23 Films & TV Shows Set In Japan During The 1930s
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Radioactive
Ohio Nevada 🇸🇪 Sweden 🇫🇷 France 🇵🇱 Poland 🇺🇦 Ukraine Hiroshima Prefecture The 1980s The 1960s The 1950s The 1940s The 1930s The 1910s The 1900s The 1890s The 1870sPioneer. Genius. Rebel. — The story of Nobel Prize winner Marie Curie and her extraordinary scientific discoveries—through the prism of her marriage to husband Pierre—and the seismic and transformative effects their discovery of radium had on the 20th century.
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Midway
Hawaii 🇨🇳 China Tokyo Prefecture 🇲🇭 Marshall Islands Pacific Ocean The 1940s The 1930sOne battle turned the tide of war. — The story of the Battle of Midway, and the leaders and soldiers who used their instincts, fortitude and bravery to overcome massive odds.
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The Chinese Widow
Zhejiang Province Tokyo Prefecture The 1940s The 1930sIt’s 1941 and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor has destroyed America’s morale. The US President Franklin D. Roosevelt then decides to risk it all by bombing Tokyo and raise more hope for his citizens. After completing its mission, a unit of the US Air Force is forced to make an emergency landing in China. Its commander Jack Turner (Emilie Hirsch) barely survives but gets rescued by Ying (Crystal Liu), a local widow who will stop at nothing to hide him from the Japanese occupant.
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The Handmaiden
🇰🇷 South Korea 🇯🇵 Japan The 1930s"My saviour who came to ruin my life. My Tamako, my Sookee." — 1930s Korea, in the period of Japanese occupation, a young woman is hired as a handmaiden to a Japanese heiress who lives a secluded life on a large countryside estate with her domineering uncle, but she's involved in something greater that will soon be revealed.
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In This Corner of the World
Hiroshima Prefecture The 1940s The 1930sTorn apart by war. Brought together by love. — Japan, 1943, during World War II. Young Suzu leaves her village near Hiroshima to marry and live with her in-laws in Kure, a military harbor. Her creativity to overcome deprivation quickly makes her indispensable at home. Inhabited by an ancestral wisdom, Suzu impregnates the simple gestures of everyday life with poetry and beauty. The many hardships, the loss of loved ones, the frequent air raids of the enemy, nothing alters her enthusiasm…
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Unbroken
🇯🇵 Japan 🇩🇪 Germany The 1930s The 1940sSurvival. Resilience. Redemption. — A chronicle of the life of Louis Zamperini, an Olympic runner who was taken prisoner by Japanese forces during World War II.
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The Little House
🇯🇵 Japan The 1930sFollowing the death of the unmarried and childless Taki, Takeshi, a young relative of hers, discovers several pages of closely written lines in which the old lady has recorded her memories. This is how he learns the truth about her youth working as a housemaid and nanny for the Hirai family in a little house in Tokyo with a red gabled roof.
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Kano
🇹🇼 Taiwan 🇯🇵 Japan The 1930sA Taiwanese high school baseball team travels to Japan in 1931 to compete in a national tournament.
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The Wind Rises
🇩🇪 Germany 🇯🇵 Japan The 1940s The 1930s The 1920s The 1910sWe must live. — A lifelong love of flight inspires Japanese aviation engineer Jiro Horikoshi, whose storied career includes the creation of the A-6M World War II fighter plane.
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Philosophy of a Knife
🇯🇵 Japan 🇨🇳 China The 1930s The 1940sThe true history of Japanese Unit 731, from its beginnings in the 1930s to its demise in 1945, and the subsequent trials in Khabarovsk, USSR, of many of the Japanese doctors from Unit 731. The facts are told, and previously unknown evidence is revealed by an eyewitness to these events, former doctor and military translator, Anatoly Protasov.
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Black Belt
🇨🇳 China 🇯🇵 Japan The 1930s The 1940sReal Fight, Real Karate, Real Japan. — Set in 1932, amid the rise of militarism after the establishment of the Manchukuo colony in Northeast China, the story centers on a trio of karateka. Studying under their aging master in a small dojo in the woods of central Kyushu, Choei, Taikan and Giryu face a company of kempeitai military police come to requisition their dojo for use as a military base.
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Memoirs of a Geisha
Kyoto Prefecture The 1940s The 1930s The 1920sMy world is as forbidden as it is fragile; without its mysteries, it cannot survive. — A sweeping romantic epic set in Japan in the years before World War II, a penniless Japanese child is torn from her family to work as a maid in a geisha house.
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Fist of Legend
Shanghai Kyoto Prefecture The 1930s The 1940sTo avenge his masters death, He'll fight like never before! — Chen Zhen, a Chinese engineering student in Kyoto, who braves the insults and abuse of his Japanse fellow students for his local love Mitsuko Yamada, daughter of the director, returns in 1937 to his native Shangai, under Japanse protectorate -in fact military occupation- after reading about the death of his kung-fu master Hou Ting-An in a fight against the Japanese champion Ryuichi Akutagawa.
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House on Fire
Tokyo Prefecture Nagasaki Prefecture The 1970s The 1960s The 1950s The 1930sAdapted from autobiographical story by Kazuo Dan, who published it a few months before his death — In the 50s, the complicated life of a popular writer who must share his life with his family, his numerous mistresses and his work
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The Makioka Sisters
Osaka Prefecture Kyoto Prefecture The 1930sThis sensuously beautiful film chronicles the activities of four sisters who gather in Kyoto every year to view the cherry blossoms. It paints a vivid portrait of the pre-war lifestyle of the wealthy Makioka family from Osaka, and draws a parallel between their activities and the seasonal variations in Japan.
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Gate of Youth
Fukuoka Prefecture The 1950s The 1940s The 1930sThe story of Shinsuke, a young man who lives through a stormy life as a poverty-stricken coal miner. Ranging from Shinsuke's infanthood to his mid-teens. Coal workers and the mines dominate nearly every aspect of his life. Shinsuke's father a group leader at the mine, dies while bravely using dynamite to rescue a group of trapped Korean miners. Several older men attempt to help he and his mother cope, including a friendly Harley-riding yakuza boss. This movie has it all, drama, romance, sex, yakuza and violence! It is based on a story by Hiroyuki Itsuki that was originally serialized in the magazine Shukan Gendai in 1969-70.
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In the Realm of the Senses
Tokyo Prefecture The 1930sA passionate telling of the story of Sada Abe, a woman whose affair with her master led to an obsessive and ultimately destructive sexual relationship.
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Tora! Tora! Tora!
Hawaii District of Columbia Tokyo Prefecture The 1930s The 1940sThe incredible attack on Pearl Harbor. — In the summer of 1941, the United States and Japan seem on the brink of war after constant embargos and failed diplomacy come to no end. "Tora! Tora! Tora!", named after the code words use by the lead Japanese pilot to indicate they had surprised the Americans, covers the days leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor, which plunged America into the Second World War.
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Bridge to the Sun
Tokyo Prefecture The 1940s The 1930sTheir love was a bridge between two worlds! — Tells the true story of Gwen Terasaki, who falls in love with, then marries a Japanese diplomat. When war breaks out they find animosity and trouble from both sides.
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Twenty-Four Eyes
🇯🇵 Japan The 1940s The 1930s The 1920sSchoolteacher Hisako Oishi struggles to imbue her students with a positive view of the world despite the fact that war is looming.
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No Regrets for Our Youth
Tokyo Prefecture Kyoto Prefecture The 1940s The 1930sYukie, the well-bred daughter of a university professor, is shocked when her father is relieved of his post for his political teachings during a purge of anti-militarism in pre-war Kyoto. Years go by as she is courted by two of her father's former students; one a fiery leftist, the other more moderate and equable.
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Behind the Rising Sun
🇯🇵 Japan 🇨🇳 China The 1930s The 1940sThe year's most timely story. — A Japanese publisher urges his American-educated son to side with the Axis.
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Apart From You
🇯🇵 Japan The 1930sFor Apart from You, Mikio Naruse turned his camera on the lives of working women, which he would continue to do throughout his long career. In this gently devastating drama, a critical breakthrough for the director, he contrasts the life of an aging geisha, whose angry teenage son is ashamed of her profession, with that of her youthful counterpart, a lovely young girl resentful of her family for forcing her into a life of ignominy.
