Tokyo 199X

By the end of the 1980s, the robust Japanese economy seemed poised to conquer the world, much to the chagrin of the protectionist crowd in the US, but as a new decade opened, the Nikkei stock index plummeted, and promiscuous speculation gave way to gloomy pessimism. As is often the case, however, socioeconomic adversity would be handmaiden to creative fecundity, and some years after the near-total collapse of the Japanese studios, a new generation of filmmakers—Takashi Miike, Satoshi Kon, and Kiyoshi Kurosawa, among others—emerged from the ashes of the national cinema, many of them veterans of a rough-and-ready independent scene, to produce works that addressed not only the anxiety of the period but also the prospects of personal and political reinvention offered by the collapse of false-bottomed prosperity and the conspicuous consumption that came with it. Accompanying our run of Banmei Takahashi’s newly restored A New Love in Tokyo, we present a series steeped in financial calamity and creative resilience that, considering the present precarity of American abundance, may also be essential viewing.