Cinema of Japan
The cinema of Japan, also known domestically as hōga, began in the late 1890s. Japan has one of the oldest and largest film industries in the world; as of 2022, it was the fourth largest by number of feature films produced and the third largest in terms of box office revenue.
During the 1950s, a period dubbed the "Golden Age of Japanese cinema", the jidaigeki films of Akira Kurosawa and the sci-fi films of Ishirō Honda and Eiji Tsuburaya gained Japanese cinema international praise and made these directors universally renowned and highly influential. Some Japanese films of this period are now considered some of the greatest of all time: in 2012, Yasujirō Ozu's film Tokyo Story was placed at No. 3 on Sight & Sound
Anime rose in popularity during the 1980s, with new animated films being released every summer and winter, often based upon popular anime television series. Mamoru Oshii released his landmark film Angel's Egg while Hayao Miyazaki adapted his own manga series Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind into a 1984 film of the same name, and Katsuhiro Otomo followed suit by adapting his own manga series Akira into a 1988 film of the same name. Anime continues to be massively popular around the world, especially the works of Studio Ghibli, which 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.
Although Japanese horror films have been around since the post-war era that began in 1945 and gained recognition with kaiju such as Godzilla, the genre did not experience a popularity boom until the late 1990s, with films such as Ringu, Kairo, Dark Water, Ju-On: The Grudge, Yogen, and One Missed Call garnering commercial success.
Japan's primary film studios are Toho, Toei, Shochiku, and Kadokawa, which are nicknamed the "Big Four" and are the only members of the Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan. The Japan Academy Film Prize, hosted annually by the Nippon Academy-shō Association, was created in 1978 and is considered to be the Japanese equivalent of the Academy Awards.
History
Early silent era
The kinetoscope, first shown commercially by Thomas Edison in the U.S. in 1894, was first shown in Japan in November 1896. The Vitascope and the Lumière Brothers' Cinematograph were first presented in Japan in early 1897, by businessmen such as Inabata Katsutaro. Lumière cameramen were the first to shoot films in Japan. Moving pictures, however, were not an entirely new experience for the Japanese because of their rich tradition of pre-cinematic devices such as gentō or the magic lantern. The first successful Japanese film in late 1897 showed sights in Tokyo.In 1898, some ghost films were made, such as the Shirō Asano shorts Bake Jizo and Shinin no sosei. The first documentary, the short Geisha no teodori, was made in June 1899. Tsunekichi Shibata made a number of early films, including Momijigari, an 1899 record of two famous actors performing a scene from a well-known kabuki play. Early films were influenced by traditional theater – for example, kabuki and bunraku.
20th century
At the dawn of the 20th century, theaters in Japan hired benshi, storytellers who sat next to the screen and narrated silent movies. They were descendants of kabuki jōruri, kōdan storytellers, theater barkers and other forms of oral storytelling. Benshi could be accompanied by music like silent films from cinema of the West. With the advent of sound in the early 1930s, the benshi gradually declined.In 1908, Shōzō Makino, considered the pioneering director of Japanese film, began his influential career with Honnōji gassen, produced for Yokota Shōkai. Shōzō recruited Matsunosuke Onoe, a former kabuki actor, to star in his productions. Onoe became Japan's first film star, appearing in over 1,000 films, mostly shorts, between 1909 and 1926. The pair pioneered the jidaigeki genre. Tokihiko Okada was a popular romantic lead of the same era.
The first Japanese film production studio was built in 1909 by the Yoshizawa Shōten company in Tokyo.
The first female Japanese performer to appear in a film professionally was the dancer/actress Tokuko Nagai Takagi, who appeared in four shorts for the American-based Thanhouser Company between 1911 and 1914.
Among intellectuals, critiques of Japanese cinema grew in the 1910s and eventually developed into a movement that transformed Japanese film. Film criticism began with early film magazines such as Katsudō shashinkai and a full-length book written by Yasunosuke Gonda in 1914, but many early film critics often focused on chastising the work of studios like Nikkatsu and Tenkatsu for being too theatrical and for not utilizing what were considered more cinematic techniques to tell stories, instead relying on benshi. In what was later named the Pure Film Movement, writers in magazines such as Kinema Record called for a broader use of such cinematic techniques. Some of these critics, such as Norimasa Kaeriyama, went on to put their ideas into practice by directing such films as The Glow of Life, which was one of the first films to use actresses. There were parallel efforts elsewhere in the film industry. In his 1917 film The Captain's Daughter, Masao Inoue started using techniques new to the silent film era, such as the close-up and cut back. The Pure Film Movement was central in the development of the gendaigeki and scriptwriting.
New studios established around 1920, such as Shochiku and Taikatsu, aided the cause for reform. At Taikatsu, Thomas Kurihara directed films scripted by the novelist Junichiro Tanizaki, who was a strong advocate of film reform. Even Nikkatsu produced reformist films under the direction of Eizō Tanaka. By the mid-1920s, actresses had replaced onnagata and films used more of the devices pioneered by Inoue. Some of the most discussed silent films from Japan are those of Kenji Mizoguchi, whose later works retain a very high reputation.
Japanese films gained popularity in the mid-1920s against foreign films, in part fueled by the popularity of movie stars and a new style of jidaigeki. Directors such as Daisuke Itō and Masahiro Makino made samurai films like A Diary of Chuji's Travels and Roningai featuring rebellious antiheroes in fast-cut fight scenes that were both critically acclaimed and commercial successes. Some stars, such as Tsumasaburo Bando, Kanjūrō Arashi, Chiezō Kataoka, Takako Irie and Utaemon Ichikawa, were inspired by Makino Film Productions and formed their own independent production companies where directors such as Hiroshi Inagaki, Mansaku Itami and Sadao Yamanaka honed their skills. Director Teinosuke Kinugasa created a production company to produce the experimental masterpiece A Page of Madness, starring Masao Inoue, in 1926. Many of these companies, while surviving during the silent era against major studios like Nikkatsu, Shochiku, Teikine, and Toa Studios, could not survive the cost involved in converting to sound.
With the rise of left-wing political movements and labor unions at the end of the 1920s, there arose so-called tendency films with left-leaning tendencies. Directors Kenji Mizoguchi, Daisuke Itō, Shigeyoshi Suzuki, and Tomu Uchida were prominent examples. In contrast to these commercially produced 35 mm films, the Marxist Proletarian Film League of Japan made works independently in smaller gauges, with more radical intentions. Tendency films suffered from severe censorship heading into the 1930s, and Prokino members were arrested and the movement effectively crushed. Such moves by the government had profound effects on the expression of political dissent in 1930s cinema. Films from this period include: Sakanaya Honda, Jitsuroku Chushingura, Horaijima, Orochi, Maboroshi, Kurutta Ippeji, Jujiro, Kurama Tengu: Kyōfu Jidai, and Kurama Tengu.
The 1923 earthquake, the bombing of Tokyo during World War II, and the natural effects of time and Japan's humidity on flammable and unstable nitrate film have resulted in a great dearth of surviving films from this period.Ref?
File:Humanity and Paper Balloons poster.jpg|thumb|Cinema poster for Sadao Yamanaka's 1937 Humanity and Paper Balloons
Unlike in the West, silent films were still being produced in Japan well into the 1930s; as late as 1938, a third of Japanese films were silent. For instance, Yasujirō Ozu's An Inn in Tokyo, considered a precursor to the neorealism genre, was a silent film. A few Japanese sound shorts were made in the 1920s and 1930s, but Japan's first feature-length talkie was Fujiwara Yoshie no furusato, which used the Mina Talkie System. Notable talkies of this period include Mikio Naruse's Wife, Be Like A Rose!, which was one of the first Japanese films to gain a theatrical release in the U.S.; Kenji Mizoguchi's Sisters of the Gion ; Osaka Elegy ; The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums ; and Sadao Yamanaka's Humanity and Paper Balloons.
Film criticism shared this vitality, with many film journals such as Kinema Junpo and newspapers printing detailed discussions of the cinema of the day, both at home and abroad. A cultured "impressionist" criticism pursued by critics such as Tadashi Iijima, Fuyuhiko Kitagawa, and Matsuo Kishi was dominant, but opposed by leftist critics such as Akira Iwasaki and Genjū Sasa who sought an ideological critique of films.
The 1930s also saw increased government involvement in cinema, which was symbolized by the passing of the Film Law, which gave the state more authority over the film industry, in 1939. The government encouraged some forms of cinema, producing propaganda films and promoting documentary films, with important documentaries being made by directors such as Fumio Kamei. Realism was in favor; film theorists such as Taihei Imamura and Heiichi Sugiyama advocated for documentary or realist drama, while directors such as Hiroshi Shimizu and Tomotaka Tasaka produced fiction films that were strongly realistic in style. Films reinforced the importance of traditional Japanese values against the rise of the Westernised modern girl, a character epitomised by Shizue Tatsuta in Ozu's 1930 film Young Lady.