Must-see Films Set in Japan

Forget the Shinjuku neon seen from a luxury hotel. Forget the zen postcards, the honorable samurai, and the “wa” (harmony) that mainstream Western cinema projects onto the screen. That is an export-grade Japan, a reassuring backdrop, often reduced to an aesthetic fetish. The real films set in Japan, those in independent cinema, treat the setting in a radically different way.

In these works, Japan is not a place, but a pressure. It is an entity that shapes, infects, represses, and, at times, destroys its protagonists. It is the weight of history, the repressed trauma of war, the alienation of a hyper-technological society that has lost touch with the human. The setting, here, is the true antagonist, or at least the battlefield on which identity is played out.

This is not a guide to places, but to battlegrounds. We will explore Japan as a psychological prison, from Teshigahara’s existential dunes to Terayama’s suffocating countryside, a place to flee from and impossible to escape. We will see Tokyo as the hotbed of the political and sexual revolution in the ’60s and ’70s, a stage for the Nūberu bāgu where crime and eros were the only political acts left.

We will witness its cyberpunk collapse, where Shin’ya Tsukamoto’s industrial metropolis literally invades the flesh, transforming man into machine. We will analyze the spectral void of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo, where modern urban loneliness becomes a contagious virus. And finally, we will touch on the emotional and economic precarity of contemporary Japan, from Sion Sono to Ryusuke Hamaguchi, where the struggle is for simple human connection.

These films use the Japanese setting not to comfort the viewer, but to challenge them. They have torn away the glossy image to show the underlying contradictions, the violence beneath the calm, the chaos beneath the order.

Here is a curated selection of independent films that perfectly embody this vision: works where Japan is the subject, the wound, and the mystery.

The Urban Crisis: Nūberu bāgu and Pinku Eiga

The 1960s and 70s saw directors like Nagisa Ōshima, Kōji Wakamatsu, and Shūji Terayama use the Japanese setting—particularly rebellious Tokyo districts like Shinjuku—as a weapon. Japan was not a place to be contemplated, but a system to be attacked. Through sex, crime, and politics, the city became the stage for revolution.

Woman in the Dunes (Suna no Onna)

An entomologist from Tokyo, searching for rare insects, ventures into a desolate village among the dunes. He agrees to spend the night in a deep sand pit where a widow lives. The next morning, he discovers the rope ladder is gone, condemning him to an absurd existence spent shoveling sand.

Hiroshi Teshigahara’s masterpiece is the anti-Japan. It removes the nation from any recognizable context and reduces it to a primordial, absurd landscape: sand. The Japanese setting here is an existential abstraction. The dunes are not a geographical location but a psychological prison representing the inescapable conformism of Japanese society, where individual rebellion is literally swallowed up, and survival lies in accepting a useless task.

Violated Angels (Okasareta byakui)

Inspired by a real crime that occurred in Chicago, the film follows a young man who breaks into a nurses’ dormitory. After tying them up, he begins a long, sadistic ritual of humiliation and psychological violence, analyzing the aggressor’s distorted sexual consciousness.

Kōji Wakamatsu, a key figure of pinku-eiga (erotic exploitation cinema), uses a claustrophobic setting for a political attack. The dormitory is not just a space for violence but a metaphor for Japan itself: an oppressive, patriarchal, and hypocritical society. As Wakamatsu would do throughout his career, sexual violence becomes an act of nihilistic rebellion against an established order, a collapse of ideals in a confined space.

A Man Vanishes (Ningen Jōhatsu)

What begins as a conventional documentary searching for a missing businessman transforms into a labyrinthine investigation. Director Shōhei Imamura follows the man’s fiancée, but soon reality begins to fray, the lines between fiction and documentary collapse, and the truth becomes unattainable.

Imamura, once Ozu’s assistant, overturns his aesthetic. Instead of an orderly Japan, he seeks “primitive” life and squalor. Here, the setting is the very fabric of Japanese reality. Following the woman through cities and villages, Imamura documents not a place, but its dissolution. The Japan of the film is a place where truth is unstable, where people can simply “evaporate” (a real social phenomenon). The setting is the very fiction that Japanese society constructs for itself.

Death by Hanging (Kōshikei)

A young Korean immigrant, R, is sentenced to death for rape and murder. The hanging fails: R survives but completely loses his memory. In an absurd Brechtian theater, the prison officials must convince him of his own guilt so they can legally execute him.

Nagisa Ōshima’s setting is a single room, the death chamber. This enclosed space becomes a microcosm of Japan. It is here that the director stages his radical critique of the contradictions of power and the racist persecution of Koreans in Japan. The setting is not a physical prison, but the Japanese national conscience—a place where justice (the officials) must literally reconstruct guilt in an innocent (the amnesiac) to justify its own institutional violence.

Diary of a Shinjuku Thief (Shinjuku Dorobō Nikki)

A young man, “Birdy,” tries to steal books from a famous Shinjuku bookstore. He is caught by the shopgirl, Umeko. A chaotic relationship exploring sex, crime, and politics begins between them, intertwining with performances by an underground theater group and the violent student protests inflaming the district.

This film is the epitome of using Shinjuku as a subject, not a backdrop. Ōshima doesn’t film in Shinjuku; he films with Shinjuku. The setting is the hotbed of the era’s social and cultural protests. The narrative is chaotic and fragmented because the Tokyo of those years was chaotic. The film captures the spirit of the Nūberu bāgu where eros and crime become the only possible political acts in a Japan that has lost its public identity.

Funeral Parade of Roses (Bara no Sōretsu)

A loose and scandalous retelling of the Oedipus tragedy, set in the underground gay and transgender scene of Tokyo. Eddie, a young trans hostess, is the rising star of Bar Genet. Her ascent provokes the jealousy of the “madame” Leda, triggering a spiral of sex, drugs, and tragedy.

Toshio Matsumoto’s film is a foundational document of Tokyo’s 1960s queer underground. The setting (the gay bars of Shinjuku, the streets) is the stage for an identity revolution. Matsumoto fragments the narrative, mixing fiction, avant-garde, and documentary (with real interviews with “gay boys”). The Japan of the film is a place of fluid identities, a pop-art and anarchic landscape that challenged fixed notions of gender and even influenced Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.

Go, Go Second Time Virgin (Yuke Yuke Nidome no Shojo)

On the roof of a Tokyo apartment building, a girl is raped by a group of thugs. There, she meets a shy, cold assassin. A delirious and nihilistic love story blossoms between the two outcasts, observed from afar by a voyeur filming the scene.

Wakamatsu again, using the urban setting (the rooftop) as an “urban eden” for the rejected. In just 63 minutes, the director creates a manifesto on the nihilism of Japanese youth, squalid and far from ideals. The roof is a suspended Japan, a non-place where violence and purity merge. It is cinema that reflects on the evils of man by taking them to their peak, using the metropolis not as a place of life, but as a stage for the collapse of every ideal.

Sex Jack (Seizoku)

A group of student radicals hides in a Shinjuku apartment after a violent action. Their ideological tensions and siege paranoia are vented through complex and violent sexual dynamics, while they are hunted by the police outside.

Another cornerstone of Wakamatsu’s political pinku. The Japanese setting is reduced to its essence: a single apartment used as a hideout. This claustrophobic space becomes a pressure cooker where sexual desire and political impulse merge and collapse. The apartment is a metaphor for the Japanese radical left itself: isolated, paranoid, and destined for self-destruction. The setting is not Japan, but the end of revolutionary Japan.

Emperor Tomato Ketchup (Tomato Kecchappu Kōtei)

In a dystopian Japan, children seize power, overthrowing adult authority. Led by the indulgent Emperor Tomato Ketchup, they establish an anarchic regime of free sex, violence, and parody of institutions, reflecting the political turmoil of the era.

Shūji Terayama, an icon of the avant-garde (angura), uses a recognizable Japanese setting (public streets, filmed guerrilla-style without permits) to stage an imaginary coup. The film is a fierce critique of Americanization and consumerism, where the child-emperor is the symbol of the neoliberal future. The setting is contemporary Japan profaned by the revolution of the imagination, a martial theater where taboos are used to shock and criticize adult society.

Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets (Sho o Suteyo, Machi e Deyō)

A disillusioned young man tries to escape his dysfunctional, poor family in a Tokyo suburb. The film, psychedelic and experimental, follows his attempts to establish independence, amidst psychosexual alienation and existential malaise, continuously breaking the fourth wall.

This is Terayama’s visionary masterpiece. The setting is the Tokyo suburbs, but it is above all a mental landscape. The title urges one to “throw away books” (dead culture) and “rally in the streets” (action, life). The Japanese setting is the battlefield between the old culture and the new counter-culture. Terayama uses urban Japan as a space to escape from, a place of social disintegration that can only be transcended through psychedelic rebellion.

Rural Japan and Distorted Memory

While the Nūberu bāgu focused on the urban crisis, other independent directors looked to the countryside. But they did not idealize it. For Terayama and others, the Japanese countryside is not a place of purity, but the source of trauma, a prison of memory, a place from which modernity and the protagonists try in vain to escape.

Goodbye CP (Sayonara CP)

A raw, unsentimental documentary portraying the daily life of a group of adults with cerebral palsy. The film challenges Japanese society’s taboos on disability, showing the subjects as they move through the city, interact with each other, and fight for their own autonomy.

Kazuo Hara’s “action documentary” uses all of urban Japan as an obstacle course. The setting (the streets, the trains) is not neutral; it is a hostile environment that constantly tests the protagonists. Hara uses a deliberately harsh style (grainy black and white) to capture the reality of their existence. The Japan here is a society that marginalizes and ignores. The act of moving in this space, of living in Japan, becomes an act of political resistance.

Pastoral: To Die in the Country (Den-en ni Shisu)

A filmmaker reflects on his traumatic childhood in a rural village, attempting to revisit (and revise) his memory. Terayama’s autobiographical film blends dreams, memories, and surrealism, culminating in a confrontation between the adult director and his younger self.

Considered Terayama’s masterpiece, the film uses the Japanese countryside as a mythical and terrifying space. It is the setting of memory. Rural Japan is not an idyllic place, but a suffocating prison dominated by a monstrous mother and archaic superstitions. The setting is literally a theatrical set that is eventually dismantled, revealing modern Shinjuku. Rural Japan is a past that must be destroyed in order to live in the present.

The Indictment: Satire and Post-War Trauma

Some of the most radical films set in Japan use genre (horror, satire, documentary) to confront the nation’s unspeakable traumas: the war, the crimes committed, and the nuclear taboo. The “Japan” setting in these films is a nation living on a repressed trauma that is rotting beneath the surface.

House (Hausu)

A schoolgirl named Gorgeous travels with six of her classmates to her ailing aunt’s remote country home. The house reveals itself to be a demonic entity that, along with a spectral cat, devours the girls one by one in surreal ways, including carnivorous pianos and murderous chandeliers.

Behind the guise of a comedic and psychedelic horror film, Nobuhiko Obayashi’s debut is a reflection on the atomic trauma. Obayashi, a Hiroshima native, uses the house as a metaphor. The setting (the old estate) is pre-war Japan; the aunt is alone because her fiancé never returned from the war. The house, and the aunt, devour the new generation (the girls) just as the war devoured the old. It is a film set in a rural Japan that is literally a hungry ghost.

The Man Who Stole the Sun (Taiyō o Nusunda Otoko)

An eccentric high school science teacher, Makoto Kido, decides to build an atomic bomb by himself. After stealing plutonium from a power plant, he blackmails the government with absurd demands (like having the Rolling Stones play in Tokyo), engaging in a duel with a police inspector.

This epic anti-nuclear satire uses Tokyo as a playground for an unlikely terrorist. The Japanese setting is fundamental: it is the only country to have suffered an atomic attack, yet it is full of nuclear power plants. The film confronts this national taboo. The urban setting (climbing the parliament building, car chases through Tokyo) shows the vulnerability of a modern metropolis to the threat it itself fuels. The Japan here is a nation with a time bomb in its basement.

The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On (Yuki Yukite Shingun)

The documentary follows Kenzo Okuzaki, a charismatic and violent WWII veteran, as he hunts down his former superiors. Okuzaki forces them, often violently, to confess the truth behind unexplained executions and cases of cannibalism committed by the Japanese army in New Guinea.

The film’s setting is contemporary Japan, the tidy, quiet homes of former soldiers. It is this contrast that creates the tension. Okuzaki brings the unresolved violence and trauma of the New Guinea jungle (the past) into the bourgeois living room of modern Japan (the present). Hara uses his protagonist to tear open the veil of peace and amnesia that post-war Japan has built for itself. The setting is the official history that Okuzaki literally punches in the face.

The External Gaze: The Essay Film and Documentary

The most important independent foreign films set in Japan do not try to explain the culture (unlike mainstream films). They use Japan, and Tokyo in particular, as a mirror. It is the epicenter of global modernity, the place where the future, the past, technology, and human memory collide in the most visible way.

Sans Soleil

An essay film, experimental documentary, and fictitious travelogue. A female narrator reads letters from a cameraman (Chris Marker’s alter ego) who reflects on the nature of memory, time, and the image, traveling between the “two extreme poles of survival”: Japan and Guinea-Bissau.

Japan, and Tokyo in particular, is the heart of Sans Soleil. For Marker, the Japanese setting is a prism through which to observe late 20th-century civilization. It is a place where futuristic technology (early video games) coexists with archaic rituals (the ceremony for broken dolls). The Japanese setting is not a subject, but a time zone of memory; a place where the director can analyze how humanity processes recollection in the age of image saturation.

Tokyo-Ga

Wim Wenders travels to Tokyo on a pilgrimage in a quest for his master, Yasujirō Ozu. Instead of the quiet, orderly Japan of Ozu’s films, he finds a modern, chaotic, and Americanized metropolis, documenting pachinko parlors, rockabillies in the park, and interviewing Ozu’s collaborators.

This film is entirely about the Japanese setting, or rather, its disappearance. Wenders looks for Ozu’s Japan and finds something else. Tokyo becomes the universal symbol of globalization and the loss of cultural identity. The setting (Tokyo) is the ghost of Ozu’s cinema, a place where modernity has erased the past. It is a melancholic essay on how a place (Japan) can change faster than its own cinematic image.

Urban Metamorphosis: Cyberpunk and 90s Alienation

Japan’s “Bubble Economy” of the 1980s and its subsequent collapse created a new kind of independent cinema. The urban setting (Tokyo) becomes an active, hostile force that invades the body. The Japanese metropolis of the 90s is the real monster: a technological organism that generates mutants (Tsukamoto) or ghosts (Kurosawa).

Tetsuo: The Iron Man

A “metal fetishist” is hit by a salaryman’s car. The next day, the employee begins to undergo a grotesque metamorphosis: his body transforms into a mass of scrap metal, wires, and engines, driving him into a destructive fury.

Shin’ya Tsukamoto’s cyberpunk masterpiece is the most literal representation of Japanese urban alienation. The setting is the industrial metropolis of Tokyo, an entity that doesn’t just host the story, but infects its inhabitants. The city’s technology and metal invade the flesh. It is body horror that reflects on the pathological materialism of Bubble Era Japan, a place where humanity has been completely devoured by an irreversible hybridization with the machine.

Tetsuo II: Body Hammer

A color remake of the first film with a bigger budget. A salaryman, after his son is kidnapped by thugs, unleashes his repressed rage. This rage triggers his metamorphosis into a cybernetic weapon, hunted by a cult of mutant bodybuilders.

If the first Tetsuo was the disease, the second is its military application. Tsukamoto shifts the setting from pure industrial abstraction to a more recognizable urban context (family, thugs). The Japanese metropolis is no longer just an infection; it is a weapon. The repressed anger of the typical frustrated Japanese employee becomes the engine of transformation. The urban setting is the catalyst that turns the common man into a “body hammer.”

Maborosi (Maboroshi no Hikari)

Yumiko lives in Osaka when her husband Ikuo inexplicably commits suicide. Years later, she remarries a widower and moves with her son to a remote coastal village on the Noto Peninsula. Despite her new life, she remains haunted by the emptiness and mystery of her first husband’s death.

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s debut is a study of alienation and loss. The film is divided between two antithetical Japanese settings: chaotic Osaka and the remote, wind-swept coastal village. But the escape from the city to the country brings no peace. The rural setting, photographed with a static and oppressive beauty, becomes a prison of silence and memory. Kore-eda’s Japan is a landscape of the soul where the pain and mystery of loss persist, regardless of the location.

Swallowtail Butterfly (Suwarōteiru)

In a dystopian, multicultural Tokyo called “Yentown,” a ghetto for immigrants seeking their fortune. A young orphan, Ageha, is adopted by a Chinese prostitute, Glico. Together with a group of outcasts, they find a cassette full of money and open a club, dreaming of a better life.

Shunji Iwai’s film uses the Japanese setting to critique the economic crisis and xenophobia of the 90s. Yentown” is an alternate Tokyo, a melting pot of cultures where the Yen is the only god. Iwai creates an imaginary but plausible Japan, a place of social marginalization where the “Yentowns” (a pun on “Yen thieves”) try to carve out an identity. The setting is a direct critique of Japanese nationalism and globalization.

Cure (Kyua)

A series of horrific murders plagues Tokyo. The victims have an “X” carved into their necks. The culprits are ordinary people who confess but have no memory or motive. Detective Takabe investigates, suspecting that a mysterious stranger is using hypnosis to unleash repressed homicidal impulses.

Cure is one of the foundational films of J-horror. Kiyoshi Kurosawa uses a squalid, decaying, and industrial Tokyo. The Japanese setting is frightening not for its ghosts, but for its emptiness. It is an alienating metropolis that has emptied people of all identity, turning them into hollow shells ready to be “filled” by a contagious evil (hypnosis). Kurosawa’s horror is social: the modern urban setting is the source of the alienation that leads to society’s collapse.

The New Millennium and Digital Independence

With the advent of the internet, the urban horror of the 90s moves from the flesh (Tsukamoto) to the digital (Kurosawa) and the psychological (Sono). The Japanese setting of the new millennium is immaterial: it is the network, the media, pop culture. It is a Japan where isolation and alienation are no longer metaphorical, but literally viral.

“A”

Documentarian Tatsuya Mori gains unprecedented access to members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult after the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway. The film documents the daily life of the remaining members, led by the young spokesman Araki, as they face public hatred and police raids.

The setting is post-attack Japan, a nation traumatized and searching for a scapegoat. Mori doesn’t film the terrorism, but its social consequence. The setting is the cult’s headquarters, besieged by the media and public hatred. Mori uses this confined space to show the humanity of the “monsters,” forcing the Japanese viewer to confront their own prejudice. The Japan of the film is a society that needs to demonize the other to feel safe again.

After Life (Wandafuru Raifu)

In a transit station resembling an old school, the dead have one week to choose a single memory from their life. This memory will then be recreated on film by “counselors” and will be the only thing they take with them into eternity.

Kore-eda creates a Japanese setting that is a bureaucratic and melancholic limbo. The building is a non-place, a Japan suspended in time. The setting is not a religious afterlife, but an emotional land registry. It is a metaphor for Japan itself: a place obsessed with memory and bureaucracy, where the meaning of life is found in the act of remembering and reconstructing the past.

Pulse (Kairo)

In the vast and alienating Tokyo, young people begin to experience terrifying encounters with ghosts emerging from the Internet. Technology, instead of connecting, becomes a portal for an epidemic of loneliness and despair that leads to the apocalypse.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s masterpiece, Pulse defines 21st-century techno-horror. The setting is a desolate Tokyo, full of empty rooms and “forbidden rooms.” The horror is not in the action, but in the loneliness. The Japan of the film is a society so alienated that the living are already ghosts. The Internet is the immaterial setting where this loneliness becomes a virus that empties the metropolis. The Japanese setting is the epicenter of the communications apocalypse.

Suicide Club (Jisatsu Sākuru)

A wave of mass suicides rocks Japan, starting with 54 schoolgirls who smilingly jump in front of a train in Shinjuku. Detectives investigate, looking for a connection between the deaths and a mysterious J-pop kids’ band.

Sion Sono’s cult film is a grotesque satire on contemporary Japanese society. The setting is a Japan obsessed with media, pop culture, and social pressure. The horror is not supernatural, but cultural. Sono’s Japan is a place where the superficiality of the media and human disconnection lead young people to seek a “connection” in suicide. The urban setting (the Shinjuku subway) is the theater for this senseless mass sacrifice.

Contemporary Japan and Invisible Dramas

More recent independent directors (Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Sion Sono, Masaharu Take) use the contemporary Japanese setting to explore emotional, economic, and relational precarity. The fight is no longer against the state, but to find a shred of identity and connection in the fabric of modern life.

Passion

A young couple announces their marriage to a group of twenty-something friends. The news brings to the surface a complex network of unexpressed feelings, love triangles, insecurities, and repressed resentments within the group.

Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s thesis film, shot under the supervision of Kiyoshi Kurosawa, uses an urban and bourgeois Japanese setting (apartments, restaurants) to stage a chamber drama. The setting is realistic, but it serves to trap the characters. Hamaguchi dissects the emotional disconnection of his generation. The Japan here is a place of “prolonged adolescence,” where the characters, despite living in the metropolis, are incapable of honest communication.

Love Exposure (Ai no Mukidashi)

Yu, the son of a Catholic priest, is forced to confess sins. To please his father, he becomes a master of upskirt photography. He falls in love with Yoko but loses her to a manipulative religious cult. To save her, he must infiltrate the cult, disguised as a woman.

This four-hour epic is Sion Sono’s manifesto on Japan. The setting is a grotesque Tokyo, a circus of perversion, religion, violence, and pure love. Sono attacks every Japanese institution: family, religion, police. Japan is a landscape saturated with stimuli, where the only form of purity (Yu’s love for Yoko) can only emerge through the most perverse act (upskirt photography).

100 Yen Love (Hyakuen no Koi)

Ichiko, a 32-year-old listless and unmotivated woman, lives with her parents. After a fight, she moves out and starts working at a “100 yen” discount store. She meets an introverted boxer and, driven by harsh reality, begins to box herself to find a shred of self-esteem.

The film is set in a precarious Japan. Not the glittering Tokyo, but its margins, the discount stores and suburban gyms. The setting is a map of economic and social depression. Boxing is not a sport of glory, but the only way for Ichiko to literally “hit” her life. The Japanese setting is that of the invisible working class, a daily struggle to feel alive in a society that considers you 100-yen trash.

Asako I & II (Netemo Sametemo)

Asako lives in Osaka and falls in love with Baku, a magnetic and elusive boy who one day disappears. Two years later, in Tokyo, she meets Ryohei, Baku’s perfect double. She begins a stable relationship with him, until the past returns in the form of the original Baku.

Ryusuke Hamaguchi uses two key Japanese settings: Osaka (the past, the irrational, Baku) and Tokyo (the present, stability, Ryohei). The film explores identity and love in the age of reproducibility. Hamaguchi’s Japan is a quiet, almost mundane place, but beneath the surface, the irrational simmers. The setting (first Osaka, then Tokyo) reflects the protagonist’s schism. It is a Japan where emotional stability is constantly threatened by the ghosts of the past.

Conclusion

These films demonstrate that independent cinema set in Japan is rarely a celebration and more often an exorcism. From the political chaos of Shinjuku to the digital alienation of Tokyo, passing through the memory-haunted countryside, these directors have used the Japanese setting as a scalpel.

They have dissected national identity, the man-machine hybrid, the crisis of the family, and the loneliness of contemporary society. To find the real Japan on the big screen, one must look not in imperial palaces or on tourist postcards, but in these subterranean landscapes, in the cyberpunk nightmares, and in the silent dramas of its invisible citizens.