General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

The Bird People in China (中国の鳥人)

The Bird People in China (中国の鳥人) is a 1998 Japanese comedy-drama directed by Takashi Miike, in which a Tokyo salaryman and a yakuza enforcer travel to a remote village in China's Yunnan province, near the Myanmar border, where a school teaches children to fly. It was adapted from Makoto Shiina's novel of the same name, with a screenplay by Masa Nakamura, and runs 118 minutes.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director / writers	Takashi Miike; based on the novel by Makoto Shiina, screenplay by Masa Nakamura¹
Release	Japan, 1998; eiga.com lists June 6, allcinema and AsianWiki list June 10³^•⁴
Running time / language	118 minutes, Japanese¹
Main cast	Masahiro Motoki (Wada), Renji Ishibashi (Ujiie), Mako (Shen), Li Li Wang (Yan)⁵
Awards	Audience Award at the 7th Hawaii International Film Festival; 10th place in Kinema Junpo's Best Ten of Japanese film; Mainichi Film Concours best actor for Motoki; director and actor awards at the Takasaki Film Festival¹^•³
Viewer rating	7.4/10 on IMDb from about 5,100 votes⁵

Spoilers

Premise and plot

Wada (Masahiro Motoki) is an ordinary trading-company employee sent to Yunnan province to handle a jade import contract after a hospitalized colleague takes his place. At a rural station he is met by Shen (Mako), a Chinese guide and interpreter who speaks idiosyncratic Japanese, and by Ujiie (Renji Ishibashi), a yakuza who forces his way onto the trip to watch over a jade-vein transaction because Wada's company owes money to his gang.³^•²

The journey to the village occupies the first half of the film and plays as a broad comedy of mishaps: the men cross mountains on foot, survive a sudden storm, ride a raft pulled by turtles, and their guide loses his memory after eating hallucinogenic mushrooms.³^•⁶ When they finally reach the ethnic-minority village, they find a "bird people school" where children are taught how to fly. The teacher is Yan (Li Li Wang), a young village woman with blue eyes whose grandfather was British; she inherited the school through his will, though she has never flown herself.³^•¹

The village's secret. Wada becomes fascinated by Yan's singing, which turns out to be the Scottish folk song "Annie Laurie," and by the legend of the bird people her grandfather translated into English. He begins the film recording his actions on a portable cassette recorder; when the batteries wear out in the wilderness, he must put the technology aside and engage with her voice directly.⁷^•⁸ Ujiie, meanwhile, grows attached to the villagers and their way of life. On the eve of departure he kills the raft-pulling turtles to keep modern civilization out of the village, and the two men attempt flight with attached wings, which ends in failure. Thirty years later, Wada in Tokyo receives a letter from Ujiie, who has returned to the village as a development adviser.³

Place in Miike's career

Takashi Miike was known at the time for violent yakuza films and transgressive horror, and English-speaking audiences later came to know him chiefly through the 1999 thriller Audition; The Bird People in China, made a year earlier, is a genteel film about friendship and traditional values, and reviewers have compared its contemplative tone to the work of Takeshi Kitano rather than to Miike's gangster pictures.⁸^•²^•⁹ The film was shot guerrilla-style in China, and its mountain landscapes are a recurring point of praise in reviews.¹⁰

Tonal structure. Critics describe a marked shift at the midpoint: the road-movie first half is broadly comedic, while the village scenes take on a serious, meditative quality. Some reviewers find the film overlong by roughly 15 minutes for the story it tells, while others single out its final shot and epilogue as among the most haunting in Miike's work.⁸^•¹⁰^•¹¹ Time Out called it an "adult fairytale" pitched between King of the Children and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, mixing adventure-comedy with magic realism.¹²

Sound and interpretation

A scholarly reading by Randolph Jordan in Offscreen argues that the film builds a gradual disjunction between sound and image, using Wada's cassette recorder and the village's songs to blur the boundary between diegetic and non-diegetic sound; in mid-song the recorder dies, but Wada continues the recording gesture, a moment the essay reads as the medium transcending its own limitations.¹³ The same village is presented as more cosmopolitan than its remoteness suggests, with the ancient and the contemporary coexisting.¹³

A Japanese retrospective assessment places the film in the context of its era, made before China became a dominant world power, when Japanese audiences could still hold sympathy and fantasy toward an unspoiled China; it calls the film a fable of nostalgic adults and notes its fixed narrative of return to nature and the desire for wings.¹⁴

Production details

The film was produced by Sedic International and Hone Film, with Marubeni Corporation and Yomiko Advertising also credited, and was distributed in Japan by Cinema Do Cinema (with cooperation from Tokyo Theatres). Cinematography is by Hideo Yamamoto and the music by Koji Endo.²^•⁴ Mako, who plays the guide Shen, is credited in Japanese sources as Mako Iwamatsu.¹

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026