Why the Five-Company Agreement Was Made｜A Pact Against Poaching to Hold Back Nikkatsu

Yujiro Ishihara, Sayuri Yoshinaga, Tetsuya Watari, Masako Izumi, Izumi Ashikawa, Chieko Matsubara, Akira Kobayashi. In the Japanese cinema of the 1960s, Nikkatsu had a presence entirely its own.

The films Nikkatsu produced feel very different from those of the other major studios, and I sense a distinctive air rising from them. What, then, is the true nature of this appeal, so hard to put into words?

Nikkatsu itself, founded in 1912, is one of the oldest film companies in Japan, a long-established house that had been at the forefront since before the war. In 1939, however, just before Japan entered World War II, the Film Law was enacted, and the system of film production was rebuilt. As part of that process, in 1942 the production companies were consolidated into three, Shochiku, Toho, and Daiei. Daiei was born from the merger of Shinko Kinema, Daito, and the production arm of Nikkatsu, among others. This was not a system the companies reorganized of their own accord. It belonged to the peculiar circumstances of an age in which the state controlled industry from above. Here lies the prehistory of a structure in which a whole industry was concentrated into a few companies and even its people were placed under control. Nikkatsu’s production arm was absorbed into Daiei, and from then on Nikkatsu survived as a company that handled distribution and exhibition.

With defeat in 1945, the studios were freed from state control, but now they were forced to keep making democratic films under strong pressure on expression from GHQ, the occupation authorities, and within the bounds of its censorship. That censorship collapsed in 1950, when war broke out on the neighboring Korean Peninsula and American eyes turned toward the peninsula. What is more, Japan, which did not become a battlefield, grew rich on the special procurement boom the war brought.

The occupation came to an end, freedom of expression was restored, and the economic boom swelled the demand for entertainment. With these two coming together, the Japanese film industry made a great recovery and entered its golden age. Cinema grew rapidly as an industry, and attendance reached its peak in 1958 at an astonishing figure of about 1.1 billion.

In this golden age, both the number of films made each year and the number of tickets sold were enormous, and amid this tide, stars came to be treated as each company’s greatest asset. What the companies feared above all was that these assets might move freely and set off a war of poaching. So in September 1953, the five major studios, Shochiku, Toho, Daiei, Shintoho, and Toei, concluded the Five-Company Agreement.

The Five-Company Agreement was an understanding meant to prevent the poaching of contracted talent, and the direct trigger was Nikkatsu’s attempt to resume production the following year, in 1954, after a long interruption. More than ten years had passed since Nikkatsu gave up its production arm, so after the war it was in effect a newcomer. It had a distribution network and theaters, but it had none of the stars or directors that mattered, and it was in no position to make films of its own. If it was going to resume production, in other words, it had no choice but to lure people away from the established companies. Sensing this unsettling move that threatened to disrupt their system, the five companies concluded an agreement to shut it down. They would not lend or borrow one another’s contracted actors, directors, or technicians without permission, they would not poach them, and they would not hire anyone who had left another company for a set period. Another interesting point is that the agreement also came with a provision forbidding contracted stars to appear on television. The Five-Company Agreement was also a bulwark against television, which was then on the rise.

The rigid system that began with this agreement seems, in changing forms, to cast its shadow over the entertainment world even today. In it we can see the distant origin of the tight control exercised by talent agencies, and of the pattern in which anyone who disturbs the order is “frozen out.”

Across the Pacific, meanwhile, a dramatic turn was taking place in the same period. In Hollywood, the home of cinema, the Paramount decision of 1948 had set the studio system on the road to dismantlement on antitrust grounds. At the very moment when the United States was using antitrust law to break the studios’ hold and open up a world of independent production, Japan did the opposite, tightening its agreement and strengthening studio control. This is why Japan’s system of exclusive contracts was so strikingly rigid even by world standards.

Yet the Five-Company Agreement infringed on the freedom to choose one’s occupation. Actors in particular resented a situation in which they could not choose the films they appeared in, and in which all authority over them was left to the company that held their contract, and a mood of independence began to grow. A symbolic first step came in 1954, when three of the most popular actresses of the day, Keiko Kishi, Ineko Arima, and Yoshiko Kuga, formed the Ninjin Club.

The hold of the Five-Company Agreement was extremely strong, however, and the independent producers went through trial after trial, struggling to secure leading stars and distribution routes. But it was precisely this tug of war in the 1950s, between the agreement and the people who resisted it, that would eventually lead to the golden age of independent film in the 1960s.

In such harsh conditions, what lay behind Nikkatsu’s rise to a presence all its own in the cinema of the 1960s? The more rigid a system becomes, the more the “next shoots” that spring from its warped gaps go on to change the future.

History teaches that the more rigid a system of mutual surveillance becomes across a whole society, as it has in Japan today, the more surely a distortion arises somewhere, and from that gap the shoots of the next generation emerge. I cannot help feeling that the movements of Nikkatsu under the Five-Company Agreement hold a hint for us now.