High On Films' 50 Best Japanese Films of the 21st Century

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It is a general idea that the Japanese cinema’s downfall started in the 1980s, and the 90s economic stagnation knocked the film industry down until its revival through J-horror (in the late 1990s). But since cinema history is often written from a Western perspective, we need to deeply examine such one-dimensional outlook directed against any home-grown national cinema. It’s true that the spread of television reduced the number of theater-going audience in Japan in the 1970s and 1980s. At the same time, the Hollywood movies garnered more popularity than the Japanese ones. Moreover, the biggest Japanese film studios like Shochiku, Toho and Nikkatsu were in deep financial trouble from the start of 1970s and they hardly made the kind of films that found an international audience. Finally, we should take in the fact that around the 1980s & 1990s, Mainland Chinese, Hong Kong and Taiwanese cinema became the face of Asian cinema in the European and American markets.



But it doesn’t mean there was dearth of new talents in the post-new wave generation Japanese cinema. From Kazhuhiko Hasegawa’s The Man Who Stole the Sun (1979), Kohei Oguri’s Muddy River (1981), Yoshimitsu Morita’s The Family Game (1983) to Juzo Itami’s The Funeral (1984) & Tampopo (1985), and Mitsuo Yanagimachi’s Fire Festival (1985), we are gradually discovering the gems of Japanese cinema from this era. One of the great Japanese auteurs, Nobuhiko Obayashi made some of his best works in the 1980s. And who can forget the rise of anime and the domination of Studio Ghibli in the 1980s & 1990s? Then there was Takeshi Kitano, Shinya Tsukamoto, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Hirokazu Koreeda, Naomi Kawase, and so on. Even the veteran Japanese filmmakers like Nagisa Oshima, Shohei Imamura, Kaneto Shindo, Masahiro Shinoda, Seijun Suzuki, and Koji Wakamatsu were making movies in the 80s, 90s, and some even in the 2000s.
The point is that – despite the limited output of the massive Japanese film industry in the decades following the 1960s or the alleged lack of creative flourish – Japanese cinema always continues to be one of the greatest cinemas around the globe. The masters of 21st century Japanese cinema are also engaged in the process of comforting the disturbed and disturbing the comforted. Maybe, our myopic tendencies might have kept some of the gems of modern Japanese cinema hidden. It’s akin to what the Nigerian author Adichie says about ‘the danger of a single story’. A phrase she uses in her TED speech to emphasize how false perceptions and overly simplistic beliefs can restrict our ideas about a person or a group or a country.
In that way, movie lists are efficient to overcome the simplistic notions about a national cinema. A movie list, of course is strictly subjective, and hence it’s not definitive even though the title makes it sounds like that. In fact, making a movie list is not an act of educating movie-lovers. But it’s an act of learning and sharing. So join us in this process and let’s look at some of the best films of Japanese cinema from the ongoing 21st century: