Five Films to Start With If You Want Japanese Cinema Beyond Ghibli

A friend texted me last month: "I've seen Spirited Away and Totoro. What Japanese films should I watch next?" I stared at the screen. The question is reasonable. The premise — that Ghibli is the gateway — is where I hesitate. Not because the films aren't masterpieces. They are. But treating Miyazaki and Takahata as the sole on-ramp to an entire national cinema is like telling someone who liked The Godfather that they now understand Italian cinema because they've seen one Coppola film. It's a category error that flattens seven decades of work into a single aesthetic lane.

Japanese cinema isn't a monolith. It's Ozu's tatami-level stillness and Kurosawa's kinetic weather. It's the pink film boom of the seventies and the V-cinema explosion of the nineties. It's the rigorous formalism of Hiroshi Teshigahara and the loose, improvised intimacy of Ryusuke Hamaguchi. It's Godzilla as nuclear metaphor and Godzilla as pure spectacle. The five films below aren't a "best of" list. They're a deliberate spread — different decades, different modes, different questions — so that by the end of the fifth film you've actually travelled somewhere.

Tokyo Story (1953) — Yasujiro Ozu

Start here. Not because it's the oldest, but because it teaches you how to watch the others. Ozu's camera never moves. It sits at the height of a person kneeling on tatami — about three feet off the floor — and it stays there. Characters enter and exit the frame. Conversations happen in the spaces between words. An elderly couple travels from Onomichi to Tokyo to visit their grown children; the children are too busy, too polite, too distracted to really host them. The mother falls ill on the return journey. She dies. The father stays behind with the daughter-in-law, Noriko (Setsuko Hara, whose smile holds more grief than most actors manage in a career), and they share a quiet drink. "Life is disappointing," she says. "Yes, it is," he replies. Cut to a pillow shot: a clothesline, a smokestack, the sea. Fade out.

I first saw this on a pirated DVD in my Delhi hostel room around 2007. The subtitles were out of sync by three seconds. Didn't matter. The rhythms are so precise you could reconstruct the edit from memory. Ozu made fifty-four films. Most use the same actors, the same sets, the same concerns: generational drift, the quiet cruelty of modernity, the rituals that hold families together until they don't. Tokyo Story isn't even my favourite Ozu — that's Late Spring (1949) or An Autumn Afternoon (1962), his last — but it's the one that announces the grammar. Learn it here. Everything else gets easier.

Woman in the Dunes (1964) — Hiroshi Teshigahara

Jump nineteen years forward. The world has changed — Japan is rebuilding, the economy is roaring, the Olympics are coming — but Teshigahara's film exists in a timeless nowhere. An entomologist (Eiji Okada) misses the last bus home from a sand-dune village and accepts a night's shelter in a house at the bottom of a sand pit. The woman who lives there (Kyoko Kishida) shovels sand endlessly; the house will be buried if she stops. In the morning, the rope ladder is gone. He's trapped. The villagers expect him to stay, to shovel, to become the woman's partner in this Sisyphean maintenance.

The sand gets everywhere. In the hair, the teeth, the folds of skin. Teshigahara and cinematographer Hiroshi Segawa shoot it like pornography — close-ups of grains cascading over shoulders, sticking to sweat, burying the frame. It's visceral in a way Ozu never is. But the existential question is the same: what do we do with the time we're given? The entomologist tries to escape. He fails. He tries again. He fails. Eventually he builds a water-catchment system from condensation — a small victory, a redefinition of purpose. The final shot pulls back and back until the sand pit is a speck in a vast desert. No ladder visible. I watched this on a flight to Seoul in 2019, the woman next to me eating bibimbap with intense concentration. I envied her focus. The film demands yours.

Cure (1997) — Kiyoshi Kurosawa

No relation to Akira. Kiyoshi Kurosawa works in a different register entirely: dread that accumulates in wide shots and long takes. A detective (Koji Yakusho) investigates a string of identical murders — an X carved into each victim's throat — committed by different people who remember nothing. The connecting thread: a drifter (Masato Hagiwara) who meets each killer shortly before the act and asks simple, maddening questions. "Who are you?" "What do you want?" The film refuses psychological explanation. There's no trauma flashback, no chemical imbalance. The drifter simply… unmoors people. He reminds them that their identities are constructed, fragile, optional.

I was about to call this the best Japanese horror film of the nineties, then I remembered Ring came out the next year and rewrote the genre globally. But Cure is the one that stays with me. The hallway scene — Yakusho walking down a hospital corridor, the camera tracking behind him, fluorescent lights buzzing, the sound design so sparse you hear his breathing — that hallway contains more menace than most films' entire runtime. Kurosawa shoots Tokyo as a city of empty rooms and institutional fluorescence. The horror isn't supernatural. It's the suggestion that the self is a story we tell ourselves, and someone else can edit the manuscript. Watch it with the lights on. I'm not joking.

Shoplifters (2018) — Hirokazu Kore-eda

Kore-eda has made a career of filming families that aren't families. Shoplifters is his masterpiece on the subject — which is saying something, because Nobody Knows (2004) and Still Walking (2008) and Like Father, Like Son (2013) all circle the same terrain. A marginal household in contemporary Tokyo: grandmother's pension, the wife's part-time laundry work, the husband's day labour, the son's shoplifting lessons, the young girl they "found" on a freezing balcony and never returned. They're not related by blood. They're related by need, by choice, by the small crimes that keep them fed. The film asks what a family is when the legal definition fails everyone involved. The answer isn't sentimental. It's fragile, conditional, and entirely real.

I saw this at MAMI Mumbai Film Festival in 2018, the same year it won Palme d'Or at Cannes. The audience — mostly industry people, critics, students — was dead silent through the credits. A programmer I know turned to me and said, "He makes it look easy. It's not easy." Kore-eda's direction is invisible in the way great editing is invisible: you only notice it when you try to imitate it. The scene where the grandmother (Kirin Kiki, in her final role) teaches the girl to shake out a wet towel — the specific wrist motion, the rhythm, the way the girl copies it imperfectly — that's three seconds of screen time. It contains the whole film. Blood doesn't make family. Repetition does. Care does. The towel shake does.

Drive My Car (2021) — Ryusuke Hamaguchi

Three hours. A red Saab 900. A widowed theatre director (Hidetoshi Nishijima) driving to Hiroshima for a residency directing Uncle Vanya, assigned a chauffeur (Toko Miura) he didn't ask for. They talk. That's most of the film. They talk about Chekhov, about the wife's infidelities, about the young actor (Masaki Okada) who may have been one of her lovers, about the chauffeur's mother who died in a landslide, about the stories we tell to survive the stories we've lived. Hamaguchi adapts a Haruki Murakami short story and expands it into something that feels like life itself — digressive, repetitive, revealing in the retelling.

I was skeptical. Three hours in a car? I'd just rewatched Happy Hour (2015), Hamaguchi's five-hour ensemble drama about four women in Kobe, and while I admired it, I didn't love it. Felt the length. Drive My Car earned every minute. The rehearsal scenes — the director casting a Korean actor who speaks no Japanese, a deaf actor who signs her lines, a Japanese actor who resents both — become a meditation on communication beyond language. The car becomes a confessional. The final shot — Miura driving the Saab alone through a snowy Hokkaido highway, the camera fixed on her face as she processes everything — held the theatre in a silence I've rarely experienced. People didn't move when the credits started. They just… sat. I drove home that night taking the long route. Didn't put on music.

What's deliberately not on this list

Kurosawa Akira. Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, Ikiru, Ran — I know. But the samurai canon gets its own starter pack. Mizoguchi's Ugetsu and Sansho the Bailiff — same. The entire pink film and V-cinema universe — Suzuki Seijun, Wakamatsu Koji, Ishii Teruo — deserves a separate, much weirder list. Anime beyond Ghibli — Kon Satoshi, Oshii Mamoru, Yuasa Masaaki, Hosoda Mamoru — that's a different conversation entirely. J-horror's golden age — Ring, Pulse, Dark Water, Audition — Cure represents the strand I find most enduring, but Nakata Hideo and Shimizu Takashi and Miike Takashi each need their own entry point. Kore-eda's earlier films — Maborosi, After Life, Nobody Knows — I considered swapping Shoplifters for Nobody Knows. Didn't. Shoplifters is the more complete film. Hamaguchi's Happy Hour and Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy — both extraordinary — but Drive My Car is the one that synthesises his concerns. Ozu's Late Spring and An Autumn Afternoon — better films, arguably — but Tokyo Story is the teaching tool.

Also not here: Godzilla. Any of them. The 1954 original is a masterpiece of anti-nuclear allegory. Shin Godzilla (2016) is a satirical masterpiece of bureaucratic paralysis. Godzilla Minus One (2023) is a crowd-pleaser with genuine weight. But kaiju is its own lineage. Same with the yakuza genre — Fukasaku Kinji's Battles Without Honor and Humanity series, Kitano Takeshi's Sonatine and Hana-bi, Miike's Dead or Alive trilogy. Those are deep waters. Start with the five above. You'll know when you're ready for the rest.

How to watch them

• Tokyo Story and Woman in the Dunes: Criterion Collection releases are the gold standard — restored, contextualised, with essays that actually teach you something. If your regional streamer has them, start there.
• Cure: Often on MUBI or Criterion Channel. Physical media collectors hunt the Arrow Video release.
• Shoplifters: Usually on Netflix or Amazon Prime depending on territory. Kore-eda's films travel well on mainstream platforms.
• Drive My Car: HBO Max in some regions, MUBI in others. The Criterion 4K disc came out late 2023 — worth it for the colour grading alone.

Watch in the order listed. Not because there's a narrative arc — there isn't — but because each film teaches you a different way of paying attention. Ozu teaches stillness. Teshigahara teaches texture. Kurosawa teaches dread. Kore-eda teaches detail. Hamaguchi teaches duration. By the time you reach that red Saab in the snow, you've built a viewer's toolkit that works across the whole cinema. Which is the point. The films don't just entertain. They train you.

Email me at [email protected] if you finish all five and want the next five. I have opinions on the Suzuki Seijun gateway. They're strong opinions.