The Stars Realign in Japan

TOKYO — Brad Pitt did it.

George Clooney and Meg Ryan did it.

Bill Murray pretended to do it. And back when he was just a celluloid action hero, Arnold Schwarzenegger was very, very good at doing it.

But none of them does it much these days.

A Hollywood in-house secret, Japanese TV commercials were once talked about with a wink and a shake of the head. Piles of cash were paid to stars willing to peddle anything from whiskey to cigarettes, cars to coffee, instant noodles to cafe latte -- as long as nobody told the fans back home. Hey, did you know Dennis Hopper did one for bath products? How much do you figure Leonardo DiCaprio got for that SUV spot? A million? Three?

Sadly, the days of seeing, say, Harrison Ford guzzling Kirin beer may be over. American stars have not vanished from the Japanese advertising landscape, but their numbers have dropped dramatically since the heyday of the 1990s, when even Mickey Rourke was considered bankable here.

"There are much thinner pickings these days," said Al Soiseth, whose Japander.com website (as in Western stars "pandering" to Japanese audiences) offers a video compendium of Japanese commercials featuring Western actors. Soiseth says there is a dearth of new ads to add to the archive, which bursts with clips of Hollywood's 1990s "A list."

Advertising industry analysts offer various explanations for the decline. With the irrational exuberance of Japan's bubble economy a distant memory, ad budgets have shrunk to at best half their former size. Hollywood stars still expecting to pull in $3 million for an afternoon's work trying not to garble a simple Japanese phrase are finding few takers.

Japanese advertisers began using Western actors in a big way in the 1960s, when Hollywood represented the cachet of American culture. But some marketing analysts point out that the Internet and globalization have made American pop culture far more accessible to Japanese consumers and, by extension, less exotic.

"The mystique has faded," said Akihiko Sasamoto, who heads the Asian casting division of Hakuhodo, one of Japan's biggest advertising and marketing agencies. "You no longer have this distinction between foreign artists and Japanese artists. So we don't need to spend a big amount of money on a Hollywood star."