IF YOU happen to be a Hollywood star in need of a quick million or two, there is bad news from the Far East: a new, more nationally assertive Japan does not want your face in its adverts any more.

In what industry experts are miserably declaring to be the end of an era, the Japanese marketing machine has taken its cue from modern television audiences and moved on. Japanese people, say the top media analysts, no longer look up to American and British film stars, so it does not help a product much when they are called in to hawk it.

Sophia Coppola’s film Lost in Translation, in which Bill Murray plays an actor who is paid millions to tout whisky in a Japanese commercial, will look like an historical period piece within a year or so, the chairman of Japan’s biggest advertising watchdog predicts.

The statistics from 2005 make grim reading for Hollywood agents. CM Databank, which tracks the advertising industry in Japan, runs an annual measure of the total “impact” of adverts — a measure that calculates total air time and audience interest.

In 1989, when the use of Western celebrities in Japan was approaching its peak, nearly a third of the highest “impact” adverts used Hollywood talent: the pantheon of stars from that year included Michael J. Fox, Eddie Murphy and Mickey Rourke. This year, only two American stars make it into the top 100 — Mickey and Minnie Mouse.

Falling advertising budgets do account for some of the decline — David Beckham’s reign as the king of Japanese adverts came to an abrupt end this year when chocolate companies and car-repair shops decided that they had spent enough. But advertising managers believe that the root cause of the change is to do with surging Japanese self-confidence.

Akihiko Sasamoto, of the giant Hakuhodo advertising agency, explained the shift as a step forward in sophistication by Japanese consumers. To a population that is far better travelled and globally aware than it was ten years ago, Western celebrity endorsement is stale. “More young Japanese speak English, and we see Western people more often than in the past. There is no freshness left in Westerners,” he said.

His agency has also been at the forefront of the trend that has replaced Hollywood actors in Japanese adverts: the march of Asian celebrities. Japanese stars now exclusively dominate the top 20 adverts of last year, and in the course of 2005 Mr Sasamoto has cast five Koreans and a Taiwanese — something that he says would never have happened two years ago.

Appearance in Japanese adverts is a lucrative but inglorious tradition that has been secretly lining the pockets of the Hollywood A-list for two decades. The sudden, Asia-centric shift in the Japanese advertising industry has delivered the coup de grâce to a practice that the actors and actresses have been desperate to hide from their domestic US fans.

In its mid-1990s heyday, anyone who was anyone was involved in Japanese advertising. Sharon Stone looked directly at the camera in an advert for Vernal cosmetics and, with a straight face, described “the quest for the beauty of the skin”. Cameron Diaz, amid a soft-focus montage of studious scenes repeated the word “believe” in a pitch for Aeon English schools. Madonna exchanged hard cash for the indignity of appearing in a ninja costume and plugging rice-based spirits, while Jodie Foster has a series of Honda and cosmetics pitches to her name.

For years, the stars have tried to prevent their Japanese transgressions reaching the outside world, but the internet has made that impossible. Websites such as japander.com chronicle Kevin Costner’s advertising of cars and coffee — a combination that has also tempted Bruce Willis to make the occasional howler — and Brad Pitt’s epic campaign for Edwin trousers.

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