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Cinema is Japan's most active art form. Last year its studios produced 442 feature-length films, a world-record output, that ranged from the existential etchings of Akira Kurosawa, 56 (Rashomon, Ikiru), to the prurient "erodutions" and monster fantasies that thrill both Japanese and American drive-in audiences. Director Kon Ichikawa (Fires on the Plain) is currently at work on a joint Japanese-Italian production titled Toppo Gigio's Pushbutton War, in which a mouse ends the threat of thermonuclear conflict. Top box office in Japan of late has been a cycle of films (15 in all) about a blind 19th century swordsman named Zato Ichi, who wanders picaresquely about, cheating at cards, killing samurai and seducing girls—an expression of Japan's concern with intuitive skill and blind luck.
Identity & Anonymity. In the plastic media, Japan has only a few artists who adhere to the ancient skills.* Most Japanese painters, printmakers and sculptors today are slavishly imitative of the West. One exception: Sculptor Masayuki Nagare, 43, who served a prewar apprenticeship to a Kyoto swordsmith before becoming a frustrated kamikaze pilot in World War II. He acquired his feel for stone toward war's end when, standing on the runway awaiting a call to suicide that never came, he hefted smoothly polished rocks and felt "oddly composed." Nagare's masterwork, now at Manhattanville College, is a 600-ton, 2,300-piece wall called Stone Crazy.
With Japan spending $18.3 billion a year on new construction, it is little wonder that Japanese architects have emerged as Asia's foremost designers. The mind behind Tokyo's soaring, $8,300,000 Olympic Gymnasium is Kenzo Tange, 55, a slim, courtly Osakan who reflects Asia's concern with "the great incompatibles: the human scale and the superhuman, identity and anonymity." In such works as the Hiroshima Peace Museum and the crossshaped Cathedral of St. Mary in Tokyo, Tange broke boldly from Japanese tradition. Using pilotis and steel, he generated a sense of boldness rather than the customary low-to-the-ground humility based on Japanese wooden construction. In a land with virtually no urban planning, Tange has mapped a $50 billion renovation of Tokyo. He warns that unless planning is undertaken now, the megalopolis of Tokaido, which by century's end will contain 80% of the Japanese population, can become an Asian version of Bosch's hell.
Mister Consensus. The man whose task it is to prevent that and other calamities from overtaking a rapidly growing Japan is Premier Eisaku Sato, 65. Reserved and calculating, Sato keeps his own counsel in a manner that would appeal to Lyndon Johnson. Yet when it comes to political combat, his timing is as sharp as that of a karate blackbelter. All of his toughness and calculation are aimed at consensus, an achievement of the most vital necessity in a nation whose political parties are fulminatingly factional and whose societal fabric is stitched together from feudal loyalties. As "Mr. Consensus," Sato has had plenty of training.