Japanese Films: What to Watch, Who to Know, Where to See Them
Jun 22, 2023
A woodcutter walks into a ruined gate out of the rain and says he does not understand what he has seen. Four people then describe the same killing four incompatible ways, and none of them is lying. Rashomon won at Venice in 1951, and the West discovered that Japan had been making extraordinary films for thirty years while nobody outside was watching.
Japanese cinema runs from Kurosawa's samurai epics to Ozu's domestic dramas, from Ghibli animation to horror that reshaped the genre worldwide. If you want a starting point: Seven Samurai for scale, Tokyo Story for depth, Spirited Away for everything at once. Most are available on the major streaming services, and the Criterion Channel or Japanese film festivals cover the rest.
Japan was making films within a few years of the Lumière brothers, and by the 1930s had one of the world's largest industries by output. Almost none of it survives. Earthquake, war, and studio fires destroyed the majority of pre-war Japanese cinema.
The 1950s were the golden age. Studios were producing at industrial scale, and Kurosawa, Ozu, Mizoguchi, and Naruse were all working at once. International recognition arrived with Rashomon at the Venice Film Festival, and Western audiences spent the next decade catching up.
Television gutted the studio system through the 1960s, and the industry fragmented. What replaced it was more interesting than the decline suggests: the Japanese New Wave, then pink films that funded a generation of directors, then the anime boom, then the horror wave of the late 1990s that Hollywood remade wholesale.
Today Japan produces more than 600 films a year, and animation accounts for a disproportionate share of both output and box office.
We'll build a costed, pre-planned Japan itinerary you can customise to your taste.
Kurosawa's film about a killing described four irreconcilable ways. It gave English the term Rashomon effect, and it is the film that opened Japanese cinema to the world. Eighty-eight minutes and still startling.
A village hires seven masterless samurai to defend it from bandits. Kurosawa effectively invented the assembling-a-team structure that a thousand films have used since, and the final battle in the rain and mud remains the benchmark. Three and a half hours that do not drag.
An elderly couple visit their grown children in Tokyo and find that nobody has time for them. Ozu shoots almost the entire film from the height of someone kneeling on a tatami mat, barely moves the camera, and produces something quietly devastating. It appears near the top of most critics' lists of the greatest films ever made.
A ten-year-old girl is trapped in a bathhouse for spirits after her parents are turned into pigs. Miyazaki's film won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and held the Japanese box office record for nearly two decades. It is the best single entry point to Japanese cinema for anyone of any age.
Katsuhiro Otomo's adaptation of his own manga, set in a Neo-Tokyo rebuilt after a catastrophe. The animation was hand-drawn at a level of detail nobody had attempted, and it changed what Western audiences believed animation could be.
Hideo Nakata's film about a cursed videotape created the template for a decade of Japanese horror and its American remakes. The restraint is what makes it work: almost everything frightening happens off screen or in implication.
A class of schoolchildren is taken to an island and made to fight to the death. Banned or restricted in several countries on release, and the obvious ancestor of a great deal of later dystopian fiction.
A cellist loses his orchestra job and takes work preparing bodies for burial. It won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and is the gentlest film on this list, about a profession most Japanese people would rather not discuss.
Kurosawa is the most internationally influential Japanese director, and the one Western filmmakers cite most. Seven Samurai became The Magnificent Seven, Yojimbo became A Fistful of Dollars, and The Hidden Fortress shaped Star Wars. Thirty films across fifty years, and the late color work, Kagemusha and Ran, is as strong as the early black and white.
Ozu made the same film repeatedly and got better at it every time: families, marriages, generational drift, shot from a fixed low camera. He is the least flashy and most quietly admired of the great Japanese directors.
Mizoguchi specialized in long unbroken takes and in films about women crushed by the societies around them. Ugetsu and Sansho the Bailiff are the places to start.
Miyazaki co-founded Studio Ghibli in 1985 and has retired several times without it taking. My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, and The Boy and the Heron cover four decades. His films are for children in the sense that they take children seriously.
Kitano is a television comedian in Japan and an austere director of violent films everywhere else, which is a genuinely strange double career. Hana-bi and Sonatine are the essential ones.
Tsukamoto makes low-budget body horror and war films largely by himself, shooting, editing, and often acting. Tetsuo: The Iron Man is not for everyone and is unlike anything else.
Worth adding to any list: Hirokazu Kore-eda, whose Shoplifters won the Palme d'Or in 2018 and who is the best contemporary chronicler of Japanese family life, and Makoto Shinkai, whose Your Name broke the animation box office records Ghibli had held.
Netflix carries the Ghibli catalog outside the US and Japan, plus a growing set of Japanese originals. Max holds the Ghibli films in the US.
The Criterion Channel has the deepest classic collection, with restored Kurosawa, Ozu, and Mizoguchi. Mubi rotates arthouse titles. For anime specifically, Crunchyroll is the largest library.
In Japan, cinemas cost around ¥2,000 for a standard adult ticket, with discounts on the first day of each month and on certain weekdays. Foreign films are usually subtitled rather than dubbed, but Japanese films rarely carry English subtitles, so check before buying.
Tokyo's repertory cinemas are the real find. Small independent theaters in Shibuya, Shimokitazawa, and Jinbocho run classic Japanese cinema continuously, some with English subtitles, and tickets cost about the same as a multiplex.
Tokyo International Film Festival is the largest, held over ten days each fall in Hibiya and Ginza, with a competition section and a substantial Japanese program. Details are on the festival site.
Osaka Asian Film Festival runs in March and focuses on new work from across Asia, with a particular strength in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Korean cinema. The program is published a few weeks ahead.
Short Shorts Film Festival and Asia takes place in Tokyo in June and is an Academy Award qualifying festival for short film. It is the most accessible of the big Japanese festivals, with screenings across several venues and many free.
Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival happens in a former coal town in Hokkaido in February, deep in snow, and specializes in horror and fantasy. It is small, eccentric, and beloved.
Kyoto International Film and Art Festival runs in the fall and pairs film with contemporary art, using historic venues around the city.
The Ghibli Museum in Mitaka is the obvious pilgrimage, and tickets are sold by advance lottery only, released monthly. Ghibli Park in Aichi opened more recently and works on a similar booking system.
Toei Kyoto Studio Park is a working film studio you can walk around, with standing Edo-period sets used for period drama since the 1970s. It is unashamedly a theme park and genuinely interesting for anyone who has watched a jidaigeki.
For locations, our guide to Studio Ghibli-inspired places in Japan covers the real places that fed the films.
The generalizations are rough but useful.
Pacing is slower and silence is used deliberately, particularly in Ozu and Kore-eda. Endings are frequently unresolved, because the tradition is less committed to catharsis than Hollywood is. Nature and season carry emotional weight that dialogue would otherwise do.
Mono no aware, a sensitivity to the transience of things, runs through a great deal of it, from cherry blossoms in a Kurosawa frame to the ending of Tokyo Story. It is not sentimentality. It is closer to acceptance.
Animation is treated as a medium rather than a genre, which is why Japan makes animated films about war, grief, and bureaucracy without anyone finding that odd.
Tokyo has the repertory cinemas, the Ghibli Museum, and the main festivals. Kyoto has Toei Studio Park and the fall festival. Both fit easily into a standard route.
Our guide to Japan's museums covers the wider cultural ground.
For things you can book directly, cultural activities across Japan lists the workshops and performances open to visitors.
A traditional crafts workshop makes a good counterpart to a day spent in dark rooms.
A route such as Tokyo and Kyoto across two weeks leaves evenings free for cinemas, which is when most of this is best seen.
More on the capital, including its repertory theaters, sits in our our guide to the capital.
