The 15 Greatest Japanese Film Directors, Ranked by What They Invented

No national cinema has been borrowed from more often than Japan’s. The Western owes it a debt it has never repaid, the modern action film took its editing grammar from Kurosawa, and half of what streaming now sells as prestige animation descends from a single studio in Koganei, on the western edge of Tokyo.

The directors below are ranked on what they invented and what survived them. That is why a filmmaker who made essentially the same family drama for thirty years sits near the top, next to one who never made the same film twice, and why animators stand here on exactly the same terms as live-action masters.

The list runs from the silent era to directors who are still shooting, because treating the postwar giants as a closed museum is the fastest way to misunderstand them. Disagree freely; that is what a list like this is for. The first names will surprise almost nobody. The surprises start further down.

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1. Akira Kurosawa

Akira Kurosawa is the most influential director who ever worked in Japan, and a serious candidate for the most influential anywhere. Seven Samurai invented the assembled-team structure that the action film still runs on, from the Western remakes to every heist and superhero ensemble since. Rashomon gave several languages a word for contested truth. Add the telephoto battles, the weather as drama and the wipe cuts that George Lucas lifted wholesale, and no one else comes close.

2. Yasujiro Ozu

Yasujiro Ozu spent a career refining one subject, parents and children drifting apart, with a camera placed low and almost never moved. Tokyo Story is the purest version: an elderly couple visits their busy grown-up children, and nothing happens except the whole of life. He is the most quietly radical formalist in cinema, and the director others steal from when they want stillness to mean something.

3. Kenji Mizoguchi

Kenji Mizoguchi turned the long take into a moral position. He holds the shot until you are implicated in what the camera is watching, and he refuses to cut away when a cut would let you off. Ugetsu, a ghost story about two men chasing money and glory while their wives pay the price, is his most famous film. His portraits of women crushed by feudal economics remain unmatched in their anger.

4. Hayao Miyazaki

Hayao Miyazaki won the Oscar for animated feature twice, more than twenty years apart, and made hand-drawn animation a serious adult medium around the world. Spirited Away remains the highest achievement of the form: a child’s nightmare about labour, greed and losing your own name, drawn with a patience no algorithm can fake. The studio he co-founded is the reason Japanese animation is discussed as cinema rather than as a genre.

5. Hirokazu Kore-eda

Hirokazu Kore-eda inherited Ozu’s subject and made it contemporary: what counts as a family when the state says it is not one. Shoplifters, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, follows a household of petty thieves held together by something stronger than blood, and it breaks your heart without raising its voice. He directs children better than anyone alive, largely by never giving them a script.

6. Masaki Kobayashi

Masaki Kobayashi made nine and a half hours of anti-war cinema across the three parts of The Human Condition, and he made them as a man who had refused promotion in the Imperial Army. The trilogy follows a pacifist through labour camps, the front and Soviet captivity without once flinching. His samurai drama Harakiri is the most withering film ever made about institutional honour, and it has lost none of its bite.

7. Shohei Imamura

Shohei Imamura won the Palme d’Or twice and became the great chronicler of the Japan the postwar masters left out: the rural, the criminal, the bodily, the lustful. He started as an assistant to Ozu and spent the rest of his career making the opposite kind of film, openly. The Ballad of Narayama, about a village where the old are carried up a mountain to die, is as unsentimental as cinema gets.

8. Nagisa Oshima

Nagisa Oshima was the sharpest political mind of the Japanese New Wave, a director who turned his censorship battles into arguments about the state itself. In the Realm of the Senses brought him an obscenity prosecution at home, which ended in acquittal. Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, with David Bowie and Ryuichi Sakamoto as enemies in a prison camp, remains his most humane work.

9. Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Kiyoshi Kurosawa, no relation to the man at the top of this list, built a horror grammar out of empty space and bad weather rather than shocks. Cure, in which a detective chases a drifter who makes strangers commit murder, is the most frightening film on this list, and there is almost nothing in it. He has since carried the same unease into ghost stories, family dramas and espionage.

10. Takeshi Kitano

Takeshi Kitano was a television comedian before he became the most distinctive yakuza stylist in the world: static frames, sudden violence, long silences and a deadpan face, usually his own, at the centre of it all. Hana-bi, in which he plays a cop caring for his dying wife while settling his debts the hard way, won the Golden Lion in Venice. Nobody has cut from tenderness to brutality so abruptly or so well.

11. Satoshi Kon

Satoshi Kon made four features and one television series before his death at forty-six, and every one of them rewired how animation handles subjectivity. Perfect Blue, about a pop idol whose identity comes apart as she turns actress, cuts between dream, performance and reality without warning. Darren Aronofsky has quoted its images on screen, and Kon’s later dream-heist film Paprika has shadowed every conversation about Inception since.

12. Ryusuke Hamaguchi

Ryusuke Hamaguchi won the Oscar for international feature with a three-hour adaptation of a Haruki Murakami short story that is largely about rehearsing a play. Drive My Car makes a grieving theatre director and his young chauffeur into one of the great screen conversations of the century. He is the best director of dialogue working today, and the most likely name on this list to climb it.

13. Isao Takahata

Isao Takahata co-founded Studio Ghibli, never drew and never repeated himself. Grave of the Fireflies, about two orphaned children trying to survive the firebombing of Kobe, is the hardest animated film ever made to sit through. Decades later he signed off with The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, a charcoal-and-watercolour fable that may be the most beautiful thing the studio ever released.

14. Mikio Naruse

Mikio Naruse is the least celebrated of the great postwar four and the most pitiless. When a Woman Ascends the Stairs follows a Ginza bar hostess counting every yen as she weighs marriage against independence, and it refuses her any easy escape. His films about working women and money were once dismissed as modest. They have aged into the most modern work of the group.

15. Shinya Tsukamoto

Shinya Tsukamoto made a cyberpunk body-horror landmark almost single-handedly on 16mm and has spent the decades since making furious, low-budget films about violence and war. Tetsuo: The Iron Man, in which an office worker slowly turns into scrap metal, still looks like nothing else. He continues to write, shoot, edit and act in his own work, which makes him the purest independent on this list.

Honourable mentions, because fifteen places were never going to be enough: Kon Ichikawa, whose The Burmese Harp and Fires on the Plain remain essential war films; Seijun Suzuki, the studio rebel whose Branded to Kill got him fired and made him a legend; Hiroshi Teshigahara for Woman in the Dunes; Kaneto Shindo for Onibaba; Kinji Fukasaku, who reinvented the yakuza film and then gave the world Battle Royale; Juzo Itami for Tampopo; Katsuhiro Otomo for Akira; Mamoru Oshii for Ghost in the Shell; and Takashi Miike, whose Audition is still passed around as a dare.

Read the list top to bottom and one pattern jumps out. The great Japanese directors rarely cared about what cinema was supposed to be for; they cared about what the camera could hold. That is why the influence runs from Kurosawa to Hollywood, from Ozu to half the festival circuit, and from Koganei to every animator who ever wanted to be taken seriously. Start anywhere. You will end up watching all of them.

Tags: cinema, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Akira Kurosawa, Japanese cinema, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Hayao Miyazaki, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Masaki Kobayashi, Takeshi Kitano

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