Best Japanese Films Kinema Junpo (1926-2025)

In the dying months of the Meiji era, a sympathetic student befriends a married couple, but soon realizes they share a curiously strained relationship stemming from an unknown incident in their past.

In eighth century China, the Emperor is grieving over the death of his wife. The Yang family wants to provide the Emperor with a consort so that they may consolidate their influence over the court. General An Lushan finds a distant relative working in their kitchen whom they groom to present to the Emperor. The Emperor falls in love with her and she becomes the Princess Yang Kwei-fei. The Yangs are then appointed important ministers, though An Lushan is not given the court position he covets. The ministers misuse their power so much that there is a popular revolt against the Yangs, fueled by An Lushan.

1954 film by Keisuke Kinoshita

A student at a woman's university takes a controversial action against the school's old-fashioned doctrines.

A samurai answers a village's request for protection after he falls on hard times. The town needs protection from bandits, so the samurai gathers six others to help him teach the people how to defend themselves, and the villagers provide the soldiers with food.

1954 film by Kenji Mizoguchi

An ingratiating bride develops warm ties to her father-in-law while her cold husband blithely slights her for another woman.

With delicate, unobtrusive strokes, Naruse evokes both the humor and bitterness of his characters’ dilemmas, in this bleak, compelling poignant portrait of a quartet of aging geishas contemplating their troubles with men and money.

1954 film by Kenji Mizoguchi

An Inn at Osaka, rarely seen outside Japan, follows the story of an insurance company executive from Tokyo, Mr. Mito, who is demoted to the Osaka office. He takes a room at a small inn and tries to rebuild his life. Notable for its exquisite framing and cinematography, An Inn at Osaka allows its complicated plotlines to disappear behind the minutiae of penury and humiliation that Mito and others suffer during the post-war economic and social reconstruction.

A Tokyo family running a liquor store overcome impotence and dysfunction as they induce an understanding through each other of how to deal with their individual problems.

After living a traumatic experience in Tokyo, Yukiko returns to Kyoto, where Hatsuko, her mother, runs a brothel, which upsets Yukiko very much.

An ethical, young tax collector new to his area encounters increasingly absurd individuals and groups coping with their post-war woes.

The elderly Shukishi and his wife, Tomi, take the long journey from their small seaside village to visit their adult children in Tokyo. Their elder son, Koichi, a doctor, and their daughter, Shige, a hairdresser, don't have much time to spend with their aged parents, and so it falls to Noriko, the widow of their younger son who was killed in the war, to keep her in-laws company.

In 16th century Japan, peasants Genjuro and Tobei sell their earthenware pots to a group of soldiers in a nearby village, in defiance of a local sage's warning against seeking to profit from warfare. Genjuro's pursuit of both riches and the mysterious Lady Wakasa, as well as Tobei's desire to become a samurai, run the risk of destroying both themselves and their wives, Miyagi and Ohama.

Where Chimneys Are Seen focuses primarily on the interconnected lives of two couples in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in Senju, a poor industrial section of Tokyo.

1953 film by Mikio Naruse

At the close of the war in Japan, a widowed mother makes every possible sacrifice to bring up her ungrateful son and daughter who are unimpressed with their poor standard of living at home. They gradually reject her in search of the material comforts that working as a maid cannot provide. The mother's despair becomes interminable.

A young woman, who must support her father as a middle-aged man's mistress, finds herself falling in love with a student closer to her age.

Fleeing a distressing family situation, Eiko, a very young girl, becomes an apprentice to Miyoharu, a veteran geisha. Both, determined to preserve their professional integrity, must face the selfishness and ambition of several petty people.