“Japan is a modern country without being a Western one.” The phrase belongs to Pierre-François Souyri, a historian of Japan, and it holds up well.
Japan is a developed country, and it is easy to find things there that look familiar.
Watch how people behave, though, and talk to anyone local, and the differences in how life is lived and how the world is seen become hard to miss.
Here are five films we suggest watching before you travel to Japan, to give you a firmer grip on Japanese society and on where it diverges from your own.
Departures
2018 - director: Yôjirô Takit Departures follows Daigo, a former musician who returns to the town where he grew up and retrains as an undertaker. In a Japan that remains superstitious, and where the fear of ghosts still runs deep, the work is close to taboo.
Surrounded by prejudice, Daigo slowly finds a kind of pride in the job, which is essential to helping bereaved families grieve.
Departures is a careful portrait of the Japanese relationship with death and of the rituals built around it.
Aristocrats
2020 - director: Yukiko Sode
Aristocrats sets out the lives of two young women from very different social backgrounds, and of the man they both see, who comes from the top of Japanese society. Class, the place of women, marriage: the film opens up a good deal of what shapes Japanese society.
The Asadas
2020 - director: Ryôta Nakano
The Asadas takes its cue from the life of the photographer Masashi Asada. With the unwavering support of his family, he became a well-known photographer in Japan by making unusual pictures: staged portraits of his own family, acting out all the dreams they had not (yet) got round to.
Early success takes him to Tokyo, where he tries to live off his work. The second half of the film shows what he does in Fukushima prefecture, alongside other volunteers, helping disaster victims recover their photographs and the memories attached to them.
The Asadas will move you from laughter to tears. An ode to photography, and to the habit of mutual help that runs through Japanese culture.
Drive My Car
2021 - director: Ryûsuke Hamaguchi
Ryûsuke Hamaguchi is the Japanese director everyone is watching at the moment. For Drive My Car he draws on two Haruki Murakami stories, Drive My Car and Men Without Women, to tell the story of an actor and the taxi driver he travels with, who come together through grief, shame and the traumas they carry.
After the screenplay prize at Cannes in 2021 and the Oscar for Best International Feature in 2022, Drive My Car is essential viewing for anyone who cares about cinema, whether or not Japanese culture is the draw.
Perfect Days
2023 - director: Wim Wenders Wim Wenders is the only non-Japanese director here, because non-Japanese directors tend to paint a false picture of the country and carry a lot of clichés with them. Wenders is the exception that confirms the rule: with Perfect Days he gets Japanese society right.
The film follows Hirayama, a Japanese man in his seventies whose job is cleaning Tokyo’s public toilets. It shows his life, quiet, monotonous, solitary. It also shows the loyal circle around him: his bookseller, the regulars at the neighbourhood bar, and the seriousness he brings to work that carries every kind of stereotype with it. The gestures are practised, repetitive, followed to the letter, with overtime to cover for absent colleagues.
The film shows how much its director loves Japanese culture, and it gives space to the ordinary people of Tokyo, the ones the media rarely covers and who make up no small part of the population.