Toho has been making films since 1932. They are still making films.
In that time they produced: Akira Kurosawa's entire career. The Godzilla franchise. The Zatoichi series. Studio Ghibli's distribution infrastructure. Seven Samurai. Rashomon. Ikiru. Gravity (distributed in Japan). Godzilla Minus One - which, in 2023, won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects on a production budget of approximately $15 million, defeating films made for ten to twenty times as much.
That longevity is not an accident. It is the result of structural decisions about how to build an organisation that can survive across decades without the specific failure modes that have ended most of Hollywood's studio-era organisations in their original form.
THE CRAFT CONTINUITY MODEL
Toho's relationship to craft is based on institutional knowledge retention in ways that the contemporary Hollywood model has abandoned. The contemporary Hollywood studio is a distribution and financing entity that does not maintain permanent creative staff - it hires for projects and releases them when projects end. The institutional knowledge accumulated by craft professionals exists in the professionals, not in the institution, and leaves with them.
Toho has historically maintained ongoing relationships with key production personnel - not necessarily as permanent employees, but as returning collaborators who build institutional knowledge over decades. The visual effects team that produced Godzilla Minus One on a $15 million budget wasn't assembled for this film. It was the accumulation of craft knowledge developed across multiple productions in an industry that treated craft continuity as a value rather than an overhead.
STUDIO GHIBLI - THE EXTREME VERSION
Studio Ghibli's relationship to craft continuity is the extreme version of the model. The studio maintained a permanent animation staff for most of its existence - a different model from the Western animation industry, which uses freelance crews assembled for specific productions. The permanence created an institutional visual culture: the specific quality of Ghibli animation, the formal consistency across films made by different directors within the studio, is partly the product of a team that worked together for years and developed a shared visual vocabulary.
The cost of this model is higher overhead between productions. The return is formal consistency and craft quality that the freelance model struggles to maintain. The Ghibli films look like Ghibli films regardless of which director made them, because the craft infrastructure producing them was the same craft infrastructure. When Miyazaki retires and a new generation takes over, they are inheriting an institutional craft tradition, not starting from scratch.
THE IP RELATIONSHIP
Toho's relationship to intellectual property is different from Hollywood's relationship to IP in one specific way: they have maintained control of their most valuable properties rather than licensing them into franchise systems that generate short-term revenue while diluting the original property's cultural specificity.
Godzilla has been made by Hollywood twice in the modern era - both times with mixed results, partly because the specific cultural grammar of the Japanese Godzilla franchise is not the same as the Hollywood monster movie grammar, and partly because the licensing arrangement doesn't give Toho full creative control. Godzilla Minus One - Toho producing the film themselves, for a Japanese audience, with Japanese craft infrastructure - won the Oscar that the Hollywood versions didn't.
THE LONG-TERM AUDIENCE RELATIONSHIP
The most fundamental difference between the Japanese film industry model and the Hollywood model is the relationship to audience trust built over time. The franchise system Hollywood operates on is a short-term audience exploitation model: the brand generates attendance because of previous films, and the new films need to generate sufficient returns immediately to justify the franchise's continuation.
The Ghibli model - Miyazaki directing films over forty years, each one different from the last, each one capable of disappointing the audience that expected the previous film and building a new audience that stays - is a long-term audience trust model. You go because Miyazaki makes it, not because it resembles the last film. The relationship is to the filmmaker's ongoing project rather than to a brand promise. That kind of audience relationship is difficult to build and extremely durable once built.
You go because Miyazaki makes it, not because it resembles the last film.