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“It’s a foolish endeavour to try to determine the best film, year by year, of any filmmaking nation, let alone one with so extraordinary a cinematic history as Japan. We’re foolish, too, if we think we can have a true grasp on a nation’s cinema from our crow’s nest on the other side of the globe, where so much of what we’ve been able to see has been funnelled through gatekeepers. Festival programmers, enterprising DVD labels and, yes, cultural institutions have all played their part in importing and making available for western viewers a subjective selection of the best or most marketable Japanese cinema at any one point in its development.”