In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

140 Japanese Cinema Goes Global those who are in the site of cultural production, where locals watch globals in their physical proximity. Yanagijima gave me another interesting anecdote. His agent gets calls from the US from time to time because his works are becoming known internationally through Takeshi Kitano’s films. Recently, he was shortlisted for an epic American film that was set in Japan and that was to be directed by a well-known American director. Through his agent, Yanagijima was told that he was one of three cinematographers whom the director wanted to meet and discuss the script with. Yanagijima was obviously excited about the prospect, but there was a problem. Yanagijima had a Japanese film that he had already committed to, and the pre-production was due to start very soon. So, if he was to meet the American director for this job, he had to leave the Japanese project without delay, without any guarantee that he would get the American job, so that the Japanese production could find another cinematographer. It was not an easy decision to make since leaving the project that he had already committed to would inconvenience many of his colleagues and could damage his reputation. Still, he decided to leave it and wait to hear from the Americans. He thought that “just reading the script and talking to the director would be a worthwhile experience” even if he did not get the job. However, the script did not arrive and nothing happened; for days and weeks there was no word from the Americans about the interview. His agent contacted the American production company many times but received only hazy answers. This story ends not only with Yanagijima not getting the interview for the American job, but also with him being without work for a few months. By telling me this story, he probably wanted to show me that he knows the irony of the situation and he is conscious of what he is doing and has some sense of humour — thus he is not as naïve as he appears — but still he can’t help picking every opportunity that might make him a “global”. Since the global successes of J-Horror movies and many other Asian films, including films made by Hong Kong, mainland Chinese, and Korean filmmakers, talking and writing about “Asianization of Hollywood” (e.g. Klein 2004) became fashionable in academic and laic discourses. However, as the example above shows, the power Global America? 141 imbalance between Hollywood and Asian film industries is “huge” to say the least. In economic terms, the budget for the Japanese original of the film Ringu (The Ring, Hideo Nakata, 1998) was approximately US$1 million while the estimated budget of the Hollywood remake The Ring (Gore Verbinski, 2002) was US$48 million (IMDb Pro — The Ring). The director’s fee for the Japanese original of Juon, was a few tens of thousand US dollars as a Japanese low budget film. However, the director’s fee for the Hollywood remake The Grudge 2 was said to be more than US$1 million (Fukushima interview 2006; Yanagijima interview 2006).31 And, needless to say, Japan holds the biggest market and richest film industry in East Asia. Therefore, an additional issue in need of close examination in order to understand better the dynamics of the globalization of film industries is how this huge global-local power differential is shaping the cosmopolitan subjectivity (i.e. cultural affiliations, value, and agency) of Asian filmmakers, and how this is affecting the Asian film industries’ capacity to address locally specific issues and to produce locally specific meanings as a result. I interviewed Satoshi Fukushima, a 45-year-old line producer of The Grudge and The Grudge 2, in a staff room in Toho studios. At that time, he was working with the last remaining Japanese maestro of the studio era, the film director Kon Ichikawa. It was Fujii who used to produce Ichikawa films because they both came from Daiei studios. I was surprised when I heard that Fukushima worked as Fujii’s assistant/junior producer for over 15 years. But this coincidence, perhaps, was actually not too surprising because the number of producers who deal with big international projects in Japan is very limited; and Fukushima had to be trained somewhere to get to his position, unless one decides to go abroad for training like Inoue, the line producer of Lost in Translation, did. Fukushima was in charge of...

Share