The average American knows two kinds of Japanese movies, if he knows any at all. In the first, grunting samurai slash at each other with swords. In the second, a prehistoric monster stomps through downtown Tokyo like King Kong, derailing trains, swatting down aircraft, and smashing buildings.
Today, such scenes seldom appear on the Japanese screen. Like the Western in the United States, samurai and monster films moved to TV (see box, pp. 72-73). Indeed, in Japan as in the United States, the advent...