Readers may have noticed a certain pattern over the last couple of Criterion Corner instalments, including the recent not-quite-Criterion Corner post: Japanese ghosts and ghouls in search of revenge and out for ears, farting Japanese pre-teens on a silence strike courtesy of Yasujiro Ozu, the precariousness of the relationship between human beings and nature in a Japanese mountain village. Obviously the main reason for me watching and writing about these was that they’re all good, interesting films – but there was another reason too: we’d been planning to visit Japan for a while, and that visit finally happened over the last few weeks, so in addition to rigorous training at the Duolingo dojo (I can now say that Ken is cool and Naomi is cute in Japanese!), we’ve also been going through some of the Japanese films on my DVD and Blu-ray shelf, including a number of Criterion releases, though barely scratching the surface, and ordering a few additional movies in the process. I.e. while this post is dedicated to a few Japanese films (each treated in shorter format than is usually the case with my Criterion Corner posts), it is likely that a few of the future posts in this series will also be Japan-bound, though probably not all of them in sequence. Already as it is, my Letterboxd account is likely to tell me at the end of the year that a remarkably large percentage of the films I’ll have watched in 2025 will have been Japanese.

So, without much further ado: