Following the numerous films made about Japan by foreign filmmakers in the wake of WWII there has been a relatively recent proliferation of the same, albeit by a more diverse series of directors and nationalities. In recent years a plethora of films by major non-Japanese directors have again been made in and about the country, each reflecting and refracting distinct, discursive and different aspects of the Land of the Rising Sun. They offer in many ways an outsider’s perspective on its social and cultural norms; and taken together they evince a multi-faceted and complex portrait of a country and its customs*.

Below are some notes about these contemporary works that have explored Japan from without.

*There are numerous films, typically large-scale Hollywood productions, in which Japan is a location but where little of interest arises from the setting. These include some Fast and Furious films and other assorted action pictures featuring Yakuza and Samurai that are too numerous and/or uninteresting to include. Do contact me with suggestions and comments on any of these.   

Like Someone in Love (2012)

Following his relocation from Iran to Italy with the philosophical romance Certified Copy (2010) Abbas Kiarostami journeyed to the land of the rising sun to make what unfortunately became the director’s penultimate film. Like Someone in Love (2012) concerns the relations between an elderly ex-college teacher and a young girl named Akiko, who works as a paid companion. This girl’s problematic relations with her boyfriend ultimately throws the relationship between the protagonists into relief and into doubt, and is the ostensible locus of tension in this typically character-driven piece that probes and peers as much as it ultimately seethes and throbs with threat.

The precise contours of Akiko and her client Takashi’s relationship offer the most penetrating interjection into Japanese social and cultural specificity in this film. Families and generational divides have often been the focus of the shomin geki, the contemporary home drama that has been a staple of Japanese cinema in the work of Ozu Yasujiro, Naruse Mikio, Shimazu Yasujiro and Gosho Heinosuke. Here there is a real grandparent and grandchild relationship in the form of Akiko’s grandmother, who pays a brief visit hoping to see Akiko but who is left alone waiting for her granddaughter when Akiko is called out to visit Takashi. However, this remains a point of contrast, an open wound, beside the potential suture of her professional undertaking – the one both reflecting and refracting the other. The fact that Takashi is taken to be Akiko’s grandfather by Akiko’s partner, Noriaki then establishes a triangular relationship that becomes key to the film and its effect.

Takashi’s precise wishes as regards paying for Akiko’s company remain ambiguous. He deigns to avoid overly intimate moments with her, and is happy not to disabuse Noriaki of his erroneous presumptions about himself and Akiko and their relationship. Need and shame appear to feed into the old man’s actions, the hiring of Akiko (with whom it seems he does not want to sleep, at least not immediately) and their ongoing union seeming to develop in an almost improvisatory way. It is, like Certified Copy, something akin to living theatre. The characters act out a work-in-progress, performing roles and interacting with one another in a way that combines the ‘rehearsed’ framework of social roles with, as it were, off-the-cuff detours and ad-libs. For her part Akiko has been content to remain with Noriaki even though she evinces little connection to or love for him and seems indifferent as to whether their relationship continues or not. Given the title and its echoes of performance and performativity, the line between the protagonist’s real and feigned feelings is clearly difficult to discern. Ambiguity is often said to be central to the Japanese character – at least by those from the West intent on ‘explaining’ the nation. It is, perhaps, based on the (comparative) lack of declarative actions and attitudes, a belief that one must fit in with the collective rather than espouse any personal or individual points of view. All of which leaves Noriaki as the most transparent character, the one person whose feelings are clear and whose actions, however confrontational, are transparent. This young man indeed seems to be the most clear-minded as to what he desires and the most relatable in his feelings, even though the way he acts on them becomes problematic. In this, however, he approximates a point of view of almost anyone looking on without specific knowledge of the relations on display, and thus offers a narrative correlation of the distanced gaze that has often been an implicit feature, a problem, of those foreign texts that in various ways ‘Other’ Japan in a quasi-Orientalist fashion.

Characteristically for Kiarostami this is a patient, protracted narrative in which the story seems to unfold around the edges of the scenes, scenes that feign toward a documentary, an observational, aesthetic (again enshrining looking as a narrative and thematic referent). The audience’s position effectively outside the story is cemented in the open ending, which, arbitrary though it feels, is calibrated to suggest the impossibility of tying up the story. This, it is implied, would be an editorial imposition where the project here is to question any assumptions and probe our relations to the characters and their actions. To this end any sense of engagement with Japan, with what is understood to be encapsulated by the designation ‘Japan’ (a discursive appellation rather than a country, a physical landmass), is left open to question; and these marked fissures, these wounds, in the suturing of text and audience are left to fester. Ultimately this is the point of the film, even if the extent of viewer knowledge of Japan is likely to direct how these questions are received – questions such as: is acting like someone in love comparable to being someone in love? Or, how do different generations in Japan understand their inter-personal relations through the lens of tradition and/or modernity? How does this shape such relations? There is throughout here, again as in Certified Copy, a creeping sense that what we are seeing is not the whole story, that there are narratives seeping through the cracks of what the film does not dramatize. This will perhaps frustrate as many as it fascinates, but it is a film that lingers long in the memory, one whose documentary portrait of Japan through a fictional lens remain probing and challenging.   

Perfect Days (2023)

The New German cinema luminary Wim Wenders has always worshipped at the feet of Ozu Yasujiro. In 1985 he made a film about Japanese culture and about Ozu, Tokyo-Ga, a defiantly outsider’s perspective on the vagaries of popular pass-times and the cinematic traditions of Japan and one of its pre-eminent classical directors. Later that decade he also made a documentary about the eminent Japanese fashion designer Yamamoto Yohj – Notebook on Cities and Clothes (1989). His recent, acclaimed and award-winning, Perfect Days is a further nod to the aesthetic style and perceived minimalist sensibility of Ozu, though its subject could in many ways scarcely be more removed from the typical family dramas of marriage and generational divide typified by the director of Tokyo Story (1953) and An Autumn Afternoon (1962).

Perfect Days concerns a mobile public toilet cleaner, Hirayama (the name of the family at the centre of Equinox Flower [1960] and An Autumn Afternoon is surely no coincidence), and for the most part its dramatic structure comprises variations on his daily routine. His morning rituals of preparing for work, his rigour and fastidiousness in his job, his visits to a public bathhouse and subway food stall and his perennial reading and amateur photography are all depicted in detail and repeated as markers of a life that is and has been ordered deliberately to the point of excluding (or at least subsuming) any difficult realities. These daily routines thus figure as constructions; increasingly they become points of departure as Hirayama is challenged by several encounters that undermine his routines and hint at familial schisms that have facilitated such a way of living and the psychology behind it. Of particular note is a visit from his niece, which points up his estrangement from his sister and a past conflict with his father, something that Wenders does not dive into but which is left to flicker on the surface of the film, much like the light we repeatedly see dancing on water or twinkling through foliage.  

As played by Yakusho Koji (at his most beatific – not something often exploited by the Japanese directors with whom he is used to working like Kurosawa Kiyoshi or Imamura Shohei) Hirayama is a benign, if remote, presence. He remains almost mute throughout, communicating with those few people with whom he comes into contact through broad, one feels well-rehearsed gestures. Yakusho (a Cannes best actor winner for the film) grounds Hirayama as an empathetic figure. Only as he meets others who penetrate his apparent façade is there any sense of creeping ambiguity over the ways he, for instance, smilingly greets the dawn each morning as he leaves home, any hint of doubt over his apparent enjoyment of these simple everyday pleasures.  

The calm serenity of Perfect Days does not preclude something of a quizzical look at public toilets in Tokyo, their often-ornate designs and smart features (the opaque glass of one set humorously confuses a tourist), and there is a sly engagement with both philosophies of Japan and the materialities of its public cultures. However, although this film is desirous of a connection to a perceived Japanese-ness (there is also a post-credit definition of komorebi, which refers to the delicate play of sunlight as filtered through foliage) it nonetheless connects with Wenders’ earlier work in several ways. Films like Summer in the City (1969), Alice in the Cities (1972), Kings of the Road (1975) or Paris, Texas (1982) feature emotionally distant and socially awkward men who stumble through chance encounters into temporary relationships that may or may not affect them in the future. A late scene here featuring Hirayama and the ex-husband of a bar hostess whom he knows could have been from Kings of the Road. They play a game of tag with their shadows, laughing and joking together like adolescents and bonding, albeit very briefly, through this game, this sense of play not only acting as an escape but also as recuperative, a communal male catharsis in a world where carefully controlled order has been shaken.

Moreover, the diegetic soundtrack of classic rock songs that Hirayama plays (on cassettes) as he drives to and from work is pure Wenders. Echoes abound here of Summer in the City, and indeed the fact that Hirayama is told by his young colleague that cassette tapes are now fashionable and therefore commercially valuable suggests the prevalence of a commodification of the past. This sits potentially awkwardly with Wenders’ own lionisation of a cinematic past here; yet he is not especially critical of said commodification. As a cycle of capitalism, it is an apt point of generational contention in a country whose international standing has since WWII been based on economic relations, especially as disseminated through technology and popular culture. This is very much a sub-text in Perfect Days but it reveals the depth of detail and lack of opportunistic or superficial aggrandizing about Japan in this engaging and quietly absorbing tale.    

Family Romance, LLC (2019)

Prior to Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days this director’s fellow New German cinema maverick Werner Herzog had made his own foray into a world that for gaijin (foreigners) always seems to feel alien and other. Typically for the man behind Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972), Fata Morgana (1971) and Lessons of Darkness (1991) the subject here is at once esoteric and poetic, curious on the one hand whilst on the other able to facilitate a reflection of ideas that animate or illuminate everyday life or offer significant pause for thought. It concerns a company that hires out actors to people who need, as the trailer, states, friends, family and followers. We are introduced to Ishii Yuichi, owner of and principal actor in this company, as he encounters a young girl, Mahiro, who it seems is looking for her long-estranged biological father. Ishii presents himself as her father, even though in the following scene we learn about him being hired by Mahiro’s mother. These meetings pepper the film, alongside other comparable instances of, for example, someone paying for a father of the bride on her daughter’s wedding day or for a series of apparent photographers to follow her down the street snapping their cameras like paparazzi in order to make it seem as though this is someone famous and thus excite the interest and attention of passersby and boost an online profile.  

Family Romance, LLC (the name of the company) is an interesting companion to Like Someone in Love. Here there is a comparable sense of being hired to play a part for the edification of a paying customer, and although Herzog’s film has the structure and veneer of a documentary, in fact all the cases it depicts were carefully scripted, cast and developed. The import of the themes that it presents are especially pertinent with regard to Japan, to the extent that extant, in some cases hegemonic, models of gendered actions and attitudes have led to a certain commodification of behaviours and relations. In a country that is often thought to be beset by precise, structured, recondite ways of behaving in inter-personal relationships, this service simultaneously provides a respite from and a quite cynical appropriation/exploitation of individual need and anxiety.

Yet there is a telling absence that almost serves to structure the narrative here. None of the stories depicted in Family Romance LLC are taken to the point of conclusion; neither is there any sense of how this company works in ‘real life’ through what could be very disturbing or personally distressing incidents. Questions of personal responsibility for the work undertaken by this company are thus ostensibly not part of the writer/director’s project here. There are no direct interviews, only client relations and interactions, and nothing behind the scenes of the company. We simply bear witness to the acts that are undertaken and are left to our own devices to consider the morality thereof. However, one conversation featuring Ishii towards the end of the film raises the spectre of morality. There is explicit reference at the end to the company lying to their customers and patrons, which frames the narratives as performances and highlights the extent to which personal actions, desires, needs, are potentially being exploited. The context of Japan’s economic decline is never raised in Family Romance LLC, but the lurking question of making money from such means makes of it a veritable elephant in the frame. The overt performance of the film’s stories, its fictions within facts, further suggests the thin line Herzog treads between what is real and otherwise. As well as a typical Herzog theme, this ambiguity is also typically Japanese, where fitting in with the collective leads to a prevalent sense of a social façade, a performativity. The lingering sense here is that the ‘truth’ of the relations matters little to either company or indeed client. Services are bought, paid for and rendered, and in few if any other countries would this be the case. What we make of this is up to each of us to decide for ourselves.

The Last Samurai (2003)

In many ways there is a significant crossover between the samurai film and the American Western. In both a mythologized, historically circumscribed era adumbrates a quasi-national identity and character, providing a narrative of the past segueing into, becoming, the present in a way that buttresses contemporary notions of nationhood and manifest destiny. This has been exploited in art, literature and film and is to the fore in The Last Samurai. There had been East/West crossovers prior to this film. Kurosawa Akira’s Yojimbo (1961) was reworked as A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and The Seven Samurai (1954) as The Magnificent Seven (1963), whilst Kurosawa had regarded John Ford as a cinematic mentor. Moreover, works like Terence Young’s Red Sun (1971) or Okamoto Kihachi’s East meets West (1995) – both westerns in all but surface accoutrements – freely combine eastern and western elements and in so doing create a generic idiom wherein the respective tenets of ostensibly different genres and nationalities are fused to the extent that they complicate rather than elucidate any stable concept of genre. More recently, Lee Sang-Il’s Unforgiven (2013), with Watanabe Ken, offers a reverential Japanese remake of Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-winning western of the same name, and has only further reinforced this concept.

And so back to The Last Samurai. This is a film by a director, Edward Zwick, whose forte (to the arguable extent that he can be said to have one) lies in the war film and historical epic – works like Glory (1989) and Defiance (2008). It is a Western only insofar as the aforesaid commonalities between Japanese samurai pictures and the once-argued American genre par excellence suggest it is so (albeit along with a passing similarity to Dances with Wolves [1990]), but to this end it remains an instructive example of the extent to which narrative blueprints can cross boundaries and borders as national mythology. Tom Cruise here plays Nathan Algren, a US Civil War veteran who, following the massacre of Native American ‘non-combatants’ in which he partook and subsequent feelings of guilt, despair and functioning alcoholism, finds himself en route to Japan to help with a fight against a samurai clan with whom the government has been in conflict because of the dictates of the Meiji Restoration. During this era – (beginning after 1868 – the film is set in 1876 and 1877) – the samurai as a prominent social class was finding itself under threat as the country was rapidly modernizing following recent contact with the outside world for the first time in almost three centuries. Algren is tasked with training government troops to combat the rebellious Samurai. However, following defeat, he becomes embroiled in said clan when their leader, Katsumoto, takes him (in lieu of killing him, as he recognises a kindred spirit) to a remote mountain village where the inclement winter months leave him stranded. During this time the Samurai clan prepares for meeting, negotiating with and potentially opposing the Emperor Meiji, whose chief retainers have been instrumental in modernising Japan. This is a figure for whom Katsumoto fights, even when ostensibly fighting against, and for whom he would lay down his sword and his life, yet he appears as a puppet being manipulated from behind the scenes. 

The narrative is thus set at a time of seismic national turmoil and transformation in Japan. Algren’s trajectory encompasses nihilistic indifference and active antipathy giving way to interest, respect and ultimately alliance in battle, as well as a potential romantic relationship and surrogate fatherhood that internalises this turmoil. Criticism of The Last Samurai centring on its perceived whitewashing of Japanese history (including, bizarrely given the deaths throughout, Cruise as the saviour of the Samurai) and Hollywood storytelling tropes have been a little short-sighted, seemingly coming from an almost wilful refusal to really think about the narrative; and whilst there is truth to some assertions – the wholly good and wholly nefarious Americans and Japanese on either side of the story feels forced as a moral equivalence – it does serve to highlight those in the middle, who emerge rather in shades of grey than black and/or white. And this is where Cruise’s Algren is significant. He remains at the ostensible centre of the drama, anchoring the story through his personal growth but importantly not focalizing the narrative. The film opens with Katsumoto dreaming and envisioning conflict in which a white tiger appears on the battlefield. This after an opening in which an unnamed narrator – later identified as a photographer engaged in recording Algren and Katsumoto’s actions – has talked about the mythical beginnings of Japan as a nation and prior to a closing post-script of a speech about what may or may not have transpired in the wake of the narrative and the personal and national transformations that it details. As such, both Katsumoto and Algren become almost apocryphal characters, part of a legend, a landscape of a lost and mythologized past. Historiography, the writing of history, thus bubbles away as a theme under the surface of the narrative here, and complicates at least some of the apparent sops to Hollywood convention, such as the ‘happy ending’ and romantic subplot, both of which are ultimately positioned as speculative due to the knowledge limitations of the sometime storyteller.   

The film’s style, especially the editing, is notable. Zwick seems aware of the generic bricolage outlined above. Repeated shots of doors closing on Algren mirror the thematic isolation, if not the precise stylistic realisation thereof, of John Wayne’s protagonist in John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), whilst there are several shots and patterns of cutting in the battle scenes that directly echo Kurosawa, especially Kagemusha (1980). If not a masterpiece, then, The Last Samurai is still an interesting, engaging, often moving film, with a keen interest in Japan, its history and a fascination with myth, storytelling and cinema as arbiters of this interest.

The Wolverine (2013)

After the widely accepted and even more widely derided farrago of X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) this follow-up by James Mangold adapted some of the comics’ most beloved and acclaimed storylines and characters in order to offer a cinematic palliative to a disgruntled fanbase. What The Wolverine offers is a compendium of things that people have heard of about Japan, its history, people and customs. Beginning with the bombing of Hiroshima (where Logan protects a Japanese soldier who in the present will then seek him out) and taking in bullet trains, love hotels, Yakuza, samurai, ninja and iconic urban and rural spaces alike. Logan is more than once referred or likened to a ronin – a masterless samurai – and his relationship with the daughter of a significant corporate clan (cannily literalising the familial baggage of many cultural forays into Yakuza lore, their status as figurative families) underscores his rootlessness through offering a glimpse of something settled and stable which his life beyond his union with Jean Grey has lost and which very literally haunts his dreams.

With Mangold at the helm this is an efficient, pacy, punchy thriller, not a film with a postmodern engagement with Japan as a series of cultural signs but rather a means of connecting Logan’s ongoing narrative to a tangible sense of historical ‘reality’ and thereby reconnecting with the ground zero of WWII trauma that Bryan Singer’s first X-Men films (wherein Jackman was introduced as The Wolverine) had boldly, controversially, initiated. The plot thread that sees the protagonist of the title perceived as wanting to die – a death that his enhanced physiognomy prevents him from undertaking – effectively ties him as a point of contrast to the samurai and the warrior’s honourable demise that is often taken to be a key to Bushido and their collective code of living (and dying). In truth this is a fortuitous and rather superficial comparison, but if nothing else it does buttress an attempt to lend the character some much-needed substance that would be more fully realised in the same director’s follow-up, Logan, in 2017.   

Bullet Train (2022)

Definitely and almost defiantly NOT remaking or reworking Sato Junya’s notable 1970s disaster epic The Bullet Train (1975)* – though both are set largely within the confines of Japan’s pre-eminent mode of surface transportation – this serio-comic caper also does not follow The Wolverine in almost itemising a narrative checklist of what those in the West may have heard of about and/or understand to be Japanese. It is, though, intent to at least signal an engagement therewith. Indeed, its point of both entry and departure – and there is much in the narrative pertaining to entries and departures (literalized in the theatricality of the strict one-minute stop at every station and its effect on boarding and disembarking the train) – is the neon-drenched image of Japan as an almost hyperreal space. However, there is little substance in probing this perception. Nor, perhaps, should there be; except that numerous laboured jokes about smart toilets, submissive politeness and fate seem to want to satirize Japan as experienced from the outside, leaving this theme feeling increasingly like a narrative pipe dream, a vague goal that was begun but thereafter largely abandoned. 

Bullet Train concerns an assorted series of hitmen and criminals whose paths cross on the transport of the title on a journey from Tokyo to Kyoto. Ostensibly central, Brad Pitt’s Ladybug (his codename) is in fact the only character not personally connected to what is revealed as a convoluted series of machinations to embroil hitman siblings from England, a young girl, a Mexican gangster, a contract killer dressed as a cartoon character, a ruthless Russian yakuza gang leader and two Japanese – a father and son – also connected to organized crime and bearing a deep grudge against said Russian (who is known as the White Death) in a personal plot of revenge. These characters overlap and interrelate, though little of these interactions are specific to the setting, Bullet Train seeming for the most part little interested in Japan. Indeed, it is little interested in anything other than director David Leitch doubling self-consciously down on the adrenaline-imbued, cartoonish, self-reflexive style that he developed in Deadpool 2 (2018), and he proceeds as though the likes of Guy Ritchie, Matthew Vaughn or Joe Carnahan had never implemented them before.

Given that there are numerous references to a popular children’s anime – including an advertisement for the nation’s favourite television show – there is a sense of celebrating the cartoonish throughout, although one is never quite sure whether this is supposed to mitigate against the lack of physical impact of the extreme violence and what should be fatality-inducing incidents throughout. Again, it is unfortunately only a germ of an idea, a station stop at which the film pauses for a minute before leaving behind in the rush forward to the next. There is, should one wish to look for it, a marked metaphor here for mainstream narrative, but it is one that Japanese cinema has treated better elsewhere, not only in Sato’s pre-Speed (1994) The Bullet Train but also in the Kurosawa Akira-scripted Runaway Train (1985). Bullet Train was adapted, loosely, from a 2010 novel by Isaka Kotaro. Its central conceit about Ladybug’s anxiety – his uncertainty over violence, his work, his moral and spiritual outlook – leads to throwaway gags about ‘Mansplaining’ and about sending out peace rather than hate. This is an interesting motif within a Japanese setting (though it is not recognised as such within the film) as contemporary Japan is rife with anxieties about masculinity, with traditional models such as the salaryman or even cultural archetypes like the yakuza being modified or even eroded. Any faith in and/or adherence (literally or otherwise) to what they represent has given way to different constructs or identifications, none of which are present in either a straight or a satirical sense here. It feels like something of a missed opportunity amidst the plethora of more or less entrenched national types; but then the country feels less like a social melting pot (as the different nationalities throughout may suggest) so much as a stage. And as Bullet Train seems at pains to point out, its men and women are merely players – i.e. actors – and we are rarely allowed to forget it as they strut their self-congratulatory stuff.   

*There is a French remake of this 1975 film on Netflix