The contemporary Japanese directors who are well-known in the West - say, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Takeshi Kitano, Naomi Kawase - are mostly unknown to Japanese, particularly of the younger generation.

The contemporary Japanese directors who are well-known in the West - say, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Takeshi Kitano, Naomi Kawase - are mostly unknown to Japanese, particularly of the younger generation.

But then foreign critics right away made sweeping comparisons to haiku, noh theater, and directors like Ozu, as if the movie were somehow representative of Japan - which was, well, not what I was after. Similarly, with After Life, I deliberately set out to make a movie that was unlike what I imagined the foreign conception of Japan to be, and I figured non-Japanese wouldn't find it interesting at all.

In the neighborhood around Waseda, there were all these movie theaters, so every morning I left the house and watched movies instead of going to class. The experience of encountering films then is one of my greatest memories. Before that I'd never paid any attention to directors, but there I was taking a crash course in Ozu, Kurosawa, Naruse, Truffaut, Renoir, Fellini. Because I've always been naturally a more introspective person, I was more interested in becoming a screenwriter than a director.

In order to avoid sentimentality and to be able to write the screenplay with the kind of humor and irony necessary to keep the story moving, I needed to distance myself as much as I could from the characters, to try to get to a point where I could view them objectively.

I did want to become a novelist, but the program at Waseda was pretty intense in terms of language requirements - two hours of English and four hours of Chinese. I thought, what do I need this for? So I stopped going to class.

One of the more problematic aspects of the current state of cinema in Japan is that the movies playing in the theaters are by and large made not by film studios but by broadcasting companies. They're either extensions of popular television dramas or adaptations of manga or anime. Younger Japanese are simply not being exposed to good films. That situation needs to change.