In September 1978, Manhunt became the first Japanese film to be released in China since the Cultural Revolution, arriving as one of three movies presented at a Beijing “Japanese Film Week” – the others were Kei Kumai’s Sandakan No. 8 (1974) and Koreyoshi Kurahara’s The Glacier Fox (1978). It subsequently went on a national release in 1979, and circulated in multiple prints for years thereafter.

A 1999 survey reported that a staggering eighty percent of Chinese respondents claimed to have seen the film, some as many as ten times. It is for this reason that one sometimes sees Japanese claims that the movie was seen by 800,000,000 people – an extrapolation that assumes that the respondents tracked with the population of China as a whole. And yet, the film was indeed seen by a remarkable number of people, from the cinemas of Beijing to open-air travelling performances in rural valleys. In his book A History of a Billion Chinese People’s Passion for Japanese Film (2006), author Liu Wenbing recounts his first viewing of Manhunt as a teenager in the 1980s, at an outdoor screening in the countryside, in which ten thousand people took their places on one side of a cloth screen, while another eight thousand watched the film in reverse aspect, from the opposite side of the projection.

Audiences in the People’s Republic were bewitched by what had been entirely everyday location work in Tokyo. For a nation where the bicycle was the standard mode of transport, audiences were amazed at the sight of streets thick with automobiles. From the funky opening music, and the very first shot – an aerial image of the Shinjuku skyscrapers – Manhunt offered Chinese cinema-goers a window into a different world. The rooftop showdown, likely to have been chosen simply for ease of shooting without disrupting traffic, takes on a new meaning when one imagines an awestruck audience, ignoring the fisticuffs in the foreground to gaze in wonder at the Tokyo cityscape.

From my article in the Umbrella (Australia) Blu-ray booklet for the Japanese film Manhunt (1976), starring Ken Takakura.