravity caught the public’s imagination, possibly for all the wrong reasons. It caused a bizarre moral panic which tared a subculture, literally changed the media landscape and diverted police resources into harassing that subculture for years after. I am of course of referring to the serial murderer, necrophiliac, cannibal and paedophile, Tsutomu Miyazaki. I really don’t want delve into his crimes (I think my description of him explains enough), but in a nutshell, he kidnapped and murdered four prepubescent girls. The police case was so inept that Miyazaki was only caught after the father of what could have been his fifth victim discovered him photographing his naked daughter in a park.

Unlike the Junko Furuta case, the media became hyper focused on Miyazaki’s hobbies. In another case of police incompetence, somehow most of the media gained access to his room in the family house, reportedly before the police had a chance to search it. Pictures of his room and the contents inside, stacked to the ceiling, mostly manga and video tapes, were splashed on TV screens as well as newspaper and magazine pages for weeks. Judging from the articles I have seen, his horror movie collection was initially highlighted, with films like “Hellraiser” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street”, as well as “mondo films” like “Shocking Asia”. Several ero anime titles are also covered in the articles such as videos from the “Cream Lemon” series. When his apparent fixation on horror films became known, TV stations immediately stopped broadcasting them. The whole episode was so toxic that in years following, some Japanese horror productions were cancelled or retooled into other genres. It all seems a bit rich as the Japanese public seemed to have no issue with gory horror films previously. For example the notorious cannibal horror/exploitation film “Cannibal Holocaust” made over a billion yen at the box office in 1983.

Tabloid media coverage

Due to the amount of video tapes and manga in his room, the media decided to dub Miyazaki the “Otaku Killer”. Media commentators, sociologists and even some psychologists fuelled an obscene moral panic which labelled all kinds of otaku as murders and rapists in waiting. In part this angle was played up by police prosecutors themselves who thought it would help cement a conviction. It was later revealed Miyazaki occasionally took part in the biannual Comic Market (Comiket). This eventually led police to raid manga and doujinshi shops with led to hundreds of titles being seized, and over 70 artists and shop owners detained for questioning. Even printers of doujinshi were implicated. The following years saw increased censorship across many forms of media, a drastic drop in the participation rate of Comiket and the word “otaku” becoming synonymous with Miyazaki’s deprived crimes. In the decades following and after Miyazaki’s execution in the early 2000’s, it became known that some of the material photographed in the original media articles was deliberately staged to be taken out of context or worse, was allegedly brought in and planted by the media themselves. It has also been noted that Miyazaki's room pretty much looked liked, and contained media that most people his age consumed.

One of the most controversial books published in modern Japanese history, “The Japan That Can Say No” was released that year. Written by Sony co-founder and chairman Akio Morita and LDP Minister of Transport and future controversial governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, the title refers to the Ishihara’s view that the Japanese government should not be a "yes man" to the United States. It criticised United States business practices and advocated for Japan to take a more assertive stance on various business and foreign affairs issues. While most of Morita’s commentary in the book was arguably measured and fairly reasonable, Ishihara came across as somewhat of a far-right wing exclusionist and nationalist. In the book Ishihara played up Japanese superiority, threaten to spill trade secrets to the Soviet Union as a bargaining tool against the US, suggested that the quality of American goods was low because the education level of those workers was low and the US dropped atomic bombs on Japan and not Germany due to racism, even though Germany had already surrendered by the time the weapons were completed. Morita distanced himself from the book when it was published in English in the early 1990’s.

The Japan That Can Say No

Foreshadowing what was to come in the mid 1990’s, Tsutsumi Sakamoto, a lawyer working on a class action lawsuit against doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo, was murdered, along with his wife and child, by members of the cult. However due to the usual incompetence of Japanese police investigators, the connection and arrests of the cult members for the murders was not made until after the Tokyo subway sarin gas attack some six years later.

Finally, I want to have a look at what was popular in terms of pop culture at the time. Despite the claims that TV anime was supposedly in decline, some great TV series began their broadcast; “Idol Densetsu Eriko”, “Blue Blink”, “Ranma ½”, “Dragon Ball Z”, “Patlabor”, “Yawara!” and “Dragon Quest”. “Dash! Yonkuro” also aired. This show which was based around toy Mini 4WD racing car kits, created a boom amongst children and caused a spike in sales of Tamiya’s Mini 4WD car kit range.

Wink

In music, the influence of idols had begun to wane. Popular music program “The Best Ten” was cancelled after 11 years on air. Over the next few years other music programs would cease broadcasting, severely limiting record companies’ ability to promote idols to the general public. This era in decline in idol record sales becomes known as the “Idol Ice Age”. However, even by 1989, changes were apparent with pop rock band Princess Princess having the two highest selling singles that year. Although idol duo Wink also had three singles in the top 10, all of which sold in excess of 500,000 copies each. As for western artists, the Cure’s “Lovesong” was massive hit. Other popular western artists included Bon Jovi and Madonna, but while the latter’s album “Like a Prayer” was the highest selling western album that year, it only placed as the 25th highest selling album in 1989.

In cinema, Hollywood still dominated with “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” beating all comers in the yearly box office figures. However not far behind were two anime features, the highest grossing Japanese films of that year; “Kiki's Delivery Service” and “Doraemon: Nobita and the Birth of Japan”.

Highest Selling Singles of 1989
1. "Diamonds" - performed by Princess Princess
2. "Sekai de Ichiban Atsui Natsu" - performed by Princess Princess
3. "Tonbo" - performed by Nagabuchi Tsuyoshi
4. "Taiyou ga Ippai" - performed by Hikaru Genji
5. "Ai ga Tomaranai ~Turn It into Love~" - performed by Wink
6. "Koi Hitoyo" - performed by Kudo Shizuka
7. "Samishii Nettaigyo" - performed by Wink
8. "Arashi no Sugao" - performed by Kudo Shizuka
9. "Kousa ni Fukarete" - performed by Kudo Shizuka
10. "Namida wo Misenaide ~Boys Don't Cry~" - performed by Wink

Highest Grossing Movies of 1989
1. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
2. Rain Man
3. Kiki's Delivery Service
4. Doraemon: Nobita and the Birth of Japan
5. Cocktail
6. Who Framed Roger Rabbit
7. Orugoru
8. Black Rain (US film, not to be confused with Japanese film of same name, released in the same year)
9. Rikyu
10. Tora-san's Salad-Day Memorial

And that concludes my introduction to the era these films were released into. The current plan is to at least post one film review each month. But of course, things like life might get in the way, and you know what I’m like!