The resurgent right: the secret of Japan’s twenty-first century cinematic success

ABSTRACT For the last seventeen years in a row, domestic Japanese cinema has trounced imported Hollywood fare at the box office. Anime-related films are one source of Japanese cinema’s strength, but there is another key factor: revisionist, right-wing historical films. A new extremist ‘mainstream’ has emerged, one in which Japan’s present and future seem increasingly unsatisfying, her past ever more appealing. This article examines several recent Japanese blockbusters and their production contexts. In both the ‘rosy past’ type and the ‘bleak future’ type of rightist film which these industrial conditions have produced, the message is essentially the same: things were better before, and only by spiritually returning to the past can Japan be made great again. If audiences continue to endorse this extremist right-wing vision of the once and future Japan, another generation of young, impressionable viewers might conclude that Japan’s only way forward is to retreat deeper into the beautified past.