Cinema of Japan

• 1. Introduction

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  Japanese cinema began in the late 1890s, and by 2022 it stood as the fourth largest film industry in the world by number of feature films produced, with 634 titles, and the third largest by box office revenue, at 1.5 billion dollars. The numbers describe a market. They do not explain why a 1953 film about an aging couple visiting their grown children would one day be voted ahead of Citizen Kane by the world's directors. They do not explain how a man in a rubber suit stomping a miniature city became an international icon of an entire nation. This is a story that runs from storytellers seated beside silent screens to a single anime about demon-slaying that broke every box-office record the country had. Along the way an empire used film as a weapon, an occupying army burned hundreds of prints, and six great artists turned the aftermath of war into some of the most admired films ever made. The questions that follow are about how a country with a rich tradition of magic lanterns built one of the oldest and largest film industries on earth, and what it chose to put on screen when no one was telling it what it could not show.

• 2. The Storyteller Beside The Screen

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  The kinetoscope reached Japan in November 1896, two years after Thomas Edison first showed it commercially in the United States. Moving pictures were not entirely new to Japanese audiences, who already knew pre-cinematic devices such as the gentō, or magic lantern. Early Japanese films leaned on the country's theatrical traditions, drawing directly from kabuki and bunraku. In 1899 Tsunekichi Shibata filmed Momijigari, a record of two famous actors performing a scene from a well-known kabuki play.

  Theaters across Japan hired benshi, storytellers who sat beside the screen and narrated the silent action aloud. These performers were descendants of kabuki jōruri, kōdan storytellers, and theater barkers, and they could be accompanied by music in the manner of Western silent films. The benshi were so central that silent films kept being produced in Japan well into the 1930s; as late as 1938, a third of Japanese films had no sound. Yasujirō Ozu's An Inn in Tokyo, made in 1935 and considered a precursor to neorealism, was a silent film.

  In 1908 Shōzō Makino, regarded as the pioneering director of Japanese film, began his career with Honnōji gassen. He recruited a former kabuki actor named Matsunosuke Onoe, who became Japan's first film star and appeared in over 1,000 films, mostly shorts, between 1909 and 1926. The first female Japanese performer to appear professionally in a film was the dancer Tokuko Nagai Takagi, who made four shorts for the American-based Thanhouser Company between 1911 and 1914.

• 3. The Fight For The Frame

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  Film criticism in Japan began with magazines such as Katsudō shashinkai in 1909 and a full-length book by Yasunosuke Gonda in 1914. Many early critics attacked studios like Nikkatsu and Tenkatsu for being too theatrical, for borrowing onnagata and other devices from kabuki and shinpa, and for relying on the benshi rather than telling stories through the camera. In what became known as the Pure Film Movement, writers in magazines such as Kinema Record called for genuinely cinematic technique.

  Norimasa Kaeriyama put those ideas into practice by directing The Glow of Life in 1918, one of the first films to use actresses, in this case Harumi Hanayagi. In his 1917 film The Captain's Daughter, Masao Inoue introduced techniques new to the silent era, including the close-up and the cut back. By the mid-1920s, actresses had replaced the onnagata, and films used more of the devices Inoue had pioneered.

  The rise of left-wing politics and labor unions at the end of the 1920s produced so-called tendency films. The Marxist Proletarian Film League of Japan, known as Prokino, made works independently in smaller gauges such as 9.5mm and 16mm, with more radical intentions than the commercial 35mm studios. Severe censorship met these films heading into the 1930s. Prokino members were arrested and the movement was effectively crushed, a foreshadowing of how the state would soon claim the screen for itself.

• 4. Cinema As Weapon

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  The Film Law passed in 1939 gave the state direct authority over the film industry. The government produced propaganda films and promoted documentaries, also called bunka eiga or culture films, with important works by directors such as Fumio Kamei. Realism was in favor, and films reinforced traditional Japanese values against the figure of the Westernised modern girl, a character Shizue Tatsuta embodied in Ozu's 1930 film Young Lady.

  As Japan expanded its empire, the government treated cinema as a way to show the glory and invincibility of the Empire of Japan. In 1942 Kajiro Yamamoto's The War at Sea from Hawaii to Malaya dramatized the attack on Pearl Harbor, using special effects directed by Eiji Tsuburaya that included a miniature scale model of Pearl Harbor itself. A street form called kamishibai, or paper theater, began around 1920 as ordinary storytelling for children, but by about 1932 it had turned toward a militaristic viewpoint.

  Yoshiko Yamaguchi became one of the era's most popular actresses, rising to international stardom across 22 wartime movies. The Manchukuo Film Association let her use the Chinese name Li Xianglan so she could play Chinese roles in Japanese propaganda films. After the war she reclaimed her Japanese name and starred in 29 more movies, then won election to the Japanese parliament in the 1970s and served for 18 years. In 1943, amid this machinery of propaganda, a young director named Akira Kurosawa made his feature debut with Sugata Sanshiro.

• 5. The Occupier's Scissors

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  After the surrender of Japan in 1945, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers established the Civil Information and Education Section, which took over the industry and required that every proposal and screenplay pass its review. The Civil Censorship Detachment, under direct American military control, then processed the scripts. Pre-war and wartime films were reviewed as well, and over 500 were condemned, with half of them burned. Toho and Daiei pre-emptively destroyed films they feared might incriminate them.

  In November 1945 the occupation authorities banned films that were militaristic, nationalistic, anti-foreign, or that portrayed feudal loyalty, approved suicide, or treated the subjugation of women as acceptable. The full list ran to more than a dozen prohibitions, ending with anything at variance with the spirit of the Potsdam Declaration. A direct consequence was that jidaigeki films, especially those involving samurai, became effectively impossible to make. Escape at Dawn, written by Kurosawa and Senkichi Taniguchi, was rewritten more than a dozen times at the censors' request, largely erasing its original story.

  The occupiers favored films that reflected their own policies, such as agricultural reform and the organization of labor unions. In Yasushi Sasaki's Hatachi no Seishun in 1946, the first kiss scene in a Japanese movie was filmed. Later in the occupation came the Reverse Course, when left-wing filmmakers pushed out of the major studios during the Red Purge joined those displaced by the Toho strikes to form a new independent film movement. The first collaborations between Kurosawa and the actor Toshiro Mifune, Drunken Angel in 1948 and Stray Dog in 1949, emerged from these unsettled years.

• 6. Six Great Artists

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  Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1951 and an Academy Honorary Award the following year, marking the entrance of Japanese cinema onto the world stage and the breakout of Toshiro Mifune. The decade became known as the Golden Age of Japanese cinema, and it produced six great artists: Masaki Kobayashi, Kurosawa, Ishirō Honda, Eiji Tsuburaya, Kenji Mizoguchi, and Yasujirō Ozu. Three films from this decade, Rashomon, Seven Samurai, and Tokyo Story, would later appear in the top ten of the Sight & Sound critics' and directors' polls, with Tokyo Story dethroning Citizen Kane atop the 2012 directors' poll.

  The year 1954 saw two of Japan's most influential films. Kurosawa's Seven Samurai followed a band of hired samurai protecting a village from a gang of thieves. The same year, Ishirō Honda directed the anti-nuclear monster drama Godzilla, with award-winning effects by Tsuburaya. Godzilla was the first Japanese film given a wide release across the United States, where it was heavily re-edited and given new footage with the actor Raymond Burr for its 1956 distribution as Godzilla, King of the Monsters. It spawned an entire subgenre of kaiju films and the longest-running film franchise in history.

  Kenji Mizoguchi, who died in 1956, closed his career with The Life of Oharu, Ugetsu, and Sansho the Bailiff, winning the Silver Lion at Venice for Ugetsu. His films often dealt with the tragedies inflicted on women by Japanese society. The first Japanese film in color was Keisuke Kinoshita's Carmen Comes Home in 1951, and Teinosuke Kinugasa's Gate of Hell, the first Japanese film shot on Eastmancolor, won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, the first Japanese film to do so. Japan has won the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film five times, more than any other Asian country.

• 7. New Waves And Empty Seats

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  The cinema audience peaked in the 1960s, with most films shown in double bills where one half was a program picture, or B movie, typically shot in four weeks. The decade was also the peak of the Japanese New Wave, which had begun in the 1950s and ran into the early 1970s. Nagisa Oshima, Kaneto Shindo, Masahiro Shinoda, Susumu Hani, and Shohei Imamura emerged as major filmmakers, with works such as Oshima's Death by Hanging and Shindo's Onibaba. Documentary played a crucial role, as directors moved between fiction and nonfiction, and Seijun Suzuki was fired by Nikkatsu for making films that, in the studio's words, do not make any sense and do not make any money.

  The 1970s brought a collapse in attendance as television spread, with the total audience falling from 1.2 billion in 1960 to 0.2 billion in 1980. Film companies fought back with bigger-budget productions from Kadokawa Pictures and with sexual or violent content that television could not show. The resulting pink film industry became a stepping stone for many young independent filmmakers, while the idol eiga drew audiences through the fame of young performers. Yoji Yamada introduced the commercially successful Tora-San series and won the first Japan Academy Prize for Best Film in 1978 with The Yellow Handkerchief.

  The 1980s saw the major studios decline, with Toho and Toei barely staying in business and Shochiku supported almost entirely by its Otoko wa tsurai yo films. Kurosawa directed Kagemusha, which won the Palme d'Or in 1980, and Ran in 1985. New directors appeared, including the actor Juzo Itami, who made his debut with The Funeral in 1984 and found critical and box office success with Tampopo. Mini theaters, smaller independent venues, gained popularity in this decade and brought arthouse films and unknown Japanese filmmakers to local audiences.

• 8. The Second Golden Age

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  Anime rose in popularity during the 1980s, with new animated films released every summer and winter, often based on popular television series. Mamoru Oshii released his landmark Angel's Egg in 1985, while Hayao Miyazaki adapted his own manga Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind into a feature film in 1984 and Katsuhiro Otomo did the same with Akira in 1988. The 1990s and 2000s came to be called Japanese Cinema's Second Golden Age, driven by the popularity of anime at home and overseas, with anime films accounting for 60 percent of Japanese film production.

  Hayao Miyazaki's Porco Rosso beat E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial as the highest-grossing film in Japan in 1992, and his Princess Mononoke held the top box office spot until Titanic. His Spirited Away broke Japanese box office records in 2001 and won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. Studio Ghibli counts among its highest-grossing films Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle, Ponyo, and The Boy and the Heron. As of 2025, the top 16 highest-grossing Japanese films worldwide are all anime, and the top 10 were all released in the 21st century.

  The J-horror genre boomed beginning in the late 1990s with commercial successes such as Ringu, Kairo, Dark Water, the Grudge series, and One Missed Call. Takeshi Kitano won the Golden Lion at Venice for Hana-bi in 1997, the same year Shōhei Imamura took his second Palme d'Or for The Eel, becoming only the fifth two-time recipient. In 2020 the anime film Demon Slayer: Mugen Train broke every box-office record in the country to become the highest-grossing film of all time in Japan. Five years later, in July 2025, Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba The Movie: Infinity Castle broke those records again, claiming the same title for itself.