29 Films & TV Shows Set In Japan During The 1950s
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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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The Outsider
🇯🇵 Japan The 1950sA former American G.I. joins a yakuza family after his release from prison in post-World War II Osaka.
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Operation Chromite
🇰🇵 North Korea (DPRK) 🇰🇷 South Korea Tokyo Prefecture The 1950sThe Odds Were 5000 to 1 … One was all They Needed. — A squad of soldiers fight in the Korean War's crucial Battle of Incheon.
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Godzilla
Nevada California Hawaii Tokyo Prefecture 🇵🇭 Philippines Pacific Ocean The 1990s The 1950s The 2010sThe world ends, Godzilla begins. — Ford Brody, a Navy bomb expert, has just reunited with his family in San Francisco when he is forced to go to Japan to help his estranged father, Joe. Soon, both men are swept up in an escalating crisis when an ancient alpha predator arises from the sea to combat malevolent adversaries that threaten the survival of humanity. The creatures leave colossal destruction in their wake, as they make their way toward their final battleground: San Francisco.
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Legend No. 17
🇷🇺 Russia Quebec 🇪🇸 Spain Hokkaido Prefecture The 1970s The 1960s The 1950sBiopic of Russian ice hockey legend Valeri Kharlamov from early childhood, rising to the pinnacle of the sport and his untimely death
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Mai Mai Miracle
Yamaguchi Prefecture The 1950s The 10th CenturyIn 1955 in western Japan, nine-year-old Shinko knows she comes from a family that dates back to over a thousand years. This long genealogy and stories about it feed her daydreams: she invents an imaginary friendship with a young girl in the Japan of a thousand years ago. One day, Kiiko, a timid child from Tokyo, is transferred into Shinko's class at school. Struggling to fit in, she finds a friend in Shinko. They set off together on a magical adventure into a story from ancient history.Adapted from the Takagi Nobuko novel Mai Mai Shinko — winner of the prestigious Akutagawa Prize —, this animated feature film portrays the relationship of two children linked not only by friendship, but also by that power that transcends eras: imagination. And perhaps it might become reality?
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JAPAN, Our Homeland
🇯🇵 Japan The 1950sThe 31st year of the Showa Era (1956) marked the tenth year since Japan's defeat in World War II. It was when Japan took its first step out of post-war poverty to rejoin the international community. In old downtown Tokyo, a teacher and her students try to pass down Doyo (Japanese traditional children's songs) as the root of Japanese cultural identity to the future generations.
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Always - Sunset on Third Street
Tokyo Prefecture The 1950sLeaving her provincial home, teenage Mutsuko arrives in Tokyo by train to take a job in a major automotive company but finds that she is employed by a small auto repair shop owned by Norifumi Suzuki. Suzuki's hair-trigger temper is held somewhat in check by the motherly instincts of his wife, Tomoe, and his young son Ippei immediately bonds with Mutsuko as if she were his older sister. The Suzuki shop lies almost in the shadow of the Tokyo Tower as it rises steadily above the skyline during construction in 1958.
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Rikidozan: A Hero Extraordinaire
🇯🇵 Japan The 1960s The 1950sStory of Rikidozan, a sumo wrestler who can only achieve limited success in Japan because he's half Korean. But when Rikidozan goes to the United States and discovers professional wrestling, he becomes a hero back home.
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Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack
Yamanashi Prefecture Shizuoka Prefecture Niigata Prefecture Kanagawa Prefecture Kagoshima Prefecture Pacific Ocean The 2000s The 1950sThe God of Destruction Godzilla lands in Japan! — Godzilla has become a distant memory for Japan when the destruction of a US submarine raises alarms for Admiral Tachibana. His estranged daughter Yuri investigates the legend of the guardian monsters, who must rise to protect Japan against the vengeful spirits within Godzilla that seek to destroy both the nation and its people for the suffering they inflicted in the Pacific conflict.
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Godzilla vs. Megaguirus
Yamanashi Prefecture Tokyo Prefecture Osaka Prefecture Ibaraki Prefecture Pacific Ocean The 1990s The 1960s The 1950s The 2000sGodzilla disappears. — In an alternate timeline the original Godzilla is never defeated and repeatedly reemerges to feed on Japan's energy sources. A new inter-dimensional weapon called the Dimension Tide is created with the intent of eliminating Godzilla. However, the new weapon might also serve as a gateway to something far more sinister.
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Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade
Tokyo Prefecture The 1950sA member of an elite paramilitary counter-terrorism unit becomes traumatized after witnessing the suicide bombing of a young girl and is forced to undergo retraining. However, unbeknownst to him, he becomes a key player in a dispute between rival police divisions, as he finds himself increasingly involved with the sister of the girl he saw die.
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The Geisha House
Kyoto Prefecture The 1950sSet in the late 1950s, when geisha culture was threatened by moral crusades, it tells the story of Omacha (Miyamoto Maki), a young girl who sees the geisha life as a way to lift her poverty-stricken family from their hand-to-mouth existence. Through her eyes, we see the protocols and complex financial relationships which dictate the running of the geisha house. Fukasaku's film is a work of great delicacy with moments of hypnotic beauty, and his tender direction, often touched with a sense of wonder, fills the screen with lovingly constructed scenes. At its heart is the poignant situation of the women who must sacrifice their normal relationships to live an ambiguous life in which they are a key part of society while being kept, for the most part, on its periphery, like perpetual mistresses.
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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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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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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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Inchon
🇰🇷 South Korea Tokyo Prefecture The 1950sLOVE. DESTINY. HEROES. War Changes Everything. — A noisy and absurd re-telling of the great 1950 invasion of Inchon during the Korean War which was masterminded by General Douglas MacArthur.
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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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MacArthur
🇯🇵 Japan 🇵🇭 Philippines 🇰🇷 South Korea The 1950s The 1940sThe film portrays MacArthur's (Gregory Peck) life from 1942, before the Battle of Bataan, to 1952, the time after he had been removed from his Korean War command by President Truman (Ed Flanders) for insubordination, and is recounted in flashback as he visits West Point.
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New Battles Without Honor and Humanity 1
Hiroshima Prefecture The 1950sThe sixth chapter of Jingi Naki Tatakai series With the endless power struggle. The extraordinary combination of Kinji Fukasaku and Bunta Sugawara, along with new ideas and a strong touch of realism, created the sixth movie of the series that describes 'The War of Hiroshima Gangsters' which had lasted almost 30 years after World War II. It can be called the Japanese secret post WWII history. It focuses on the ugly, violent inside struggle of the Yamamori Group of 1959 in Kure City, Hiroshima. Director Kinji Fukasaku, the master of portraying violence and humanity, said "Having making the five previous movies, I found those characters very interesting. So I took a deeper look into them this time." He made this shocking movie with high enthusiasm and revealed the core of gangster's struggle which has never been touched before.
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Battles Without Honor and Humanity: Deadly Fight in Hiroshima
Hiroshima Prefecture The 1950sRepeatedly beat to a pulp by gamblers, cops, and gangsters, lone wolf Shoji Yamanaka finally finds a home as a Muraoka family hitman and falls in love with boss Muraoka's niece. Meanwhile, the ambitions of mad dog Katsutoshi Otomo draws our series' hero, Shozo Hirono, and the other yakuza into a new round of bloodshed.
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Under the Flag of the Rising Sun
Tokyo Prefecture 🇵🇬 Papua New Guinea The 1970s The 1950s The 1940sA war widow determined to clear the name of her disgraced husband, who was court-martialed for desertion and executed. Official records have been destroyed, and the ministry that distributes benefits continues to deny her a pension. Twenty-six years after the war, she seeks out four survivors of her husband's garrison. Each tells a dramatically different story about her husband's conduct, but she is determined to learn the truth.
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M*A*S*H
🇰🇷 South Korea 🇯🇵 Japan The 1950sM*A*S*H Gives A D*A*M*N. — The staff of a Korean War field hospital use humor and high jinks to keep their sanity in the face of the horror of war.
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Cry for Happy
🇯🇵 Japan 🇰🇷 South Korea The 1950sYou'll cry for happy, happy, happy when four U.S. sailors take over a geisha house...geisha girls and all ! — Army photographers on leave in Japan take over a geisha house.
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Sayonara
🇯🇵 Japan 🇰🇷 South Korea The 1950s"I am not allowed to love. But I will love you if that is your desire..." — Air Force Major Lloyd Gruver (Marlon Brando) is reassigned to a Japanese air base, and is confronted with US racial prejudice against the Japanese people. The issue is compounded because a number of the soldiers become romantically involved with Japanese women, in defiance of US military policy. Ordinarily an officer who is by-the-book, Gruver must take a position when a buddy of his, an enlisted man Joe Kelly (Red Buttons) falls in love with a Japanese woman Katsumi (Miyoshi Umeki) and marries her. Gruver risks his position by serving as best man at the wedding ceremony.
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