The complex legacy of Lost In Translation two decades on

It has been 20 years since an ageing Bill Murray and a young Scarlett Johansson introduced Tokyo to a generation in Sofia Coppola’s Lost In Translation.

The legacy of the Oscar-winning movie, which hit screens on Sept 12, 2003, is mixed. It’s the film that launched a thousand travel blogs, helping propel a tourism boom as it catapulted Japan onto the list of exotic Asian destinations where young philosophy majors could go to find themselves. Yet many of its depictions of the Japanese, questionable even then, are uncomfortable in a modern light.

At a time when the country had lost much of its international relevancy, the film helped rekindle interest in it. After 1989’s Black Rain and 1992’s Mr. Baseball, Hollywood movies set there mostly disappeared as the spectre of a Japanese takeover of the world economy faded.

The release came just when the administration of…