General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Night and Fog in Japan (日本の夜と霧)

Night and Fog in Japan (日本の夜と霧, Nihon no yoru to kiri) is a 1960 Japanese color feature directed by Nagisa Oshima (大島渚) for the Shochiku studio, set at a wedding where former student radicals confront the failures of the Japanese left during and after the 1960 protests against the revised US-Japan Security Treaty. Shochiku halted its screenings days after the 9 October 1960 release, and the withdrawal ended Oshima's career within the studio system.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Release	9 October 1960, distributed by Shochiku; screenings halted within days by the studio's decision¹^•²
Credits	Directed by Nagisa Oshima; screenplay by Oshima and Ishidō Toshirō; cinematography by Kawamata Takashi; music by Manabe Riichirō¹
Principal cast	Miyuki Kuwano (Reiko Harada), Fumio Watanabe (Haruaki Nozawa), Masahiko Tsugawa (Ōta), Akiko Koyama (Misako), Hiroshi Akutagawa (Prof. Udagawa)³
Format	35mm color, produced at Shochiku's Ōfuna studio; 107 minutes per Shochiku, 108 minutes in the National Film Archive of Japan's print record¹^•³
Form	Built from long takes: 43 sequence shots by one count, 47 by another⁴^•⁵
Aftermath	Oshima left Shochiku over the withdrawal and later founded his own company, Sozosha⁶
Standing	Cited by a Japanese critics' poll as one of the dozen best Japanese films ever made; IMDb rating 6.8/10 from about 970 votes⁷^•⁸

Spoilers

Story and structure

The drama unfolds at the wedding reception of Nozawa Haruaki, a newspaper reporter, and Reiko, a former student, a couple brought together by the Anpo struggle.¹ A wanted Zengakuren (All-Japan Federation of Student Self-Government Associations) activist, Ōta, bursts in and raises the mysterious disappearance of a fellow student, Kitami, who vanished while heading to the Diet.¹ From this accusation the film exposes a chain of incidents that occurred within the student movement from around 1950 (Shōwa 25) onward.¹

The wedding guests, all former politicized students, argue through their memories in a series of flashbacks, and the film becomes a confrontation between Japan's "old" and "new" Left: Stalinist purges, factional schisms, betrayals, martyrdoms, and personal resentments are all aired.¹³^•⁴ The critic Dennis Schwartz, reviewing the film, describes its argument as a critique of the futility of the Japanese leftist movement, whose totalitarian, Stalinist-modeled structure left the younger generation of protesters without usable role models.¹⁴ In the Senses of Cinema director survey, the film's structure is described as a spiral of accusation and counter-accusation: one character's indictment triggers a flashback, the accused then gives an alternative version of the same events, and the quest for a final settling of accounts circles back on itself, ending ambiguously.⁶

Production and political context

Oshima made the film at Shochiku in 1960, a year in which he released three features on topical subjects: Cruel Story of Youth, The Sun's Burial, and Night and Fog in Japan.⁹ The immediate background was the Anpo struggle, the mass opposition movement against revision of the US-Japan Security Treaty, which culminated in 1960.¹⁰ The film's subject is the student movement that grew out of that period and its predecessor struggles of the early 1950s, including the campaigns against the Subversive Activities Prevention Law.⁵

According to the Harvard Film Archive, Oshima wrote and filmed the picture in total secrecy from his Shochiku superiors, taking advantage of the directorial freedom granted him after the surprise box-office success of Cruel Story of Youth.¹¹ The British Film Institute's Sight and Sound describes it as a completely political film about the failure to prevent the treaty's renewal, and notes that it is surprising Shochiku allowed him to make it at all.¹²

Style

The film is built almost entirely from extended sequence shots, a formal restriction the Harvard Film Archive identifies as an homage to Alain Resnais, whose 1955 Holocaust documentary Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard) supplies the title.¹¹^•¹⁵ Counts of the shot structure differ: Tony Rayns, the British-based critic and scholar of East Asian cinema writing in Film Comment, counts 43 sequence shots, theatrically stylized including the flashbacks, while the commentary on Oshima's official production site refers to the film's 47 cuts.⁴^•⁵ The camera whip-pans back and forth between the polarized factions at the wedding, and the film opens and closes in symbolic thick fog.¹¹^•⁴ The Edinburgh Film Guild's program note calls the result theatrical and anti-realist, an extended, stylized debate rather than a naturalistic drama.¹³

The contrast with Oshima's own later practice is sharp: Violence at Noon (1966) contains around 2,000 edits against this film's few dozen.¹⁶

Withdrawal and its consequences

Shochiku pulled the film from theaters within days of release. The studio's own portal and Oshima's official site state that screenings were halted on the fourth day after the 9 October 1960 opening;¹^•² the Harvard Film Archive and the Edinburgh Film Guild say three days.¹¹^•¹³ Harvard adds that the studio refused angry critics' requests to view the film.¹¹ The Edinburgh note links the withdrawal to a political assassination of the period, without naming it.¹³

The withdrawal was decisive for Oshima's career. The National Film Archive of Japan's 2023 retrospective states that the halted release of this problem film was the occasion of his break with Shochiku,¹⁷ and he went on to leave the studio and found the independent production company Sozosha (Creation).⁶ In a 2010 article in the Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, Isolde Standish of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, argues that the film was pivotal in Japanese cinema history both as the mark of Oshima's departure from the studio system and as one of a handful of films that began the political avant-garde cinema movement that peaked from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s, a movement institutionally tied to the independent distributor and later producer Art Theatre Guild (ATG).¹⁸

Reputation

Despite its aborted release, the film's standing grew. The Wexner Center for the Arts records that a Japanese critics' poll cited it as one of the dozen best Japanese films ever made.⁷ The Criterion Channel describes it as the most critically acclaimed and personally bitter of Oshima's three 1960 films, a brutally honest look at the failure of Japan's activist reform movement.⁹ At a 1984 Rome retrospective, the critic Lino Miccichè chose it to open the program, and the directors Gianni Amelio and Bernardo Bertolucci came onstage to welcome Oshima.⁴ On IMDb it holds a rating of 6.8/10 from about 970 votes.⁸

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026