There was a time when romantic stories were derided as “childish” and “feminine” because women were their primary audience. Today, love stories on-screen are not only a major discipline of literary study but one of the most popular genres of films and books the world over, spawning countless subgenres and innumerable fans. What makes romance so appealing to us is the way it reveals core parts of the human experience while revolving around an age-old theme that never gets old: love.
The best Japanese romance movies do this spectacularly because of the propensity for risk-taking that Japanese filmmakers have shown throughout celluloid history. While movie adaptations of modern romantic classics by Haruki Murakami transform themselves unrecognisably inside the world-building of filmmaker Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Hayao Miyazaki’s slice-of-life animated films depict some of the most heart-wrenching portrayals of love ever imagined. In this list of what we consider to be the best Japanese romance movies of all time, we have tried to show the range of Japanese cinema; stories that have traversed childhood friendships, school romances, extramarital affairs and star-crossed lovers, portraying how love changes us and changes with us as we grow from innocence to maturity.
1. Early Spring (1956)
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