Word: boxes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...success of the police-box system is reflected in Japan's startlingly low crime statistics. In 1980 there were 1.4 murders per 100,000 people, against 10.2 per 100,000 in the U.S. The incidence of robbery was 1.9, compared with 234.5 in the U.S. gun-crimes of any kind are rare, in fact. Another reason: strict gun-control laws, which allow no civilian to own a gun except for hunting. Impressed with boxes, Japanese success, Singapore has installed police boxes, and San Francisco is studying the feasibility of adopting the system. Tokyo's Soeno thinks this...
...only 1.3 tickets for every Japanese citizen. Though in 1982 both attendance and revenue rose significantly for the first time in two decades, the increase was due entirely to a 13.4% surge in distributors' grosses for foreign films-including Japan's new alltime box-office champ (yawn), E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial...
These films mark returns to prominence by directors who have been working in movies for at least a quarter of a century. But where are the Japanese equivalents of Spielberg and Lucas, Coppola and Scorsese-younger directors who can revitalize the box office and the art form? Some are locked into the industry's tradition-bound system of slow advancement, where experience is rewarded but rarely offered. "This brutal apprenticeship has long controlled the Japanese studio system," notes American Writer-Director Paul Schrader, who will soon go to Japan to film a biography of Novelist Yukio Mishima. "I think...
...writers who refuse to be seduced. And when they speak out, readers respond by the thousands. Internationally prominent novelists like Kobo Abe (Woman in the Dunes) and Kenzaburo Oe regularly sell 150,000 copies of each book. Other novelists, like Hisashi Inoue, 47, have enjoyed even greater success (see box). Shusako Endo's spare and elegant studies of Christian faith and martyrdom (Silence; The Samurai) have brought the 60-year-old author the title of the Japanese Graham Greene and made him one of the nation's most widely translated writers...
...shame. In each Tora-San film, Atsumi, 55, noodles around in the same wildly checked, double-breasted leisure suit and porkpie hat, playing a middle-age Walter Mitty pitted against the vicissitudes of modern Japan. And with each film, some 4 million Tora-trekkies line up at the box office. His latest fan is a big one: IBM has cast him for a new series of Japanese ads. "Computers in a way are like Tora-San," says Atsumi. "They are dedicated to the well-being of people." Actors (and ad-agency copywriters) are the same the world over...