Anarchy in Japan’s film industry: How punk rescued Japanese cinema

When punk impressed itself upon Japanese youth culture in the mid-to-late 1970s, it arrived at a time when the nation’s film industry was in crisis. The major studio system that had presided over film production for several decades was in serious decline, curbing opportunities for the next generation of filmmaking talent by ceasing to take on new apprentices. Inspired by the ‘do-it-yourself’ ideology surrounding the emerging punk scene, young, aspiring filmmakers took matters into their own hands by forming small clubs to self-produce zero-budget short and feature-length films on their own terms, relying on friends, classmates, musicians and other hangers-on, and using increasingly accessible Super 8 and 16mm filmmaking equipment. In doing so, punk-inspired jishu seisaku eiga (‘autonomously produced cinema’) became an exciting nonprofessional alternative to the stagnating professional studio system, with many of its amateur participants going on to become influential professional figures within the Japanese film industry of today. This article seeks to provide an exploration of punk’s overlooked emergence in Japan, its impact on (and synthesis with) jishu film production, it being a catalyst for important aesthetic and generic schisms such as ‘cyberpunk’, and how it ultimately mobilized Japanese cinema to rejuvenate itself.