Okay, so hoga is a film made in Japan, but also the feelings Japanese have towards their own domestic productions. Those feelings, as I learned yesterday from a comment here by Jason Gray, the Japanese correspondent of Screen International, are currently very warm indeed.
Jason wanted to correct a gloomy extrapolation I'd made from figures I'd found from the turn of the century. I'd extrapolated the kind of decline scenario you see in the (hypothetical) chart above, with American imports forcing Japanese film productions into the ground within a few decades. (Of course, this assumes the continuation of films as we know them, cinemas as we currently have them, and so on.) I lumped this "decline scenario" in with other hub and spoke phenomena. "If current trends continue (and I doubt they will, but that's for another day), by about 2040 no Japanese films will be watched in Japan; they'll all be American."
So, for the last five years there's been this thing -- an amazing renaissance -- going on in Japanese film. They're calling it the "hoga bubble". The word "bubble", of course, is a metaphor which suggests that it's not particularly sustainable. Maybe it's a boom, but that still implies a bust somewhere down the line. Or is it a tipping point, a corner which has been definitively turned? Does it represent the end of the dominance of Hollywood in foreign markets? Will other countries follow Japan's example, and see their own domestic film productions take more than 50% of all box office? India's already there, of course, but you'd have to go back to the 1960s (and all those wonderful, smutty Carry On films starring Kenneth Williams and Sid James) to see a similar market share for British films in the British market, for instance. But if the bubble did turn out to be a corner, we might see our chart looking something like this:
The best general survey of the hoga bubble I can find online is this one on the Cinemasie site (in French only). It says that for the first time for more than twenty years, local productions in 2006 took 53% of box office, overtaking foreign films (and 95% of those are American). That was up from 43% in 2005. Films produced per year are also up, to about 500 last year, from about 250 in 2002. The number of cinema seats is also increasing, as is the size of the domestic film market itself. Cinemasie notes the market domination of Toho, far ahead of domestic rivals Shochiku and Toei. It notes the tendency for co-production by television companies. And it notes the end of the Korea boom.
Michi Kaifu adds an interesting development -- an increase in the number of female directors. She mentions Miwa Nishikawa (Sway) and Naoko Ogiwara (Kamome Diner) as well as Mana Yasuda, Aya Watanabe and Mika Ninagawa, whose "Sakuran" was one of the buzz hits of the recent Berlinale film festival. This "breath of fresh air" is a trend I feel particularly close to, and somewhat involved in: Mika Ninagawa used one of my songs in her first short, Cheap Trip, and Emi Necozawa and I did soundtrack music for Noriko Shibutani's "Bambi (Heart) Bone".
I'm particularly interested in the larger cultural context in which this is happening. Jason Gray says "the Hollywood imports are appealing less and less to locals. Johnny Depp is a veritable God here, but #1-ranked Pirates (and #2 ranked Da Vinci Code) excepted, this year was unimpressive. Aside from Spider Man, Japanese audiences have limited interest in American superheroes like Superman and X-Men. M:i:III only made half of what the second film did. And when an animation style doesn't appeal, as in the case of Cars, it tanks no matter how huge the P&A budget is".
"This year I've been very aware of a surprising new mood in Japan, an intensely inward-looking mood akin to narcissism. Japan, increasingly, performs itself to itself as 'the other', as an exotic tourist destination primped for internal consumption. TV here in Hokkaido is an endless advertorial presentation of winter resorts where Japanese families go to marvel at intensely, even stereotypically, Japanese wonders; to bathe in hot springs, to sit on tatami mats in ryokan hotels, to sample inevitably delicious food. It's what deconstructionists would call 'the staging of difference against the scenery of standardisation and globalisation'."
A boom, a bubble, a corner or a tipping point? Who knows. But now we have a term for it, let's watch Japan's hoga bubble fly!