Japan and the Oscars - a History
Saturday, February 12, 2022 at 3:00PM by Timothy Lyons
Ryûsuke Hamaguchi and actress Reika Kirishima at Cannes this past summer with "Drive My Car"
One of the more pleasant surprises of this year’s Academy Award nominations announcement was the shortlisting of Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s subtly masterful Drive My Car in Best Picture. In addition to this mention, Hamaguchi himself was nominated for Director and Adapted Screenplay (along with co-writer Takamasa Oe) and the film received an easily predicted nod in International Feature. While there seemed to be enough of a groundswell of support for the film to break into the general field, its inclusion in the top race remains a largely unexpected and refreshingly left-of-center occurrence. Despite now being the very first Japanese film nominated for Best Picture, Drive My Car is not the first to be recognised overall. It is also not the first to find favor beyond the usually ghettoized International Feature category.
Japan’s history with Oscar began in earnest during the 1950s...
Between 1951 and 1955, three Japanese films (Rashomon, Gate of Hell and Samurai: The Legend of Musashi) received honorary Best Foreign Language Film wins before that category became an official Award of Merit in ‘56. The first competitive nomination and win for a Japanese film came in 1954 with Sanzo Wada being awarded in Best Costume Design for Gate of Hell. The crafts were surprisingly kind to Japanese film during the rest of the decade and into the 60s with mentions for Rashomon, Ugetsu, Seven Samurai and Yojimbo in Costume and/or Production Design.
Woman in the Dunes
Ryûsuke Hamaguchi is not the first Japanese auteur honored with a Best Director nomination, but the third. The first, Hiroshi Teshigahara received his bid in 1965 and the Oscars have rarely made a choice as wild, offbeat and frankly inspired. Teshigahara found himself in the Best Director lineup for his helming of the highly symbolic and stylised New Wave/erotic-drama/art-film The Woman in the Dunes. In a field rounded out by eventual winner Robert Wise (The Sound of Music), David Lean (Doctor Zhivago), John Schlesinger (Darling) and William Wyler (The Collector); Teshigahara is nothing if not an outlier.
Woman in the Dunes is the strange and hypnotic tale of an entomologist and a widow who are trapped together in a hut at the bottom of a deep, sand-filled pit. While rightfully considered a masterpiece today, the film in both theme and execution couldn’t be further from the typical tastes of the largely regressive Academy especially then during their change-resistant period of the early-to-mid 1960s. In some small way, Teshigahara’s mention was a hint at voters’ eventual embrace of the provocative and new (something that came to bare in the next decade), but it remains an audacious and uncharacteristic pick nonetheless. It would be another twenty years before a Japanese film would again break through in such a prominent way.
Ran
Between 1956 and 1981, ten Japanese films would see themselves nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award. Of these, only Woman in the Dunes and Kagemusha (1980) would receive mention outside that largely segregated ‘Foreign’ citation. Kagemusha is one of two late career masterworks from Akira Kurosawa released in the 1980s, the other being Ran (1985). Receiving four nominations including one for Kurosawa himself as Best Director, support for Ran both below and above the line would indicate the film probably came the closest to a Best Picture bid of any Japanese film pre-Drive My Car.
Ran is a stunning rendering of Shakespeare’s King Lear transposed to feudal Japan and is Kurosawa’s last large scale period epic. The late great Emi Wada actually won an Oscar for her costume designs in the film and there were additional nods to be had for its Cinematography and Production Design. For all the film’s scope and production value, however, the single greatest element in Ran is the wasn’t-even-nominated-but-should-have-won supporting performance of Mieko Harada as the scheming Lady Kaede.
And with that, a small pause to talk about acting…
MIyoshi Umeki's historic Oscar win for "Sayonara"
The Academy is renowned for being miserly when it comes to recognising actors of colour including those of east Asian descent. Last year’s win for Youn Yuh-jung and nomination for Steven Yeun for Minari were happy exceptions to the trend but just the year before South Korea’s Parasite won best picture and not one person from that tremendous ensemble was nominated. While there have been examples of Japanese representation in the acting races, these have exclusively been within Hollywood-produced and/or English language fare and have largely been indicative of Japanese stereotypes.
While to-date largely problematic, it is worth mentioning that representation is representation and the first step to more nuanced portrayals is for portrayals of any kind to exist and the undeniable talent behind them to be recognised. So, shout out to trailblazing winner Miyoshi Umeki (Sayonara in 1957) and nominees Sessue Hayakawa, Mako Iwamatsu, Ken Watanabe and Rinko Kikuchi. I wish I could add the likes of Harada, Toshiro Mifune, Sakura Ando and Drive My Car’s Hidetoshi Nishijima to that list but at the end of the day their staggering performances are/will be their own reward going forward. Now back to the history lesson…
Spirited Away
Japanese films hit an Academy dry spell post Ran, but the 21st century would see a new avenue for recognition open up. Best Animated Feature was only in its second year of existence in 2002 when voters decided to award the win to Hayao Miyazaki’s stone-cold classic and should-have-been-Best-Picture-winner Spirited Away. Miyazaki would follow his win with noms for Howl’s Moving Castle and The Wind Rises, while filmmakers under his own Studio Ghibli banner would add three more films to the studio’s slate of nominees over the years. The citations in Animated Feature extend beyond Ghibli with Mamoru Hosoda’s Mirai nominated in 2018.
2008 was the first time that two separate Japanese films were able to eke out wins in the same year. Kunio Kato won Best Animated Short for La Maison en Petits Cubes while Yojiro Takita’s Departures would win Japan its first competitive Best International Feature Oscar. Widely considered undeserving of that prize today, Departures is not without its charms but is definitely a lesser entry in Japan’s roster of Oscar recipients.
Shoplifters
Far more exciting than that win was the country’s next nomination in the International category for Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters in 2018. Quietly one of the greatest and most powerful films of the 21st century and criminally underrated despite its Palme D’or win, Shoplifters should have preceded Drive My Car’s recognition with a spate of general field mentions of its own, but presumably didn’t come close.
And with that we come full circle. Drive My Car’s nominations are a wonderful gift and with the added exposure, the hope is that they inspire audiences to further explore Japanese film as a unique national cinema. In researching this post it became apparent that, in comparison with many other countries’ outputs, The Academy has actually been uniquely generous with Japan. It is of course always important to remember that awards aren’t the definitive barometer by which a film’s quality is judged, but if their power as a cultural beacon is used for good, they can help expand audience interest in all corners of the art-form and promote representation in the industry. The nods for Drive My Car are great. Here’s to many more like them.
Related:
• Best Picture Oscar Race
• International Feature Oscar Race
• Japanese Films and the Best Costume Design Category
Asian cinema, Drive My Car, Japan, Oscar Trivia, Oscars (21), Ran, Woman in the Dunes
Reader Comments (7)
I loved reading this. Woman in the Dunes is indeed strange but brilliant, and you mentioned Ugetsu, which should have seen Kenji Mizoguchi in the Director conversation. The same is true for his Sansho the Bailiff.
Hopefully by the 80s, the Academy had realized that Kurosawa was insanely under-rewarded. He should have won in 85. Ran is among his best.
Shout out to Eiko Ishioka, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Kazu Hiro.
Working Stiff - - Great shoutouts there. I was limiting myself in the write-up to Japanese contributions within Japanese film (apart from that short diversion into acting nominees) but those three winners were very worthy - Especially Ishioka who remains one of the best winners ever for Best Costume Design.
I was slightly underwhelmed by Drive My Car, but so many of my favorite auteurs and actors are Japanese and were ignored by the Academy. In some cases it was because their films took so long to be discovered in America (Yasujirō Ozu). In other cases, though, the Oscars were just too American/Eurocentric to appreciate them (Kinuyo Tanaka). I can't help but be thrilled that Japanese cinema is finally in the spotlight.
(And yes, Shoplifters deserved a lot more. Maybe Kore-eda's next film, with Song Kang-Ho, will be our next international hit.)
If How Do You Live? ends up with anywhere near the level of acclaim of his most popular films, I think there’s a solid chance Hayao Miyazaki could find himself in the Best Director conversation whenever it’s released. His stature has grown dramatically in the two decades since Spirited Away, to the point that the narrative is definitely there for it to happen. If anyone is going to make history by becoming the first person to receive a Best Director nomination for an animated film, it’s got to be him. He’s one of the most widely respected directors currently living, in animation or otherwise.
It's also worth noting that Kurosawa made the excellent Dersu Uzala for Russia and that film won the Oscar for foreign language/ international feature for 1975.
Very interesting article. Oscar is my favorite award, and each time I enjoy watching it. It's always great to witness how talented and brilliant people receive such an award