General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Funeral (お葬式)

The Funeral (お葬式, Osōshiki) is a 1984 Japanese comedy-drama directed and written by Juzo Itami (伊丹十三), his first feature film, about an actor couple who must organize a traditional three-day funeral for the wife's father without knowing any of the required procedures¹. It was released in Japan on November 17, 1984, runs 124 minutes, and was distributed by the Art Theatre Guild (ATG)¹^•². The film became a nationwide hit described as a kind of social phenomenon, swept that year's Japanese film awards, and established Itami, then 51, as a director after careers as an actor, essayist, and commercial filmmaker³^•¹.

Key fact	Detail
Director and writer	Juzo Itami, his first feature, made at age 51¹
Release	November 17, 1984; distributed by ATG; 124 minutes, color with some monochrome sections, standard ratio¹^•²
Production	New Century Productions and Itami Productions; cinematography by Yonezo Maeda, music by Joji Yuasa¹
Lead cast	Tsutomu Yamazaki as Wabisuke Inoue and Nobuko Miyamoto as Chizuko Amamiya, with Kin Sugai, Hideji Otaki, and Chishu Ryu as the priest⁴
Awards	Kinema Junpo Best Film of 1984; Japan Academy Prize for Best Film, among 32 awards claimed by the distributor⁵
Origin	Itami presided over his wife's father's funeral in September 1983 and decided on the spot that it would make a film¹
International showings	1985 Cannes, Toronto, and Chicago film festivals; New York release in December 1987⁶

Spoilers

Plot and approach

The story follows Wabisuke Inoue (Tsutomu Yamazaki) and his wife Chizuko (Nobuko Miyamoto), two actors who hear of her father's sudden death during a commercial shoot and travel with their family to the villa in Izu where the parents lived⁷. Having never arranged a funeral, Wabisuke is at a loss at every step: under the guidance of a funeral company he deals with hospital payments, encoffining, the death certificate, and negotiations over the priest's fees⁷. The film covers the wake, funeral, departure of the coffin, and cremation across three days⁵.

Two running complications drive the comedy. Wabisuke's mistress arrives in mourning clothes to help, unnerving him⁷, and the family learns the rites from a funeral-instruction videotape, a sequence critics have read as an irony about tradition transmitted through modern media⁸. The priest, played by Yasujiro Ozu regular Chishu Ryu, is surprisingly materialistic⁴. The climax comes at the post-funeral gathering, when Chizuko's mother Kikue (Kin Sugai) takes the speech meant for Wabisuke and turns the formal ceremony back toward the deceased, expressing her long love for her husband⁹.

Itami, who had acted in films since 1960 and worked as an essayist, magazine editor, and maker of commercials and documentaries, deliberately framed the funeral not as tragedy but as a human comedy built from cinematic detail¹^•¹⁰. Commentators have described the film as a manual for mourners presented as drama, satirizing a ceremony so bound up in procedure and manners that the mourners have no room to grieve⁹. A scholarly assessment holds that the film drew Japanese society's latent interest in death and funerals, long treated as taboo, out into the open¹¹.

Production

The idea came from direct experience. In September 1983 Itami presided over the funeral of his wife Nobuko Miyamoto's father and said, "This is a movie. It will become a movie"¹. He wrote the script during mourning over the year-end and New Year period; a working draft was printed early in 1984, and preparation, casting, and budgeting moved quickly³. Crank-in was June 2, 1984, filming was nearly complete by July 18, and the finished film was first shown to a general audience on the night of August 26, 1984, at the Yufuin film festival before its November 17 theatrical release³. Shooting took place at Yugawara and at the Itami household¹.

Itami prepared meticulously, preparing storyboards for every shot, though his diary records anxiety that he could not yet show staff and cast a clear image of the film he should make¹². Early production had mishaps: footage of a ceremonial videotape scene was shot on a cheap consumer camera and proved unusable for enlargement to the big screen, and the producer decided to shoot a planned 16 mm section in 35 mm as a precaution¹³.

His father, the prewar film director Mansaku Itami, whose own films were satires on Japanese society, died of tuberculosis in 1946, and memories of his funeral also influenced the script⁶. Itami had hesitated for decades to direct, saying he avoided "challenging the mountain" of his father's reputation⁶.

Reception and awards

Audiences filled theaters and the film expanded nationwide, a hit the Itami Juzo Museum calls a kind of social phenomenon³. It placed first in Kinema Junpo's 1984 best-ten list and won the Japan Academy Prize for Best Film, with Tsutomu Yamazaki taking Best Actor and Kin Sugai Best Supporting Actress; the distributor counts 32 awards in total⁵^•¹⁴. The Hochi Film Award for Best Film went to Itami in 1984¹⁴.

The film played at the 1985 Cannes Film Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival, and the Chicago International Film Festival, but did not reach New York until December 1987, after Tampopo (1985) and A Taxing Woman (1987) had become international hits⁶. Later assessments made it a fixture of Itami's reputation: the Criterion Collection released it in 2022 as spine #1125 with a new restoration, interviews, and excerpts from Itami's 1985 book The Funeral Diary⁴, and a 4K digital remaster has been shown at Japanese festivals¹³.

Place in Itami's career

The Funeral was the first of ten features Itami directed, all starring Miyamoto, followed by Tampopo (1985), A Taxing Woman (1987), and others¹⁵. Film historians describe these films as mordant satires of contemporary Japanese life, full of physical comedy and mockery of the new consumerist Japan, which made Itami the most visible Japanese director of the 1980s¹⁶. In interviews after the debut, Itami said everything he had done before had been preparation for becoming a film director¹⁷.

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Comedy and romantic films (individual works) › Comedies of the 1980s › Satirical, black, and parody comedies of the 1980s

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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