The post-war period in Japanese cinema must surely rank alongside the most important eras in the history of documentary filmmaking. In spite, or perhaps because, of the demise of the country's commercial film industry, which continued almost unabated throughout the 1960s and 1970s, these years saw the emergence of several figures who would revolutionize the documentary form. In particular, they would significantly change the parameters of what is traditionally thought of as a documentary film, and irrevocably alter and transform perceptions of the roles and responsibilities of the documentary filmmaker. Of these directors, the elder statesmen and key names are Tsuchimoto Noriaki and Ogawa Shinsuke. These filmmakers are held in the highest esteem in Japan and Asia for their groundbreaking work in the 1970s, but for various reasons have not quite achieved comparable visibility or acclaim in the West.

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Within the hallowed ranks of Japanese anime, the label of “new Miyazaki” is something that is at once both too difficult and too easy to bestow on new directors: too difficult because the Studio Ghibli luminary is as distinctive a figure as is currently working in Japanese cinema; too easy as a great deal of our current Anglophone critical establishment seems only able to valorize promising new directors by relying on lazy comparisons to great filmmakers of past generations. Discourse on Kitano Takeshi in particular exemplifies this trend. By the time of his own international breakthrough with Hana-Bi in 1997, he was being variously compared to Ozu, Kurosawa, and Oshima in Japan; elsewhere to Martin Scorsese, Buster Keaton, Jean-Pierre Melville, Robert Bresson, John Woo, Sam Peckinpah, and Quentin Tarantino.

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