Katana VentraIP

Cinema of Japan

The cinema of Japan (日本映画, Nihon eiga), also known domestically as hōga (邦画, "domestic cinema"), has a history that spans more than 100 years. Japan has one of the oldest and largest film industries in the world; as of 2021, it was the fourth largest by number of feature films produced.[4] In 2011, Japan produced 411 feature films that earned 54.9% of a box office total of US$2.338 billion.[5] Films have been produced in Japan since 1897, when the first foreign cameramen arrived.

Cinema of Japan

3,648 (2021)[1]

2.8 per 100,000 (2017)[2]

Toho Company (33.7%)
Toei Company (10.5%)[3]

490

114,818,000

¥161.893 billion ($1.27 billion)[1]

¥128.339 billion (79.3%)

During the 1950s, a period dubbed the "Golden Age of Japanese cinema", the jidaigeki films of Akira Kurosawa as well as the science fiction films of Ishirō Honda and Eiji Tsuburaya gained Japanese cinema international praise and made these directors universally renown and highly influential. Some of the Japanese films of this period are now rated some of the greatest of all time: Tokyo Story (1953) ranked number three in Sight & Sound critics' list of the 100 greatest films of all time[6] and also topped the 2012 Sight & Sound directors' poll of The Top 50 Greatest Films of All Time, dethroning Citizen Kane,[7][8] while Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai (1954) was voted the greatest foreign-language film of all time in BBC's 2018 poll of 209 critics in 43 countries.[9] Japan has also won the Academy Award for the Best International Feature Film[nb 1] five times,[nb 2] more than any other Asian country.[12]


Japan's Big Four film studios are Toho, Toei, Shochiku and Kadokawa, which are the only members of the Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan (MPPAJ). The annual Japan Academy Film Prize hosted by the Nippon Academy-shō Association is considered to be the Japanese equivalent of the Academy Awards.

Anime

: films set in the present day, the opposite of jidaigeki

Gendai-geki

: horror film

Japanese horror

Japanese science fiction

Jidaigeki

: films featuring ninjas

Ninja films

: realistic films about common working people

Shomingeki

: socially conscious, left-leaning films

Tendency films

: gangster films about yakuza mobsters

Yakuza films

hosted by the Nippon Academy-shō Association, is the Japanese equivalent of the Academy Awards.

Japan Academy Film Prize

Japan Academy Prize

List of highest-grossing Japanese films

List of highest-grossing films in Japan

List of highest-grossing non-English films

List of Japanese actors

List of Japanese actresses

List of Japanese film directors

List of Japanese films

Cinema of the world

History of cinema

List of jidaigeki

List of Japanese-language films

List of Japanese movie studios

List of Japanese submissions for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film

(The Japanese New Wave)

Nuberu bagu

Television in Japan

Voice acting in Japan

Godzilla

Studio Ghibli

Anderson, Joseph L.; Donald Richie (1982). The Japanese Film: Art and Industry (Expanded ed.). Princeton University Press.  978-0-691-00792-2.

ISBN

Baskett, Michael (2008). . Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press. ISBN 978-0-8248-3223-0.

The Attractive Empire: Transnational Film Culture in Imperial Japan

無声映画鑑賞会 (2001). The Benshi-Japanese Silent Film Narrators. Tokyo: Urban Connections.  978-4-900849-51-8.

ISBN

Bernardi, Joanne (2001). Writing in Light: The Silent Scenario and the Japanese Pure Film Movement. . ISBN 978-0-8143-2926-9.

Wayne State University Press

(1978). Japanese Film Directors. Kodansha. ISBN 0-87011-304-6.

Bock, Audie

(1988). Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-00822-6. Available online at the Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan

Bordwell, David

Bowyer, Justin, ed. (2004). The Cinema of Japan and Korea. Wallflower Press, London.  978-1-904764-11-3.

ISBN

(1979). To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema. University of California Press. hdl:2027/spo.aaq5060.0001.001. ISBN 978-0-520-03605-5.

Burch, Nöel

Cazdyn, Eric (2002). The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan. Duke University Press.  978-0-8223-2912-1.

ISBN

Dym, Jeffrey A. (2003). Benshi, Japanese Silent Film Narrators, and Their Forgotten Narrative Art of Setsumei: A History of Japanese Silent Film Narration. : Edwin Mellen Press. ISBN 978-0-7734-6648-7. (review)

Lewiston, New York

Furuhata, Yuriko (2013). Cinema of Actuality: Japanese Avant-garde Filmmaking in the Season of Image Politics. Duke University Press.  978-0-8223-5490-1.

ISBN

(2008). A Page of Madness: Cinema and Modernity in 1920s Japan. Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan. ISBN 978-1-929280-51-3.

Gerow, Aaron

(2010). Visions of Japanese Modernity: Articulations of Cinema, Nation, and Spectatorship, 1895–1925. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-25456-5.

Gerow, Aaron

High, Peter B. (2003). The Imperial Screen. Wisconsin Studies in Film. The University of Wisconsin Press.  0-299-18134-0.

ISBN

Hirano, Kyoko (1992). . Smithsonian Institution. ISBN 978-1-56098-157-2.

Mr. Smith Goes to Tokyo: The Japanese Cinema under the Occupation, 1945–1952

(2005). Shadows on the Screen: Tanizaki Junʾichirō on Cinema and "Oriental" Aesthetics. Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan. ISBN 978-1-929280-32-2.

LaMarre, Thomas

Mellen, Joan (1976). . Pantheon, New York. ISBN 978-0-394-49799-0.

The Waves At Genji's Door: Japan Through Its Cinema

(2013). The Aesthetics of Shadow: Lighting and Japanese Cinema. Durham: Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0-8223-5422-2.

Miyao, Daisuke

, ed. (2014). The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-973166-4.

Miyao, Daisuke

Nolletti, Arthur Jr.; Desser, David, eds. (1992). . Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0-253-34108-2.

Reframing Japanese Cinema: Authorship, Genre, History

Nornes, Abé Mark (2003). . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 978-0-8166-4045-4.

Japanese Documentary Film: The Meiji Era through Hiroshima

Nornes, Abé Mark (2007). Forest of Pressure: Ogawa Shinsuke and Postwar Japanese Documentary. Minneapolis: . ISBN 978-0-8166-4908-2.

University of Minnesota Press

Nornes, Abé Mark; Gerow, Aaron (2009). Research Guide to Japanese Film Studies. Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan.  978-1-929280-53-7.

ISBN

(1999). The Warrior's Camera. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-01046-5.

Prince, Stephen

(2005). A Hundred Years of Japanese Film: A Concise History, with a Selective Guide to DVDs and Videos. Kodansha America. ISBN 978-4-7700-2995-9.

Richie, Donald

(1982). Currents In Japanese Cinema. Kodansha America. ISBN 978-0-87011-815-9.

Sato, Tadao

Wada-Marciano, Mitsuyo (2008). Nippon Modern: Japanese Cinema of the 1920s and 1930s. . ISBN 978-0-8248-3240-7.

University of Hawaii Press

by Joaquín da Silva

Chronology of Japanese Cinema

Toki Akihiro & Mizuguchi Kaoru (1996) .

A History of Early Cinema in Kyoto, Japan (1896–1912). Cinematographe and Inabata Katsutaro

Kato Mikiro (1996) .

A History of Movie Theaters and Audiences in Postwar Kyoto, the Capital of Japanese Cinema

maintained by the Agency for Cultural Affairs (films after 1896, in Japanese)

Japanese Cinema Database

maintained by UniJapan (in English, films after 2002)

Japanese Film Database

maintained by Kinema Junpo (films after 1945, in Japanese)

Kinema Junpo Database

Archived May 20, 2015, at the Wayback Machine (films in the national archive collection, in Japanese)

National Film Center Database

(includes film database, box office statistics)

Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan

(in Japanese)

Japanese Movie Database

: Festival of New Japanese Film (Japan Society, New York)

JAPAN CUTS

Kinema Club

Midnight Eye

by Aaron Gerow

Japanese Reference Materials for Studying Japanese Cinema at Yale University

by Gregg Rickman

Japanese Cinema to 1960

 – An annual curated film program focusing on classic Japanese cinema and new currents, with regular guest directors and actors.

Japanese Film Festival (Singapore)