A comment in Holljapan.

A Comment in Holljapan

When Disney's production chief, Jeffrey Katzenberg, unleashed his wrath on the movie industry earlier this year, the Japanese didn't escape.

In his lengthy "internal" memo, the Disney executive said that the Japanese belief that they could control the software that drives their hardware "simply doesn't make sense in the movie business."

The wisdom of Japan acquiring Sony and Matsushita was "particularly questionable," he wrote. Further, "the Japanese are getting into a business that is to some extent outside their cultural context."

And then he threw in a zinger: "I firmly believe...that the recent marriages between Japanese hardware makers and American movie makers may not be ones made in entertainment heaven. There will be a chasm in the fundamental understanding of the movie business that will likely prove exceedingly frustrating for Japanese and Americans alike."

Such comments weren't music to Japanese ears, particularly since the Disney company had reached an agreement with Yamaichi Securities  and a group of banks to supply Disney with some $365 million, to be invested in 25 features over the next year and a half. Recently, Disney also signed a multi-million dollar deal with Wowow, Japan's DBS payTV service.

In fact, over the past four years, one half of Japan's American investments have been in the entertainment business.

Once Katzenberg's memo became known, the Japanese response wasn't long in coming. Major Japanese executives stressed that Japan had no intention of "running" studios, but was leaving that phase strictly to the Americans. "We're in it for the profits," was the tenor of the Japanese comment.

Katzenberg ridiculed the notion of Japan seeking a vertical integration of its hardware with American software. In the case of Sony, he noted, by owning Columbia it now controlled less than 15 per cent of Hollywood's software output.

"Fifteen per cent does not comprise the critical mass necessary to direct a market," he wrote. Apart from all that, Katzenberg argued, "Filmmaking at its essence is about the conveyance of emotion. Ours is said to be a crazy business and most of its practitioners are, by normal standards, a bit eccentric.

"The Japanese, on the other hand, culturally err on the side of withholding emotion..."

PHOTO : How Tokyo's Mainichi Daily News saw the MCA's Japanese buyout.