‘Godzilla Minus One’ Director Says Key To Japanese Media Finding Overseas Success Is “To Not Think About The Rest Of The World At All And Instead Push The Domestic Aspect To Its Limits”
Speaking as a proven, $116 million international box office-earning expert on the matter, Godzilla Minus One director Takashi Yamazaki says that rather than changing their entire identities in order to appeal to overseas markets, the key to success for any given piece of Japanese media is for its creators to do the complete opposite and instead focus their attentions squarely on their domestic audiences.
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Yamazaki, whose other directorial credits include 2010’s live-action Space Battleship Yamato, the live-action Parasyte duology, and the animated Lupin III: The First, opined on the topic of Japan’s ongoing, birth rate crisis-motivated economic turn towards international consumers while speaking to Forbes Japan alongside Neon Genesis Evangelion creator Hideaki Anno regarding the future of the country’s rapidly-expanding entertainment industry.
Following an opening admission from Anno that although some companies and creators are scrambling to make their works more international-friendly, he himself had never once made a work with the overseas audience in mind, the most recent Japanese Godzilla helmsman recalled, “When we were making Godzilla Minus One, we weren’t thinking about overseas audiences at all—not even one millimeter.”
“When the film was close to being finished, people at Toho said, ‘We’ll roll it out overseas,'” he continued, as machine translated by ChatGPT. “But they said it would be released with subtitles rather than dubbing, so at first I thought, ‘They’re not very motivated.’ However, during the pandemic, there were many people in North America who were watching Japanese and Asian anime and dramas, and subtitles were actually considered cooler.
“Rather than us having done something, my impression is that the times had changed and the groundwork for acceptance was already there. That it went on to rewrite the all-time box-office record for live-action Japanese films in the U.S. was more surprising than anything else.”
To this end, Yamazaki then brought the conversation to the wider Japanese entertainment environment, asserting to his Forbes Japan host, “I think the greatest weapon for works released for overseas audiences is not thinking about overseas at all, and instead pushing the domestic aspect to its limit.”
“That gives a work strength. If you try to match global standards, there are probably many people in Hollywood who are much better at that. Instead, I think the strength of Japanese works that go overseas lies in things that are unusual—maybe a little strange, but interesting in some way.”
“The reason Hollywood is often said to be boring lately is that formulas for ‘how to make a hit’ have become too well established, resulting in the same kinds of works being made over and over again. Within that context, the question is how far you can go in making something domestic—not in the sense of content being Japanese, but something made with a Japanese sensibility. That, I think, is probably the most advantageous condition for us.”
Later pressed for his thoughts on the Japanese government’s ongoing efforts to help expand their global entertainment footprint by providing financial and structural support to local artists across every medium, Yamazaki further explained, “It’s clear that the dramatic change in Japanese people’s perception of Americans after the war was due to the TV dramas of that time. When they watched something like ‘Father Knows All,’ they were shocked to see that Americans, who had previously been considered devils, were actually living wonderful lives and were such nice people.”
“I think South Korea’s national power has also increased significantly thanks to its content,” he noted. “Getting people to watch Japanese content and fall in love with Japanese people is the same as getting them to fall in love with Japanese products. It requires little investment, yet can be a powerful weapon, to get people to like the country itself. Government officials are finally starting to realize this.”
At present, Yamazaki is hard at work on his follow up to Godzilla Minus One, the aptly-named Godzilla Minus Zero, which is currently on track to breach the ocean’s waters sometime in 2026.
