Japanese Golden Age

In the decade after its defeat, Japan’s film studios produced a run of masterpieces the rest of the world is still catching up on.

Nobody abroad was watching until an Italian scholar entered Rashomon at Venice without telling Kurosawa, and it took the top prize in 1951. Behind it stood a working system, four masters at full strength at once: Kurosawa staging battles in real rain, Ozu at his low tatami camera, Mizoguchi demanding one more take, Naruse counting the small change of unhappy households. The studios turned these pictures out on schedule, between program fillers, the way Detroit made cars. Seven Samurai took a year to shoot and nearly broke its studio; it has been paying Toho back for seventy years.