75 Films & TV Shows Set In Japan During The 1940s
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Letters from Iwo Jima
Okinawa Prefecture The 2000s The 1940sThe battle of Iwo Jima seen through the eyes of the Japanese soldiers. — The story of the battle of Iwo Jima between the United States and Imperial Japan during World War II, as told from the perspective of the Japanese who fought it.
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The Tokyo Trial
🇯🇵 Japan The 1940sThis film was directed by Gao Qunshu and is about the International Military Tribunal for the Far East after Japan's surrender in World War II. The movie presents the trial from the point of view of the Chinese judge Mei Ju-ao. The director and his crew spent more than a year doing research to finish the script, which is based on historical data. It cost 18 million yuan (2.25 million U.S. dollars). This film hired actors from 11 countries, including mainland China, Hong Kong, Japan and other places, including actors such as Kenneth Tsang and Damian Lau. They recreated court scenes from the trial in Chinese, English and Japanese. It was shown in cinemas and around 100 universities across mainland China to mark the 75th anniversary of the start of Japan's invasion of China.
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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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The Face of Jizo
Hiroshima Prefecture The 1940sBased on a play by Hisashi Inoue, it focuses on the sufferings of the survivors of Hiroshima. The film takes place during 4 days in the summer of 1948, as the ghost of her father visits Mitsué (Rié Miyama). He had somehow learned that she has fallen in love, and tries to convince her to start her new life. But Mitsué obstinately refuses his warm and humorous encouragements : « People were killed in my place. I do not have the right to find happiness », she says.
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Women in the Mirror
Hiroshima Prefecture The 1940sThree women who share memories of the Hiroshima disaster try to uncover the hidden family ties that may or may not bind them together.
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Pearl Harbor
Hawaii New York District of Columbia Tennessee England Tokyo Prefecture The 1940s The 1920sIt takes a moment to change history. It takes love to change lives. — The lifelong friendship between Rafe McCawley and Danny Walker is put to the ultimate test when the two ace fighter pilots become entangled in a love triangle with beautiful Naval nurse Evelyn Johnson. But the rivalry between the friends-turned-foes is immediately put on hold when they find themselves at the center of Japan's devastating attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.
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H Story
Hiroshima Prefecture The 1940sAn autobiographical docudrama about an attempt to remake Alain Resnais' 1959 film Hiroshima Mon Amour.
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Hiroshima
Hiroshima Prefecture The 1940sThe grisly events leading to the first attack with a nuclear weapon. — Hiroshima is a 1995 Japanese / Canadian film directed by Koreyoshi Kurahara and Roger Spottiswoode about the decision-making processes that led to the dropping of the atomic bombs by the United States on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki toward the end of World War II. Except as actors, no Americans took part in the production. The three-hour film was made for television and evidently had no theatrical release, but is available on DVD for home viewing. A combination of dramatisation, historical footage, and eyewitness interviews, the film alternates between documentary footage and the dramatic recreations. Both the dramatisations and most of the original footage are presented as sepia-toned images, serving to blur the distinction between them. The languages are English and Japanese, with subtitles, and the actors are largely Canadian and Japanese.
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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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Madadayo
Tokyo Prefecture The 1960s The 1950s The 1940sThis film tells the story of professor Uehida Hyakken-sama (1889-1971), in Gotemba, around the forties. He was a university professor until an air raid, when he left to become a writer and has to live in a hut. His mood has hardly changed, not by the change nor by time.
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Rhapsody in August
Nagasaki Prefecture Hiroshima Prefecture The 1940sTears. Laughter. Innocence. It was a summer of remembering. — The story centers on an elderly hibakusha, who lost her husband in the 1945 atomic bombing of Nagasaki, caring for her four grandchildren over the summer. She learns of a long-lost brother, Suzujiro, living in Hawaii who wants her to visit him before he dies.
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Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah
Tokyo Prefecture Mie Prefecture Hokkaido Prefecture Hiroshima Prefecture Fukuoka Prefecture 🇲🇭 Marshall Islands Pacific Ocean The 1990s The 1940sAt the end of the century, the greatest battle has begun! — The Futurians, time-travelers from the 23rd century, arrive in Japan to warn them of the nation's destruction under Godzilla. They offer to help erase Godzilla from history by preventing his creation. With Godzilla seemingly gone, a new monster emerges as the Futurians' true intentions are revealed.
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Hiroshima: Out of the Ashes
Hiroshima Prefecture The 1940sThe movie follows the perspective of several characters (such as Japanese victims, soldiers, American prisoners of war and others) and how they lived or tried to survive the effects felt during the aftermath of the Atomic Bomb dropping by the Enola Gay at Hiroshima, during World War II.
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Fat Man and Little Boy
Hiroshima Prefecture The 1940sThe story of the extraordinary people who changed our world. — This film reenacts the Manhattan Project, the secret wartime project in New Mexico where the first atomic bombs were designed and built.
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Day One
Hiroshima Prefecture The 1940sThis day will go down in history as a black mark against mankind. — Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard leaves Europe, eventually arriving in the United States. With the help of Einstein, he persuades the government to build an atomic bomb. The project is given to no-nonsense Gen. Leslie Groves who selects physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer to head the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico, where the bomb is built. As World War II draws to a close, Szilard has second thoughts about atomic weapons, and policy makers debate how and when to use the bomb.
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Black Rain
Hiroshima Prefecture The 1940sShigematsu Shizuma lives with his senile mother, his wife Shigeko, and his niece Yasuko in a village near Fukuyama. He, his wife, his niece and his close friends in the village were present at the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The Shizumas look for prospective husbands for Yasuko, but find that the families withdraw on finding out she was at Hiroshima.
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Grave of the Fireflies
Hyōgo Prefecture The 1940sIn the final months of World War II, 14-year-old Seita and his sister Setsuko are orphaned when their mother is killed during an air raid in Kobe, Japan. After a falling out with their aunt, they move into an abandoned bomb shelter. With no surviving relatives and their emergency rations depleted, Seita and Setsuko struggle to survive.
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Sakura-tai Chiru
Hiroshima Prefecture The 1940sA documentary about the lives of actors in the Sakura-tai theatrical troupe, which had arrived in the island of Hiroshima to begin preparations for the staging of a play just before the atomic bombing.
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Barefoot Gen 2
Hiroshima Prefecture The 1940sThree years after the Hiroshima bombing, a teenager helps a group of orphans to survive and find their new life.
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Superfantozzi
Hiroshima Prefecture England The 1940s The Middle AgesSuperfantozzi (1986) is an Italian film from 1986. It is the fifth film in the saga of the unlucky clerk Ugo Fantozzi, played by its creator, Paolo Villaggio. In this film, Fantozzi is portrayed in a surreal historical journey, from Genesis to 1980s.
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Insignificance
Hiroshima Prefecture The 1950s The 1940sA comedy about life, death, sex, and the Universe... relatively speaking. — Four 1950s cultural icons who conceivably could have met but probably didn't, fictionally do so in this modern fable of post-WWII America. Visually intriguing, the film has a fluid progression of flashbacks and flashforwards centering on the fictional Einstein's current observations, childhood memories, and apprehensions for the future.
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Barefoot Gen
Hiroshima Prefecture The 1940sA story about the effect of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on a boy's life and the lives of the Japanese people.
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The Challenge
Kyoto Prefecture The 1980s The 1940sHe has trained every thought, every muscle, every nerve, for the moment of truth! — Rick, a down-and-out American boxer, is hired to transport a sword to Japan, unaware that the whole thing is a set up in a bitter blood-feud between two brothers, one who follows the traditional path of the samurai and the other a businessman. At the behest of the businessman, Rick undertakes samurai training from the other brother, but joins his cause. He also becomes romantically involved with the samurai's daughter.
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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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Enola Gay: The Men, the Mission, the Atomic Bomb
Hiroshima Prefecture The 1940sWell-intentioned history lesson; the decision to drop the atom bomb, the secrecy surrounding the mission, and the men who flew it.
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