Best Japanese Films Kinema Junpo (1926-2025)

A woman's struggle for equality in Japan in the 1880s. Eiko Hirayama leaves Okayama for Tokyo, where she helps the fledgling Liberal Party and falls in love with its leader Kentaro Omoi, just as the party is being disbanded by the government. Eiko and Omoi are jailed because of a fire at a factory instigated by Chiyo, a servant girl from Eiko's home in Okayama, who was sold to slavery. A few years later the 1889 constitution is proclaimed, Eiko, Omoi, and Chiyo are pardoned, and the Liberal Party is reinaugurated. However Omoi does not campaign for women's rights.

1948 film by Akira Kurosawa

In early post-war Osaka, three women—war widow Fusako, her Korean expat sister Natsuko, and Kumiko, Fusako's sister-in-law—descend into prostitution, all for their individual reasons.

A group of war orphans initially seen scratching out an existence through black market work, as they are taken under the wing of a nameless soldier, just repatriated after the war.

In the Meiji period, a schoolteacher tries to hide his lower-class upbringing as he supports a visiting liberal intellectual.

1948 film by Yasujirō Ozu

Like many women after the war, Toshiko works as a chorus girl; her boyfriend Tadashi wishes she'd join him more frequently, but she detests his criminal involvement.

The mistress of a crook real estate broker comes to terms with her soulless existence after an artist paints her portrait.

After Japan's defeat in the war, the Anjo family lose their peerage and wealth. Since their mansion is due to pass into the hands of a creditor, the family holds one last ball before leaving.

A romance with political overtones about the relationship of a sheltered bourgeois woman and a doctor who devotes himself to caring for the poor. Over a ten-year period - from 1936 through the war - they find each other and are separated again by the events of those tumultuous days.

An errant salaryman's son gets lost until a man from the Tokyo tenements brings him to vendor Tane, who's reluctant to let the kid board.

Yuzo and his fiancée Masako spend their Sunday afternoon together, trying to have a good time on just thirty-five yen. They manage to have many small adventures, especially because Masako's optimism and belief in dreams is able to lift Yuzo from his realistic despair.

Three bank robbers, Eijima, Nojiri, and Takasugi, flee the police and escape into the mountains. At an inn high in the Japanese Alps, Eijima and Nojiri encounter a young woman and her father, as well as Honda, a mountaineer. The inn folk do not realize their guests are wanted criminals and the visitors are treated with great kindness. Honda volunteers to lead them over the mountains, but Eijima's paranoia endangers all of them as they make the perilous trip.

Omnibus of love stories from 1947 directed by famous directors, featuring big stars.

In postwar Japan a young woman is unable to marry her sweetheart because her family's in difficult circumstances and needs her income to keep afloat.

A Japanese war widow recalls her love affair with her deceased husband.

The film is set during the days of the scarcity of food after World War II, during which five men ate an elephant that died in a zoo. The elephant's corpse however, was infested with deadly bacteria and the men have only 30 hours left to live...

The stage director Shimamura, who is bringing western theatre to Japan, falls in love with the outspoken actress Sumako Matsui, and leaves his family to be with her, while trying to keep his Art Theatre solvent.

Slice of life film centered on a couple of years in the life of a rural high school girl.

A Japanese family weathers much hardship after their military uncle comes to live with them during WWII.