Rashomon ranks high on Japanese Wikipedia

This Reddit post offers an interesting look at the most popular films around the world as ranked by their Wikipedia page views in March.

It’s probably not surprising that films like Steven Soderbergh’s topical Contagion or Bong Joon-ho’s recently very successful Parasite generate page views across different Wikipedia languages, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that Kurosawa’s Rashomon was in the top 10 of Japanese Wikipedia’s most viewed film articles in March. I don’t know if it is in some way topical in Japan at the moment, but it’s always good to see that interest in Kurosawa continues in his home country. I think it’s also the oldest film listed in any language’s results.

My Japanese isn’t good enough to search this, but all my Japanese friends keep saying people are disgusted with Abe’s lies over Covid (there are some very funny memes circulating featuring Abe and his two facemasks). I wonder if the searches are related to people getting interested again in lies and gaslighting – is there a Japanese version of the phrase, Rashomon effect?

That’s a good guess, I think. I did a bit of digging but couldn’t find any clear indication of either Rashomon or the Rashomon effect (羅生門効果, I believe, in Japanese) being featured in the news recently. I must say though that Google’s search tools aren’t always the best when it comes to Japanese news sources. I feel that they have, in fact, gotten only worse over the years.