Cinema of Japan

The cinema of Japan (日本映画, Nihon eiga), also known domestically as hōga (邦画, "domestic cinema"), has a history that spans more than 100 years. Japan has one of the oldest and largest film industries in the world; as of 2021, it was the fourth largest by number of feature films produced. In 2011, Japan produced 411 feature films that earned 54.9% of a box office total of US$2.338 billion. Films have been produced in Japan since 1897, when the first foreign cameramen arrived.

During the 1950s, a period dubbed the "Golden Age of Japanese cinema", the jidaigeki films of Akira Kurosawa as well as the science fiction films of Ishirō Honda and Eiji Tsuburaya gained Japanese cinema international praise and made these directors universally renown and highly influential. Some of the Japanese films of this period are now rated some of the greatest of all time: Tokyo Story (1953) ranked number three in Sight & Sound critics' list of the 100 greatest films of all time and also topped the 2012 Sight & Sound directors' poll of The Top 50 Greatest Films of All Time, dethroning Citizen Kane, while Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai (1954) was voted the greatest foreign-language film of all time in BBC's 2018 poll of 209 critics in 43 countries. Japan has also won the Academy Award for the Best International Feature Film five times, more than any other Asian country.

Japan's Big Four film studios are Toho, Toei, Shochiku and Kadokawa, which are the only members of the Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan (MPPAJ). The annual Japan Academy Film Prize hosted by the Nippon Academy-shō Association is considered to be the Japanese equivalent of the Academy Awards.