While the popular Kano baseball movie opened in Taiwan a year ago, it finally made landfall in Japan, where movie distributors needed time to devise a special marketing strategy and add subtitles to the film, even though more than half the dialogue is in Japanese.
Taiwanese director Huang Ming-chuan (黃明川) says that delayed release is common practice in both Taiwan and Japan.
“Producers and investors hold back on the release of a newly-made film until they feel the time is right to hit the market,” Huang said, adding “a year delay in releasing Kano is a long time, but Japan works in mysterious ways sometimes.”
Photo: Zhou Min-hong, Taipei Times
Kano seems to have struck a chord, as filmgoers flocked to opening week screenings, according to news reports from Tokyo and Osaka. It didn’t hurt that four top Japanese actors were also in the cast.
“We watched Kano today, and we liked it a lot,” Mitsuko Ebihara, who saw the movie at a small cinema in Tokyo, told the Taipei Times in a recent e-mail.
“It was sold out, every seat was taken,” she said.
Ebihara said that all major TV networks and newspapers in Japan have reported on the Kano backstory. Few Japanese know about the history behind the movie, she added.
“But it seems that once they learned the facts from Japanese media, many people became interested in the film,” she said.
“Many Japanese love baseball, so I think the movie will attract a large Japanese audience nationwide.”
Kiyoko Kaneko, who lives in Sapporo, said she saw Kano last week and loved it.
“I didn’t know that Chiayi’s opposing team during the first game at Koshien was a team of Sapporo boys,” she said.
“The movie was exciting for this reason and touched me as a Japanese. The ending song was nice, and I was singing it in my heart because I knew the melody already from the TV ads for the movie.”
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