Since its origins, cinema has a documentary value. Early film pioneers filmed the daily activities and then more distant and exotic cultures such as Japan. Over time, Western gaze itself has influenced this culture and has gradually led it on the path of modernization. Cinema itself is a symbol of this modernization. In attempting to appropriate this filmic device, some Japanese filmmakers understood the artificiality of its process of reproducing a reality and considered films as an artificial representation.

After the Second World War, there was a opposition between these two ways of thinking. On one hand, films such as Ichikawa Kon's documentary about the 1964 Tokyo Olympiad were explicitly presented as icons of the socio-economic model of reconstruction. On the other hand, filmmakers concerned with the preservation of Japanese identity threatened by the American occupier, heavily rejected an approach in order to propose a counter-vision. Ironically, Ozu Yasujiro, the “most Japanese” of Japanese filmmakers embodies this counter-vision at the dawn of post-war propaganda discourses. He who gave films that the Western eyes would see as testimonies of the traditions of Japan, was actually the perfect example of the anti-Western sense of realism.

More contemporary filmmakers are in the continuity of this idea that is to conceive cinema as a mean to question identity and the place of the modern Japanese individual. These concerns sound even more necessary at a period in his history when the Japanese model so much vaunted through propagandist pictures suffer a frightening decline.