Best Japanese movies of 1980s

Actors : Tatsuya Nakadai, Akira Terao, Jinpachi Nezu, Daisuke Ryû,
Directors : Akira Kurosawa,

In Medieval Japan, an elderly warlord retires, handing over his empire to his three sons. However, he vastly underestimates how the new-found power will corrupt them and cause them to turn on each other...and him.

Actors : Tesshô Genda, Mitsuo Iwata, Nozomu Sasaki, Mami Koyama,
Directors : Katsuhiro Ôtomo,

A secret military project endangers Neo-Tokyo when it turns a biker gang member into a rampaging psychic psychopath that only two teenagers and a group of psychics can stop.

Actors : Akemi Yamaguchi, Yoshiko Shinohara, Tsutomu Tatsumi, Ayano Shiraishi,
Directors : Isao Takahata,

A young boy and his little sister struggle to survive in Japan during World War II.

Actors : Kôji Yakusho, Nobuko Miyamoto, Ken Watanabe, Tsutomu Yamazaki,
Directors : Jûzô Itami,

A truck driver stops at a small family-run noodle shop and decides to help its fledgling business. The story is intertwined with various vignettes about the relationship of love and food.

Actors : Tatsuya Nakadai, Jinpachi Nezu, Tsutomu Yamazaki, Ken'ichi Hagiwara,
Directors : Akira Kurosawa,

A petty thief with an utter resemblance to a samurai warlord is hired as the lord's double. When the warlord later dies the thief is forced to take up arms in his place.

Actors : Kayo Matsuo, Minoru Ôki, Shôgen Nitta, Tomisaburô Wakayama,

When the wife of the Shogun's Decapitator is murdered and he is ordered to commit suicide by the paranoid Shogun, he and his four-year-old son escape and become assassins for hire, embarking on a journey of blood and violent death.

Actors : Yoshie Shimamura, Iona Morris, Issei Miyazaki, Catherine Battistone,
Directors : Mori Masaki,

A powerful statement against war, Barefoot Gen is a disturbing story about the effect of the atomic bomb on a boy's life and the lives of the Japanese people.

Actors : Sayuri Yoshinaga, Yoshiko Sakuma, Jûzô Itami, Yûko Kotegawa,
Directors : Kon Ichikawa,

This sensuously beautiful film chronicles the activities of four sisters who gather in Kyoto every year to view the cherry blossoms. It paints a vivid portrait of the pre-war lifestyle of ...

Actors : Yoshiko Sakakibara, Akiko Nakamura, Toshiko Fujita, Shigeru Matsuzaki,
Directors : Osamu Dezaki,

Cobra, a famous space pirate with a psycho-gun hidden in his left arm, supposed dead for two years, is back in action. He falls for bounty huntress Jane Flower, whom crime lord Necron wants dead, and tries to help her save her world.

Actors : Junko Miyashita, Norihei Miki, Kiwako Taichi, Kin'ya Kitaôji,
Directors : Mitsuo Yanagimachi,

The villagers in a beautiful remote area of Japan are divided into the woodsmen, who worship the mountain goddess, and the fishermen, who worship the goddess of the sea. These traditions ...

Actors : Hisamitsu Nakamura, Kenichi Kobayashi, Ken Takakura, Ayumi Ishida,
Directors : Yasuo Furuhata,

Shuji was once a feared member of the Yakuza crime syndicate, but he's reformed his ways, abandoned his old life and left the city for a small coastal fishing town where he's become an honest fisherman.

Actors : Hirotaka Suzuoki, Shigeru Nakahara, Miki Takahashi, Mayumi Tanaka,

Arion begins with his journey to discover a world of poverty and horror where ordinary people are barely surviving through the war. He falls in love with a blind slave girl who is then ...

Actors : Yasuko Sawaguchi, Toshirô Mifune, Ayako Wakao, Kôji Ishizaka,
Directors : Kon Ichikawa,

Based on a centuries-old traditional Japanese fairy tale, a country couple finds a baby girl in some bamboo and raises her as their own daughter. Not the same as the original tale, though, ...

Actors : Kôichi Satô, Tatsuya Nakadai, Shima Iwashita, Ai Saotome,
Directors : Hideo Gosha,

During the Meiji era, a brutal prison warden terrorizes convicts sentenced to forced labor to build the roads needed to open up the territory in the icy wilderness of Hokkaido.