Japan’s cinema, also known as hga, or “home cinema” in Japan, has a history of more than a century. Japan has one of the world’s oldest and largest movie industries, ranking fourth in terms of feature movie production in 2021. In 2011, Japan produced 411 feature films, accounting for 54.9 per cent of a US$2.338 billion box office total. Since 1897, when the very first foreign cameramen arrived, Japan has been producing movies.
In inSight & Sound’s ranking of the 100 best movies of all time, Tokyo Story (1953) came in third. Tokyo Story also dethroned Citizen Kane inside the 2012 Sight & Sound directors’ poll of The Top 50 Greatest Movies of All Time, while Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954) was chosen as the greatest foreign-language film of all time in a BBC survey of 209 critics from 43 nations in 2018.
Japan is the only Asian country to have received the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film four times.
Toho, Toei, Shochiku, and Kadokawa, members of the Motion Picture Producers Association, are Japan’s Big Four film studios (MPPAJ). The Nippon Academy-sh Association hosts the annual Japan Academy Film Prize, which is regarded as the Japanese counterpart of the Academy Awards.
In November 1896, the kinetoscope, which was first demonstrated commercially in the United States by Thomas Edison in 1894, was presented for the first time in Japan. Businessmen like Inabata Katsutaro introduced the Vitascope and the Lumière Brothers’ Cinematograph to Japan in early 1897. Cameramen from Lumière were the first to film in Japan. Moving images, on the other hand, were not a completely new experience for the Japanese, who had a long history of pre-cinematic devices like the gent (utsushi-e) or the magic lantern.
The COVID-19 epidemic struck Japan’s movie business in 2020, just as it had done in every other country. Several movie releases have been postponed, and cinemas have been closed for months, only to reopen once several safety precautions have been implemented. The anime film Demon Slayer: Mugen Train, based upon that Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba manga series, shattered all box-office records in Japan, becoming not just the highest-grossing Japanese film of all time, but also the highest-grossing movie of 2020.
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