The cinema of Japan has, over the course of its post-Pacific War history, been an unstable institution. It has been subject to a series of fluctuating fortunes that have in fact contributed significantly to its defining tenets and characteristics, a truly national film industry in that both its fate and its individual products and the characteristics that have defined them have remained closely tied to the sociopolitical flux of the country in which they were made. Of course one could make similar claims about many national cinemas, but in Japan there is a particularly marked sense in which the fortunes of its filmmakers and studios have been both reflected in and predicated upon the fortunes of the nation. Conceptualisations and histories of Japanese cinema, in both Western and Japanese discourse, have tended to replay several well-rehearsed epithets regarding the highs of its golden eras and the attendant lows that have succeeded them, about marked peaks and troughs regarding economic success and stagnation, technological advancement and problems relating to the same (developments such as the Fukushima nuclear reactor). Successive eras of Japanese history – especially its modern, Meiji-era (1868) development and beyond – can likewise be delineated, suggesting a direct correlation that has endured into the new millennium. However this seemingly perennial paradigm did in some ways begin to erode and to change in the years following 1997, and to understand why 1997 was a significant year it is necessary to elaborate a little on the context.

In many ways the contemporary story of Japanese cinema suggests 1989 as a decisive turning point. Tezuka Yoshiharu (2012) has discussed the late 1980s in Japan as one of three key instances when a national identity crisis resulted from Japan being opened up and/or exposed to the world at large (pp. 9–12). He identifies what has been termed Kokusaika, or internationalisation, as part of Francis Fukuyama's infamous 1992 declaration of the end of history, and analyses how ‘the essential cultural uniqueness of Japan’ began to erode as a result (p. 10). As well as signalling a new social era (the Heisei era), the year 1989 marked an end to a largely stagnant cinematic decade in which hitherto prevalent generic trends (especially yakuza, samurai and shomin-geki films) stalled and Japanese films began to wane on the international stage.