Metropolis, the free paper every gaijin read in tokyo has a feature about foreign films in Japan.
If you want to market your home movies to the japanese market you should start here.

Now Tadanobu Asano is one of my favorite japanese actor. He began his career as a young tortured kid who make schoolgirls all dizzy because he’s so mysterious and cool and went on to drink as much beer as he could, grow long and greasy hair and sing in a noise band. Also he’s doing comercials for beer, where he only drinks and smile. Now he’s officially kimoi (nauseating) with every girl in the country. Take that in the nose Johnny Depp, that’s how you destroy a hearthrob image.
Susumu Terajima is also another of my favourite. The guy’s born with a yakuza ’s face.His parents are scared of him and when he asks for change at a convenience store, the cashier just shit their pants. That guy is also everywhere. He plays in everything, drama, tv shows, movies you name it, Terajima doesn’t stop. He’ll play anything mind you. He’ll play a good father as well as a dirty scumbag rapist or a guitar player or some carrots, he doesn’t give a shit.
Those two were supposed to meet at some point in their career. The Kirin can coffee brand Fire made it happen. The campaign is called okanemochikyoudai which roughly translate as the rich brothers or rather the brothers who have gold, the product being a can coffee named Goldrush.
Those are truly stupid commercials. It’s like the guys from Kirin went to see Asano and Terajima and told them “Do whatever the fuck you want,we’ll film it, and don’t forget to say Fire goldrush from time to time.”
The result is like watching two dead drunk hobos laughing and screaming FIRE GOLDRUSH all the way to the bank. Those guys rule. (the videos are in .asx)
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Official website

3yen is all about metapublishing goodness, or as Yves puts it, Plexuspublishing(tm). Anyway a medium mainly talking about or from the medium. It’s not a surprise then to have such a nice piece of meta-movie here. A movie showing people watching another movie, not to be confused with meta-film, a movie showing people making movies. Don’t worry i just make this up as i write.
Recently, it has been a trend in the japanese movie industry to promote horror movies by showing people watching said horror movies. Last year when Chakushin ari was released, you could see on tv, teenage girls in movie theaters ripping their own vocal cords by screaming in terror in front of the last Miike’s horror flick.

This video is similar. It shows the Morning Musume, a pre-teen band of cute girls, watching a sequence from The Ring. They censored it but the one crying actually peed her pants. Well she didn’t but i had to make this a little more interesting.
Enjoy the screams of terror of teenage talent from Japan, please.

Zoo is a five segments horror film based on short stories from youg author Otsuichi. Japanese horror film usually scares the shit outta me. I really couldn’t care less about some retarded kid returning from the grave with a vengeance, but pale young asian girls making strange noises are just spooky.
Anyway, here’s the official site and the trailer.
And the very useful site real tokyo has more info about it.

The Silent Era

The first film produced in Japan was the short documentary 「芸者の手踊り」 (Geisha No Teodori) in June of 1899.

The first Japanese performer to appear in a film professionally was the dancer/actress Tokuko Nagai Takagi, who appeared in four shorts for the American-based Thanhouser Company between 1911 and 1914 (source) (http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/30/tokuko.html).

Most Japanese cinema theatres at the time employed benshi, narrators whose dramatic readings accompanied the film and its musical score which, like in the West, was often performed live. (See also the books Benshi, Japanese Silent Film Narrators, and their Forgotten Narrative Art of Setsumei A History of Japanese Silent Film Narration by Jeffrey A. Dym and The Benshi–Japanese Silent Film Narrators (http://www.infoasia.co.jp/ucsubs/benshi_e.html).)

The 1923 earthquake, the Allied bombing of Tokyo during World War II, as well as the natural effects of time and Japan’s humidity on the then more fragile filmstock have all resulted in a great dearth of surviving films from this period.

Some of the most discussed silent films from Japan are those of Mizoguchi Kenji, whose later works (e.g., The Life of Oharu) are still highly regarded today.

The 1930s

Unlike Hollywood, silent films were still being produced in Japan well into the 1930s. Notable talkies of this period include Mizoguchi’s Sisters of the Gion and Osaka Elegy (both 1936).

The 1940s

Kurosawa Akira makes his feature film debut with Sugata Sanshiro in 1943.

The 1950s

The Kurosawa Akira-directed 七人の侍 (The_Seven_Samurai) is released in 1954, the same year as ゴジラ (Gojira), known to the West (and to Japan from its first sequel on) as Godzilla. Over ten minutes of footage is cut from Godzilla by its American distributor, mostly of wounded civilians in burning cities, evoking the recent Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Daikaiju films were a mainstay of Japanese cinema for well into the 1970s, and are still being made today.

Ozu Yasujiro directs Tokyo Story (Toukyou monogatari) (1953) and Good Morning (Ohayou) (1959).

The 1960s

Technicolor makes its mark. Ichikawa Kon captures the watershed ‘64 Olympics in his three-hour documentary Tokyo Olympiad (Toukyou Orimpikku; 1965). Nikkatsu fires Suzuki Seijun for “making films that don’t make any sense and don’t make any money” after his surrealist yakuza flick Branded to Kill (1967).

Tezuka Osamu’s Tetsuwan Atomu introduces anime to television and gives the world Astro Boy in 1963.

Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes (1964) takes the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, and is nominated for Best Director and Best Foreign Language Film Oscars.

The 1970s

Oshima Nagisa directs Ai no koriida (In the Realm of the Senses; 1976), a World War II period piece about Abe Sada. Staunchly anti-censorship, he insists the film contain hardcore pornographic material; as a result the exposed film must be shipped to France for processing, and an uncut version of the film has still, to this day, never been shown in Japan.

The 1980s

Miyazaki Hayao adapts his manga Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind (Kaze no tani no Naushika) into a feature film (an anime of the same name) in 1984. Otomo Katsuhiro adapts his manga Akira into a feature-length anime in 1988. New anime movies are run every summer and winter with characters from popular TV anime. Imamura Shohei wins the Golden Palm at Cannes for Narayama Bushiko (Ballad of Narayama; 1982).

The 1990s

Imamura Shohei again wins the Golden Palm (shared with Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami), this time for Unagi (The Eel; 1997), joining Alf Sjöberg, Francis Ford Coppola and Bille August as only the fourth two-time recipient. Kitano Takeshi emerges as a significative filmmaker with works such as “Sonatine”(”Sonatine”, 1993), “Kids Return” (”Kidzu Ritan”, 1996) or “Hana-Bi” (”Hana-Bi”), which was given the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.

2000 and after

Miyazaki Hayao comes out of retirement to direct Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi; 2001), breaking Japanese box office records and winning the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. In 2002, Dolls is released, directed by Takeshi Kitano.

(Source: Wikipedia)