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
Japanese science fiction
Jidaigeki
: realistic films about common working people
Shomingeki
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
(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
(1988). Eros Plus Massacre: An Introduction to the Japanese New Wave Cinema. Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0-253-20469-1.
Desser, David
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
(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
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
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
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.