Selling Japanese movies abroad has never been easy -- the industry makes about 1 percent of its box office overseas, but Haruki Kadokawa and Takashi Miike are both working hard to raise that number, if in radically different ways.
Kadokawa rose to fame in the 1970s and 1980s producing schlocky blockbusters based on the best-selling books of his own publishing house. A master showman, he flogged his films relentlessly and imaginatively -- until a 1993 drug bust derailed his career. Last year, he made a sensational comeback with "Otokotachi no Yamato," a World War II sea epic that earned 5 billion yen at the local box office.
Kadokawa's followup, "Aoki Ookami: Chi Hate Umi Tsukiru Made (The Blue Wolf: To the Ends of the Earth and Sea)," is a biopic of Mongol warlord Genghis Khan, shot entirely in Mongolia, albeit with a mostly Japanese cast.