The Golden Lion won by Kurosawa Akira’s Rashomon in 1951 aroused worldwide interest towards Japanese cinema during the 1950s and 1960s, but mainly in its guise of period films. Indeed, while geisha and samurai stories tickled Western audience with exotic settings, many masterpieces set in everyday Japan were largely overlooked. Among these, only Ozu’s films have been enjoying a lasting posthumous appreciation since the 1970s, as his cinema’s contemplative approach was well suited to be described with an almost stereotyped fascinating lexicon provided by the so-called ‘Zen boom’. Something has changed in the last decades, though it seems to confirm the deeply rooted commonplace about Japan as a land of contrasts and paradoxes: while the few films screened in Italy share the image of Japan as a quiet place characterized by tradition, spirituality, small everyday rituals and an intimate relationship with natural cycles, media convergence and relocated cinema experience have been fostering the global circulation of a different Japan and a different Japanese cinema, though equally ‘essentialised’: cool, postmodern, pop, colorful, technological, kawaii, superflat and extreme.

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