Japanese Movies With Subtitles: What to Watch and Where

Japanese movies with subtitles are one of the best ways to hear how people really talk in Japan, but the choice of film matters more than with most languages. Samurai epics and yakuza thrillers are full of old or rough speech; quiet family dramas sound like the Japanese you will use. Start with the films and series below, then set up subtitles so you learn instead of just reading.

Movies to learn Japanese: start with everyday speech

These are calm, dialogue-driven films with modern, everyday Japanese:

• Our Little Sister (2015). Three sisters in Kamakura take in their teenage half-sister. Kind, slow and full of family conversation.
• Shoplifters (2018). Hirokazu Kore-eda's Palme d'Or winner about a poor family in Tokyo. Natural speech, lots of casual forms.
• Perfect Days (2023). A Tokyo toilet cleaner's daily routine, directed by Wim Wenders. Very little dialogue, so every line is easy to catch.
• Departures (2008). A cellist becomes a funeral ceremony assistant; won the Oscar for best foreign language film. Polite, formal Japanese.
• Tampopo (1985). A comedy about a ramen shop. Older, but still the best film about food vocabulary.
• Drive My Car (2021). Longer and harder: several languages, long monologues. For later.

Anime is a separate world. If that is what you want to watch, our page on how to learn Japanese with anime covers Crunchyroll.

Japanese series on Netflix for learners

Series beat films for learning, because characters, places and phrases repeat.

• Midnight Diner: Tokyo Stories. A small late-night diner, one guest per episode. The best series on this list for learners: short episodes, everyday talk, food.
• First Love. A love story told across decades, with lots of ordinary conversation.
• The Queen of Villains. The story of a 1980s women's wrestler. Rough and loud, good for informal Japanese.
• Alice in Borderland and Erased. Thrillers: fun to watch, but expect shouting and less useful phrases.

Where to watch Japanese movies with English subtitles

Netflix and Prime Video have the largest choice of Japanese films and series, and most titles come with English subtitles and Japanese ones. Studio Ghibli films are on Netflix in most countries outside the US, Canada and Japan. Crunchyroll is the place for anime. Classic Japanese cinema, Ozu and Kurosawa, is on the Criterion Channel in the countries where it runs. Every catalog depends on your country, so search for the title where you are.

English or Japanese subtitles?

With English subtitles only, you follow the story and learn very little: Japanese sounds like a stream of syllables, and the English line is too different to map onto it. With Japanese subtitles only, you need to read kanji fast enough to keep up, which most learners can't for a while.

What works is both at once. Japanese movies with Japanese subtitles plus an English line give you the sound, the written word and the meaning together. The question "japanese movies with english subtitles or Japanese ones" stops being a choice.

InterSub does this in Chrome, Edge or Firefox on Netflix, Prime Video, Crunchyroll, YouTube and other platforms. It shows dual subtitles, and works as a pop up dictionary: hover over a word and the video pauses and shows its reading and translation. The words go to your Wordbook for Anki. Many people search for a japanese subtitles extension for exactly this.

Add InterSub to Chrome

If the Japanese track is missing for a title in your country, InterSub can translate the second line live on a paid plan. If a title has no subtitles at all, there is nothing to show: InterSub works with the subtitles the platform provides.

Learn Japanese with movies, step by step

1. Watch a scene with Japanese and English subtitles.
2. Look up the two or three words that matter, not all of them.
3. Rewatch the scene with English hidden until you pause.

Movies with Japanese subtitles are hard at first; three scenes a day this way teach more than a whole film watched with English only.