Japanese cinema must change to help young directors, says Hirokazu Kore-eda

Acclaimed director Hirokazu Kore-eda feels that complacent attitudes and poor working conditions are holding Japan back in cinema and television. PHOTO: AFP

TOKYO – Acclaimed Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda fears that Japan’s underfunded, inward-looking cinema industry is putting off young talent, so he has taken matters into his own hands by mentoring up-and-coming film-makers for a new Netflix series.

Kore-eda, whose 2018 film Shoplifters won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, feels that complacent attitudes and poor working conditions are holding Japan back in cinema and television while its neighbour South Korea powers ahead internationally.

“Our film-making environment must change,” he said in an interview, calling for an end to the low pay, long hours and insecurity faced by those trying to hone their skills.

“Throughout my career, I’ve been able to focus solely on improving my own film-making. But now, when I look around me, I see that young people are no longer choosing to work in film and television.”

To help tackle the issue, the director of Broker (2022) and Our Little Sister (2015) collaborated with three younger proteges to make a new show set in tradition-steeped Kyoto.

The nine-episode manga adaptation, The Makanai: Cooking For The Maiko House, tells the tale of a tight-knit community of kimono-clad apprentice entertainers known as maiko.

Kore-eda, 60, said he also learnt many things from his mentees while working as showrunner for the series, to be released worldwide on Thursday.

“It’s more like, I want to steal something from these three,” he joked, complimenting the quality of their art and “knowledge of equipment that’s far deeper than mine”.

Nana Mori (left) and Natsuki Deguchi in The Makanai: Cooking For The Maiko House. PHOTO: NETFLIX

While Japanese anime is booming on Netflix and other streaming services, the nation’s live-action offerings have been overshadowed by South Korean mega-hits such as Squid Game (2021) and the Oscar-winning movie Parasite (2019).

To become a global cultural powerhouse, the South Korean government has spearheaded efforts to launch a blitz of pop culture exports in the past two decades, Kore-eda said.

“All the while Japan has been looking inwards”, with little incentive to market its films and TV shows overseas, thanks to the flourishing domestic market.

“That’s one big reason why we see a gap,” he added.

After the success of Shoplifters, about a family of small-time crooks who take in a child they find on the street, the director branched out into languages other than Japanese.

He has previously said that making French film The Truth (2019) and the recent South Korean title Broker sharpened his perspective on what the industry lacks at home.

In 2022, Kore-eda and other directors argued that Japan needs an equivalent of France’s state-run National Centre for Cinema to more robustly fund the industry and improve working conditions.

A 2019 Japanese government survey found that more than 60 per cent of employees and 70 per cent of freelancers involved in film-making in Japan were unhappy with their low pay, gruelling hours and the uncertain future of the industry.

Hiroshi Okuyama, one of the three directors who worked with Kore-eda on The Makanai, said he and his peers no longer see their vocation as a viable source of income on its own.

“Film-makers of my generation, myself included, are resigned to the reality that we can no longer make a living solely by making movies,” the 26-year-old said, sitting alongside his peers Megumi Tsuno and Takuma Sato.

Kore-eda is also an active campaigner against sexual harassment in the film world, and in March 2022, he and others stood in solidarity with actors who came forward with stories of being assaulted by a male director in Japan.

Those accusations morphed into a social media campaign resembling #MeToo, and in July, the Directors Guild of Japan issued a statement vowing to eradicate harassment – described by Kore-eda as a “big step forward”.

But he is calling for a system to protect victims who speak out, because harassment still tends to be “treated as a matter of a person’s poor character, with little awareness yet that this is a more structural problem”.

When he is not campaigning, Kore-eda is busy thinking about his next projects, saying he wants to focus on immigration, abandonment and even work that resembles an “epic poem”.

All in all, “there are too many things I want to do”. AFP

Join ST's Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you.