Japan and the Foreign Language Film Oscar

Japan’s choice of Wim Wenders’ PERFECT DAYS (2023) as its submission for Best International Feature at this year’s Academy Awards and its subsequent nomination got me to thinking about Japan and its 72-year-long relationship with the Academy Awards, especially in light of the fact that two major Japanese hits in the U.S. market this past season, Takashi Yamazaki’s GODZILLA MINUS ONE and Hayao Miyazaki’s THE BOY AND THE HERON, were passed over in favor of Wenders’ film. Both films at least got one nomination each in other categories. More on this below, but first some history.

Prior to the establishment of a competitive category in 1956, Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film were awarded to single films on an honorary basis by the Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences beginning in 1947. The first was Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist film from Italy, SHOESHINE, awarded because, in the Academy’s words, “the high quality of this motion picture, brought to eloquent life in a country scarred by war, is proof to the world that the creative spirit can triumph over adversity.”

At the 1952 Academy Awards ceremony, honoring films released in the U.S. in 1951, Akira Kurosawa’s RASHOMON was given an Honorary Oscar after being “Voted by the Board of Governors as the most outstanding foreign language film released in the United States during 1951.” Having achieved some surprise success at international film festivals in 1951, RASHOMON represented Japanese cinema’s postwar global coming-out party. It was the first Japanese film to get any kind of award from the Academy at all.

Interestingly, the film was nominated the following year for Best Art Decoration – Set Decoration (Black-and-White), making it the first Japanese film ever to score an Oscar nomination in a competitive category.

At the 1955 Oscar ceremony, Teinosuke Kinugasa’s GATE OF HELL was awarded an Honorary Oscar as “Best Foreign Language Film first released in the United States during 1954.” GATE OF HELL was also nominated that year for best Costume Design (Color). It won and became the first Japanese film ever to win a competitive Oscar. Japan now had three Oscars.

GATE OF HELL wasn’t the first Japanese film in color, but it was the first to get seen overseas.

At the 1956 Oscar ceremony, the first film in Hiroshi Inagaki’s SAMURAI Trilogy, released in the U.S. as SAMURAI, THE LEGEND OF MUSASHI, was awarded an Honorary Oscar as “Best Foreign Language Film first released in the United States during 1955.”

I wrote about the SAMURAI Trilogy here.

A different Japanese film, Kenji Mizoguchi’s UGETSU, got a nomination that year for Best Costume Design (Black-and-White).

At the 1957 Oscar ceremony, honoring films released in 1956, Kon Ichikawa’s THE HARP OF BURMA was nominated in the newly formed competitive category, Best Foreign Language Film.

Federico Fellini’s LA STRADA won.

That year, Akira Kurosawa’s SEVEN SAMURAI, under its U.S. release title, THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, was nominated in two categories, Best Costume Design (Black-and-White) and Best Art Direction – Set Decoration (Black-and-White).

SEVEN SAMURAI (1954) would eventually be re-released in the U.S. under its proper title in its longer three-and-a-half-hour cut, restoring an hour that was shaved off for the 1956 U.S. release. (Another groundbreaking Japanese film from 1954, Ishiro Honda’s GOJIRA, was also released in the U.S. in 1956, but in a re-edited English-language version with newly shot footage featuring Hollywood actor Raymond Burr and retitled GODZILLA, KING OF THE MONSTERS. It, however, got no Oscar nominations.) The three-and-a-half-hour cut of SEVEN SAMURAI played in a Times Square theater in 1971 and I saw it there while I was still in high school. In the period between the two releases, SEVEN SAMURAI had been remade by Hollywood as a western, also called THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, in 1960, with such future stars as Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson and James Coburn and directed by John Sturges. I saw that film in a Times Square theater just weeks before I saw SEVEN SAMURAI and the theaters were right around the corner from each other. I covered the experience of seeing the two films so close together here. (In 1960, the remake was nominated for an Oscar for its unforgettable music score by Elmer Bernstein.)

In the 1960s, five Japanese films were nominated for Best Foreign Language Film:

1961: IMMORTAL LOVE Dir.: Keisuke Kinoshita. Stars: Hideko Takamine, Tatsuya Nakadai.

1963: TWIN SISTERS OF KYOTO Dir.: Noboru Nakamura. Stars: Shima Iwashita, Hiroyuki Nagato.

1964: WOMAN IN THE DUNES Dir.: Hiroshi Teshigahara. Stars: Eiji Okada, Kyoko Kishida.

1965: KWAIDAN Dir.: Masaki Kobayashi. Stars: Rentaro Mikuni, Michiyo Aratama.

1967: PORTRAIT OF CHIEKO Dir.: Noboru Nakamura. Stars: Shima Iwashita, Tetsuro Tanba.

None of them won. Significantly, when researching this piece, I was stunned to realize I’d never heard of three of the films, IMMORTAL LOVE, TWIN SISTERS OF KYOTO, and PORTRAIT OF CHIEKO. I’d also never heard of the director of the latter two, Noboru Nakamura. Why had these films never crossed my radar before? I looked in my library of books on Japanese film, including Donald Richie’s celebrated books on Japanese cinema, and found only one book that mentions all of these films and gives a substantial assessment of Nakamura’s career: A Critical Handbook of Japanese Film Directors, by Alexander Jacoby.

Curious about this, I did some research on the films and managed to find the two Nakamura films on-line. I watched both of them. They were beautiful color widescreen prints with English subtitles that were apparently done by fans. They’re unsung Japanese masterpieces. Why hasn’t Criterion taken note of this director?

I have another book that includes a four-sentence description of Nakamura, scanned here in its entirety:

For those who prefer not to read the small print: “Graduated from Tokyo University and came to Shochiku as an assistant to the veteran Yasujiro Shimazu. Is best known for his versions of classical dramas. On the evidence of his two 1967 films Nakamura’s style is fluid and deliberate and his world filled with elegiac harmony, which may seem a little cloying. There is a a hint of Ozu (q.v.), but without the latter’s eminent characterisation.”

Here’s the cover of the book that entry is from:

This is what Alexander Jacoby says about Nakamura’s two Oscar-nominated films, using the original title for TWIN SISTERS OF KYOTO:

The Old Capital (Koto, 1963), after Kawabata, was a moving account of a Kyoto girl who learns she has a twin sister in a rural village. Shima Iwashita handled the dual role ably, and Nakamura effectively caught the atmosphere of the city, while implicitly condemning the corrosive effect of the Japanese class system on personal relationships.”

Portrait of Chieko (Chieko sho, 1967) was an intriguing account of a woman artist’s descent into schizophrenia, albeit with ambiguous sexual politics, it being unclear whether her madness is triggered by the frustration of her artistic career or by her inability to bear children.

Furthermore, Jacoby had this to say about the director:

“Nakamura’s most critically acclaimed films, however, were a sequence of female-centered melodramas made during the sixties, which commented intelligently on the place of women in Japanese society and on wider political issues.”

Here’s what I posted on Facebook about these films after seeing them:

TWIN SISTERS OF KYOTO (1963) stars Shima Iwashita in a dual role as the title sisters, one of whom was abandoned as a baby and raised by an artisan in Kyoto while the other was kept by their working parents, now dead, and is a laborer at a cedar harvesting plant in the mountains. The Kyoto sister didn’t know she had a twin while the other was fully aware of it and the two finally cross paths in Kyoto. The film is about their shifting emotional relationship and attempts to adjust to the class differences between them. It’s based on a novel, “The Old Capital,” by Yasunari Kawabata, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968.

The movie is beautiful, gentle, sensitive and poetic in a way that rivals the best of Ozu. I still find it hard to believe that this director, Noboru Nakamura, remained off my radar all this time (and the actress as well).

PORTRAIT OF CHIEKO (1967) was directed, like the previously discussed TWIN SISTERS OF KYOTO (1963), by Noboru Nakamura, a major talent who’s been shamefully neglected in this country. It’s about an ostensibly happy marriage between two artists, one a sculptor and poet and one a painter and weaver, that begins in the Meiji era and is followed for nearly 30 years through the subsequent Taisho and Showa eras, as we witness the slow downward spiral of the wife, Chieko (Shima Iwashita), into madness and schizophrenia and the attempts of Kotaro, the husband (Tetsuro Tanba), to care for her and understand what’s going on while struggling to achieve success with his sculptures. The husband’s poems about the situation punctuate the narrative now and then. It’s based on a true story.

The subtle thematic undercurrent involves the role of Japanese women and the societal expectations placed on them by marriage, even one with so tender and thoughtful a husband. It’s handled as sensitively and gently as any film on the subject I’ve seen and is extremely well acted and directed. I don’t understand why these films and their director have remained so obscure in the U.S. for this long.

Martin Dowsing has provided an illuminating review of PORTRAIT OF CHIEKO on his blog site, complete with valuable historical background about the subject and previous film portrayals:

https://martindowsing.blogspot.com/2023/11/portrait-of-chieko-chieko-sho-1967.html

I should add that the actress who stars in these films, Shima Iwashita, whom I’ve seen in other Japanese films in largely supporting roles, is superb here and may rank with the greatest Japanese actresses of all, Setsuko Hara, Hideko Takamine, Kinuyo Tanaka, and Machiko Kyo. Somewhere in my research, I saw that she was married to director Masahiro Shinoda (DOUBLE SUICIDE) and acted in several of his films.

The back cover of Screen Series: Japan shows us Shima Iwashita in Yasujiro Ozu’s final film, AN AUTUMN AFTERNOON (1962):

I’m still hoping I can find IMMORTAL LOVE, which stars Hideko Takamine and Tatsuya Nakadai.

Interestingly, all three films, IMMORTAL LOVE, TWIN SISTERS OF KYOTO and PORTRAIT OF CHIEKO, came from Shochiku Pictures, the same company that gave us Ozu.

I’ve seen the two other 1960s Japanese films nominated for Best Foreign Language Film: WOMAN IN THE DUNES and KWAIDAN and have both on Criterion disc. I’ve seen KWAIDAN several times including at least once this past decade and wrote about it here.

Subsequent nominations for Japanese films in the Best Foreign Language Film category, listed by the year for which they were nominated, are listed here. Only one was a winner.

1971: DODES’KA-DEN/Akira Kurosawa

1975: SANDAKAN NO. 8/Kei Kumai

(Ironically, the winner for 1975 was Akira Kurosawa’s DERSU UZALA, submitted by the USSR.)

1980: KAGEMUSHA/Akira Kurosawa

1981: MUDDY RIVER/Kohei Oguri

2003: THE TWILIGHT SAMURAI/Yoji Yamada

2008: DEPARTURES/Yojiro Takita

2018: SHOPLIFTERS/Hirokazu Koreeda

2021: Winner: DRIVE MY CAR/Ryusuke Hamaguchi

DRIVE MY CAR also got other nods from the Academy:

At the 94th Academy Awards, the film was nominated for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay, and won Best International Feature Film. It was the first Japanese film to receive a Best Picture nomination.

I’ve seen just one of these eight films and I have three others on Criterion disc waiting to be watched. (In fact, Criterion distributes a good number of the Japanese films discussed in this piece.)

For the record, Wikipedia offers a complete List of Japanese Academy Award winners and nominees:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Japanese_Academy_Award_winners_and_nominees

During this bout of research, I pondered the whole process of how films are chosen by Japan to submit to the Academy for consideration for Best Foreign Language Film, since each country only gets to choose one film per year. Who makes that decision and what factors have been most important? I wondered how IMMORTAL LOVE got chosen the same year that Kurosawa’s YOJIMBO was critically acclaimed upon its release in the U.S. that year or how TWIN SISTERS OF KYOTO got the nod when Kurosawa’s HIGH AND LOW had seen such a successful international release the same year. I’m not entirely sure how much of a release in the U.S. any of the three films I had never heard of even got. I haven’t found any answers, but after seeing TWIN SISTERS and PORTRAIT OF CHIEKO, I realized I shouldn’t question it. I may never have discovered these beautiful films otherwise.

For the record, YOJIMBO was at least nominated by the Academy that year for Best Costume Design (Black-and-White), while HIGH AND LOW had to settle for being nominated for Best Foreign Film at the 1964 Golden Globes.

There are other ways Japanese films can be honored at the Academy Awards. A year after the new category of Best Animated Feature was introduced in 2001 (with SHREK winning at the 2002 ceremony), Hayao Miyazaki’s film, SPIRITED AWAY, was nominated and wound up winning. (Miyazaki did not show up in person to accept, citing his antipathy towards the imminent U.S. invasion of Iraq.) Three of Miyazaki’s later films, HOWL’S MOVING CASTLE, THE WIND RISES and THE BOY AND THE HERON, have been nominated in this category. On March 10, 2024, we’ll learn if Miyazaki gets a second Oscar in this category.

Miyazaki also got an Honorary Oscar at the 2015 awards ceremony. Other Japanese animated films to get nominated for Best Animated Feature include the Studio Ghibli productions, THE TALE OF THE PRINCESS KAGUYA (2014), directed by Isao Takahata, and WHEN MARNIE WAS THERE (2015), directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi. Mamoru Hosoda’s MIRAI (2018) was also nominated. I wrote about WHEN MARNIE WAS THERE here.

Earlier, Akira Kurosawa got an Honorary Oscar at the 1990 ceremony. Kurosawa was also nominated for Best Director in 1986 for RAN. When he got the Honorary Oscar, I remember the montage of clips from Kurosawa films and being dismayed that it chose to focus almost entirely on action scenes from RASHOMON, SEVEN SAMURAI, THRONE OF BLOOD and YOJIMBO. Would unsuspecting viewers think he was just a samurai director? Why not a few poetic, contemplative moments from films like DRUNKEN ANGEL, IKIRU (below) and HIGH AND LOW, hmmm?

Getting back to this year’s Japanese Oscar nominees, I should stress that I saw each of them, THE BOY AND THE HERON, GODZILLA MINUS ONE, and PERFECT DAYS, in theaters, enjoyed them all, and would be happy if either one had been nominated for Best International Feature. It would have been especially gratifying to see a Godzilla film finally earn such a nod. Still, it’s quite a thrill for three Japanese films to be nominated in different categories in one year and it’ll be a very big deal for Japan film fans if all three should win.

Initially, it seemed odd to me that Japan would pick as their official entry a film directed by a European, but the fact remains that Wenders was indeed recruited by a Japanese clothing executive, Koji Yanai, to make a short film promoting a new class of high-end public toilets designed for Tokyo by star architects and, according to a New York Times article about the film, “originally built to welcome the world to Japan for the summer Olympic Games scheduled for 2020.”  Also according to the article, written by Motoko Rich, “Wenders decided he wanted to make a feature-length film where the central character would be a toilet cleaner. Yanai had suggested Koji Yakusho, one of Japan’s most well-known actors, who had gained an international following after he starred in the 1996 romantic drama Shall We Dance?”

Curiously, when I was in Tokyo the public toilet cleaners I saw were all women in their senior years, not a male or young person among them. In the film, the main character is a middle-aged man and his assistant is a young man, later replaced by a young woman. Now, granted, the toilets they clean here are clearly out of the ordinary, so maybe they require a specially trained crew. As the article says, “Yanai funds cleaners to tend to the architectural toilets two to three times daily, whereas standard public toilets are cleaned once a day.” (Okay, but I remember the “standard” toilets being cleaned way more than once a day when I was there.) I also found it amusing that Yakusho’s character encounters more than one attractive young woman who rides in his cleaning van and takes an active interest in his audiocassette collection of American pop songs from 50 years ago. Of course, he has to show each of them how to load a cassette into the dashboard player. (One of them likes Patti Smith, another Van Morrison.)

In any event, given Wenders’ long relationship with Japan and his oft-expressed admiration for Yasujiro Ozu and the fact that the Japanese actually approached Wenders to make the film, it may not be an odd choice after all. Furthermore, Wenders’ film about Tokyo and Ozu, TOKYO-GA (1985), is one of the best essay films ever made. I sure hope PERFECT DAYS wins. We’ll know in a week.

UPDATE (3/10/24): So PERFECT DAYS didn’t win, but THE BOY AND THE HERON and GODZILLA MINUS ONE won in their respective categories, Best Animated Feature  and Best Visual Effects. Two out of three in this historic year isn’t bad at all.