Elegant location and establishment to the contrary, Japan Society is a not-for-profit group, specializing in lectures and exhibitions in the fields of arts and culture, and with an emphasis on business matters, public policy and education (including language teaching). Though it presented its first Japanese film in 1922, it shows only an annual baker’s dozen and cannot compete with what Ryo Nagasawa calls “the big powers.” But having shared information and worked with the established New York Asian Film Festival, this young Film Program Officer knew that, through unique contacts with individual distributors and producers and, for restored and archived classics, the National Film Center in Tokyo, there were things they could do, films to be shown, that others could not.

So it was proposed, and accepted, that as one aspect of the Society’s multi-faceted 2007 centennial celebration, they join with Subway Cinema in the equal programming and presentation of two fully independent festivals that, like MasterCard’s circles, would partially overlap at their venues: the first “Japan Cuts: Festival of New Japanese Film” and the sixth annual New York Asian Film Festival.

A stone’s throw from the United Nations, the Society has historically attracted a more staid audience to retrospectives on giants like Kurosawa and Mifune, or critic Susan Sontag on Japanese cinema. Returning several times a year to Japan, where her parents run movie theaters and she will screen four films daily in addition to meeting with distributors and filmmakers and acquiring two dozen or more titles each time to bring back here, Nagasawa decided to select a number of films aimed at younger viewers for this initial co-participation.  “What can we do,” she asked, “that, say, MoMA doesn’t?”

The obvious answer was, not so much classics or new films in that mold, but Japanese art-house, blockbuster, action, anime and anime-based live-action, kaiju (monster) and horror films -- “almost too many horrors!” With the occasional work shown at both venues, this year’s NYAFF began downtown, two weeks at IFC Center, then moved up for a co-presented long weekend at Japan Society, where the gala would continue as independent Japan Cuts (Long Cuts, eighteen U.S. or N.Y. feature premières; Short Cuts, free-of-admission digital videos and shorts; five invited directors on hand, Q&As, receptions, a discussion about contemporary female filmmakers, and a free family screening).

Organizers and programmers were pleased with this first year’s festival attendance, “very happy we could attract a lot of people.” The initial long weekend began with audience enthusiasm and a bang, literally -- Takashi Miike’s Big Bang Love, Juvenile A (also screened downtown, a week earlier) and Exte: Hair Extensions, comic J-horror from Sion Sono (who answered questions afterwards) -- and by the time it was all over, eighty-offerings-in-eleven-days later, 4,500 patrons had come, “a big jump compared to previous programs.”

Already thinking of possible entries for a 2008 edition, and set to confer with Subway Cinema within the next couple of weeks -- with a shorter selection window, the latter’s five volunteer members will not begin winnowing until after New Year’s -- Japan Society people expected in advance that their first, co-presented part would be popular with a new, younger audience, which it was even though opening selections sidestepped the outré over which such viewers “go crazy at international fantastic film festivals.”

It has been three-quarters of a century since Japan’s serious film output was second only to America’s. A devastating earthquake, homegrown-military and then Allied-occupation censorship, wartime devastation, financial crises, the collapse of major studios, the artistic price of churning out cheap monster movies, and the inroads of television reduced the country’s industry to a shadow. Recovery seems here, however, with more than four hundred domestic releases in 2006, their ticket gross topping foreign films’ for the first time since the mid-‘eighties. Strong and poised once again, part of the whole burgeoning Asian film phenomenon, Japan now needs visibility overseas beyond DVD and art house.

The last week-and-a-half, Japan Cuts brought in an older, “closer to our original audience.” But since the amazing coincidence of “Fall 2005/An avalanche of Japanese films hits New York” at five separate independent sites, it has been increasingly clear that the classic offerings of the past cannot be “the Japan Society specialty any more.” In a unique position, “with access to all new Japanese films that they don’t have, not only the popular ones” of other festivals and younger viewers’ word-of-mouth, the Society film department faces the dual challenge of appealing to its traditional fans as well as to newer, younger ones, and of merging the advantages and limitations of its own non-profit niche with those of, say, for-profit NYAFF. With players such as New York’s Asian American International Film Festival (thirty years and running, from Asian Cinevision) and the New York Korean Film Festival (inaugurated seven years ago) already on the field, the operative words are to be cooperation and co-presentation.

A rookie to the team, Japan Society will have to prove its staying power among the big guys. But the start-up has proved most promising, and future editions should be even better, with experience and exposure as the good word spreads. Communications Associate Kuniko Shiobara says that “we are very happy with what we’ve accomplished and with the crowds.” What could be a better beginning on which to build?

(Photo from Exte: Hair Extensions. © Exte Film Partners.)