The Rise and Fall of a Japanese Film Mogul : Media: He revived interest in books and movies. But now his nation scorns him.

At his peak, Japan’s most flamboyant media mogul was toasted as a brilliant marketer who shrewdly combined film, books and advertising to churn out one blockbuster after another.

Admirers praised Haruki Kadokawa, the 51-year-old head of the Kadokawa Shoten film and publishing conglomerate, for rescuing the nation’s film industry from oblivion by drawing crowds to the theaters and turning young people into readers of literature.

But big men fall hard, in Japan as elsewhere. Kadokawa was indicted last month on charges of possessing and smuggling cocaine. Two weeks ago, he was indicted on charges of embezzling as much as $187,000 from his company, allegedly to purchase cocaine. Since Kodokawa was first arrested in August, the man once lionized as the publishing industry’s King Midas has been picked apart as an emperor with no clothes.

He has been blasted as a tyrant and tiresome braggart, a bizarre mystic who relied on crystals and psychics to shape his business strategies. His blockbuster films have been derided as cinematic junk food, and he has been accused of turning the small publishing firm his father founded in 1946--meant to rebuild culture in war-torn Japan--into a brash purveyor of the merely popular.

“Ultimately, his films became pale imitations of American movies,” said Yoshi Shirai, a Tokyo film critic. “He sold movies like cars or refrigerators, and ruined the audience for Japanese films.”

The company “makes no effort to nurture solid literature but just accepts what is popular,” complained top-selling author Ayako Sono, who was the first to withdraw publishing rights from Kadokawa Shoten after the arrest.

The Ministry of Education is reviewing whether the company should continue providing children’s textbooks.

But the rise and fall of Japan’s flashiest media entrepreneur is likely to leave the biggest mark on the film industry here. In an industry plagued by declining audiences, insufficient investment and a persistent lack of flair, the absence of Kadokawa’s marketing talents looms large.

Since joining his father’s company in 1965, Kadokawa has made one bold move after another. His unerring sense of what sells transformed Kadokawa Shoten into a powerhouse with $533 million in revenue and an operating profit of $15.4 million for the fiscal year ended March 31.

Kadokawa made his splashiest move in 1976. For the first time in the history of Japanese publishing, a book company branched into movie making--using one business to boost sales for the other.

Kadokawa based his first film, a mystery titled “The Inugamis,” on a novel by Seishi Yokomizo--and saw to it that bookstores across Japan held “Yokomizo fairs” promoting the novel. He also printed up 15 million book inserts about the movie and 15 million bookmarks that could be exchanged for a discount movie ticket.

Such promotions may be standard practice now, but in Japan it caused a sensation. The film brought in $24 million, a considerable sum at the time, and triggered runaway sales of the novel. Thereafter, Kadokawa was known as “The Revolutionary Kid.”

Three years ago, he set out to challenge Hollywood itself by setting up film production and distribution companies in Los Angeles.

Although Kadokawa has not been particularly productive since his 1990 lavish samurai epic “Heaven and Earth” failed to make money, no other filmmaker so consistently spewed out hits, bringing audiences to theaters in a nation where the average Japanese sees just one movie a year.

“Of his 60 films, he only made about 10 clear flops,” one Japanese film critic said. Kadokawa produced seven of Japan’s 20 box office hits between 1949 and 1992.

Indeed, he was headed for another hit with “Rex,” a cutesy dinosaur story shrewdly timed to exploit the “Jurassic Park” mania, before his arrest prompted his company to pull it from theaters.

“In a way he was a monster, but he was doing things that no one else dared to do,” said Mark Schilling, a Tokyo film critic. “The critics hated him, but he made a lot of money for a lot of people.”

Kadokawa’s professional eclipse is the latest blow in a life of tragic lows and giddy highs. According to various published reports, he was born in Toyama prefecture in central Japan, the eldest son of a noted haiku poet and scholar.

He reportedly never saw his mother after his parents divorced when he was seven, and had a stormy childhood of conflicts with his father.

His father constantly berated him and sometimes beat him, told him he wasn’t his real son and four times disowned him, the reports say. Joining his father’s company upon graduation from Tokyo Kokugakuin University, he put out a collection of poems in 1967, and, in a pioneering move, filled the book with colorful photos. It was a bestseller.

In 1975, he startled the publishing world by putting pictures on book covers for the first time--and selling them with what came to be known as “challenge advertising,” a bold move in a society that avoids conflict and direct product comparisons.

“Women, turn off the TV”; “Women, close your weekly magazines,” his ads declared, challenging them to read literature instead. The ads offended TV producers, magazine editors and women, who felt they were being jeered at. But paperback sales climbed steadily, and Kadokawa was lauded for helping revive book reading among young people.

His father fought him at every step, distressed to see his highbrow publishing firm turning into a low-culture money machine.

The younger Kadokawa was unapologetic: “Like the Beatles and (Playboy magazine’s Hugh) Hefner, you make money first and the culture follows later.”

The two had a reconciliation in 1975, just 10 months before his father died. Kadokawa reeled from the shock, which came five years after his sister committed suicide. This year, his son, Taro, 26, was sued for sexual harassment.

Despite the tragedies, Kadokawa went on to score many more successes and introduced innovations.

He also collected more enemies. Critics say he would listen to no one and unilaterally fired nearly 400 employees.

After his arrest, employees gleefully welcomed the end of the “reign of terror.”

In the early 1980s, Kadokawa told a reporter he was interested in how he would be remembered. He may never have dreamed it could be as a fallen legend.

Tokyo bureau researcher Megumi Shimizu contributed to this report.