Where to Begin with Classic Japanese Cinema｜Tokyo Story, Seven Samurai, and Ugetsu

“I don’t know what to watch first.”
Almost everyone says this.

That is how many Japanese films there are. The Japanese Cinema Database, which the Agency for Cultural Affairs ran until 2023, listed about 48,000 titles released in cinemas between the dawn of film in 1896 (the 29th year of Meiji) and the present day. The sheer accumulation of that figure carries the memory of a time when Japan was one of the great film nations.

Japanese cinema also gave birth to many genres of its own and stood apart as something singular in world cinema. Yet Japanese people who have grown up since the 1970s belong, almost without exception, to generations raised on Hollywood-style film content, and so they tend to know little of their own country’s films. The reason lies in the history of Japanese cinema, which entered a period of complete decline in the 1970s. More than fifty years have now passed since that decline began, and since the quality of the films has naturally fallen with it, Japanese people raised in this era do not know “how to read a film.”

Film is the one true total art. Personally, I believe that learning how to read films leads directly to the ability to see the world from another vantage point. Just as writing has “a way of reading,” so do moving images, and just as Japanese differs from English, the way to read a Japanese film differs from the way to read an American one. To read films, in other words, is to read a culture.

So how does one learn to read them? The truth is that until six years ago, like most people of my generation, I had never watched Japanese films myself. By that I mean that although I had seen a few contemporary works, I had never once seen any of the so-called “classic films.”

When I first decided to take on Japanese cinema, I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of films and had no idea where to start. Since no one teaches you this sort of thing, the method I chose was simply to watch everything I could, one film after another. If you watch a great many films every day, the character of each era and the style of each filmmaker gradually seep into your mind and body, and before long you find yourself in touch with the culture as a whole.

My recommendation is to start with films from a golden age. Japanese cinema had two golden ages, the first from the mid to late 1930s and the second from the early to mid 1950s. In those days, each director’s personal style was strongly marked, quite unlike the sameness of today, so whose films, and which ones, you watch first will greatly shape how you watch everything afterward. Even so, jumping straight into early silent films is a high hurdle.

Start, then, with the talkies, the films with sound, and choose from the second golden age. Above all, the first priority is to watch the signature works of the great masters of the era.

◯ Yasujiro Ozu, Tokyo Story (1953)
◯ Akira Kurosawa, Seven Samurai (1954)
◯ Kenji Mizoguchi, Ugetsu (1953)

These three masterpieces make a good place to begin. What matters even more than their being masterpieces is that, although they were made in the same years, their directors’ styles could hardly be more different, and each was produced and distributed by a different studio. Tokyo Story is a Shochiku film, Seven Samurai a Toho film, and Ugetsu a Daiei film, and in those days the character of the studio was deeply reflected in its films. They are entirely different works, but if you watch them in order, Tokyo Story, then Seven Samurai, then Ugetsu, they will give you a chance to grow used to the particular habits of black-and-white film, and they will also be a first step toward finding what to watch “next.”

Golden Week is drawing to a close, but why not begin with that first film?