Japanese films nominated for the Oscars: the international list
All Japanese films nominated for Best International Feature, from The Burmese Harp to Perfect Days, with the winners Departures and Drive My Car.
Japan's relationship with the Oscars began before the international category even competed as we know it, with honorary awards for Rashomon, Gate of Hell and Samurai I in the 1950s. Since then, its nominee list reads like a film school syllabus: Kobayashi's ghost stories in Kwaidan, Teshigahara's Woman in the Dunes, Kurosawa's Kagemusha. Two films have taken the award home, Departures in 2009 and Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Drive My Car in 2022. This list covers the competitive nominations in the international category, using the English titles most sources use.
Japan in Best International Feature
1957 · The Burmese Harp · Nominated
A Japanese soldier in Burma at the end of the war becomes a monk to bury the dead. Directed by Kon Ichikawa.
Worth it if: you like humanist anti-war classics.
1962 · Immortal Love · Nominated
Keisuke Kinoshita follows a woman's decades of resentment inside a marriage she never chose.
Worth it if: you enjoy classic melodramas about women's lives.
1964 · Twin Sisters of Kyoto · Nominated
Twin sisters separated at birth meet again in Kyoto, in an adaptation of Yasunari Kawabata.
Worth it if: you appreciate gentle, elegant drama set in old Kyoto.
1965 · Woman in the Dunes · Nominated
An insect collector ends up trapped with a woman at the bottom of a sand pit. Hypnotic and strange.
Worth it if: you like strange, allegorical arthouse films.
1966 · Kwaidan · Nominated
Masaki Kobayashi's four ghost stories based on Lafcadio Hearn, with stunning painted sets.
Worth it if: you love atmospheric horror rather than jump scares.
1968 · Portrait of Chieko · Nominated
The love of poet Kotaro Takamura and his wife Chieko as she slowly sinks into mental illness.
Worth it if: you are drawn to sad love stories about art and illness.
1972 · Dodes'ka-den · Nominated
Akira Kurosawa's first color film, about the people of a slum and a boy who pretends to drive a tram.
Worth it if: you like colorful, humane stories of everyday poverty.
1976 · Sandakan No. 8 · Nominated
A journalist hears the story of an old woman who was sold into prostitution in Borneo as a girl.
Worth it if: you want a hard, important drama about women's history.
1981 · Kagemusha · Nominated
A petty thief is made to impersonate a dying warlord in Akira Kurosawa's epic, also a Palme d'Or winner.
Worth it if: you like grand samurai epics with huge battles.
1982 · Muddy River · Nominated
A boy in 1950s Osaka befriends two children living on a boat, in Kohei Oguri's debut.
Worth it if: you like tender black-and-white stories of childhood.
2004 · The Twilight Samurai · Nominated
Yoji Yamada's portrait of a low-ranking widowed samurai at the end of the Edo period.
Worth it if: you want a quiet samurai film focused on family.
2009 · Departures · Winner
An unemployed cellist takes a job preparing the dead for burial and learns a new way of seeing life.
Worth it if: you want a moving, gentle film about death.
2019 · Shoplifters · Nominated
Hirokazu Kore-eda's family of petty thieves takes in a little girl. It also won the Palme d'Or.
Worth it if: you like dramas that change how you think about family.
2022 · Drive My Car · Winner
A grieving theater director bonds with his young driver, in Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Haruki Murakami adaptation.
Worth it if: you have patience for a long, rewarding film about grief.
2024 · Perfect Days · Nominated
Wim Wenders follows Hirayama, a Tokyo toilet cleaner who finds beauty in routine, played by Koji Yakusho.
Worth it if: you want a calm film that makes you notice small things.
Which Japanese films have won Best International Feature?
Two Japanese films have won the competitive award: Departures, directed by Yojiro Takita, at the 2009 ceremony, and Drive My Car, directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, at the 2022 ceremony.
How Oscar nominations work
Each branch of the Academy picks the nominees in its own field, so actors choose actors, directors choose directors and editors choose editors. The whole membership can nominate for Best Picture, and the whole membership then votes on the winners. That two-step process is why a film can dominate the nominations and still leave the ceremony with very little.
A quick note on dates: this post uses the year of the ceremony, not the year the film came out. A film released in one year usually competes at the ceremony held early in the next, which is why the same title can appear under two different years depending on the source.
Want to turn this into a watchlist? On Rankiew you can mark what you have seen, rate each title from 1 to 10, write a short review and build a public list to share with friends. It is a simple way to see how much of Oscar history you have actually watched.
