【Worth watching at least once】:2025 Japanese film “1st Kiss”, The Time-Traveling Romance
Welcome to the deep dive. Today we are launching uh head first into the extraordinary career of one of the most successful, most decorated directors in contemporary Japanese cinema, Aayukot Sukahara. Mhm. But our mission isn’t just, you know, to catalog her hits. We’re using her recent, highly anticipated collaboration as a kind of starting gun to map out the entire well the philosophical and aesthetic battlefield of modern Japanese film. That’s absolutely right because when you look at the sources we’ve gathered, articles on Sukahara, these deep theoretical dives into cinematic light, critical analysis of genres, they consistently reveal these two powerful and yeah, often antagonistic artistic traditions in modern Japanese filmm. Okay. Like what? Well, you have the tradition of humane realism, right? Represented by figures like Hiroazu Kada. And then you’ve got the opposing aesthetic tradition defined more by the sensory uh light obsessed style of someone like Shinji. Then Sukahar fits in. How? Well, Sukahar’s success, frankly, it proved she can operate in both universes, which makes her the perfect subject really for this deep dive. Okay, let’s unpack this director first, though, because her origin story is fantastic. Auko Tukahara is, yeah, a serious force of nature. She hails from Saitama Prefixure, and she’s affiliated with TBS Sparkle. That’s been her professional home since 97 back when it was still Kinoshida Productions. And what’s truly fascinating, like you said, is her start. She didn’t train as a director, not formally. She graduated from Chiba University with a bachelor of arts in literature. And she actually recounts how when she was job hunting, she saw an opening for a screenwriter position at this company. Her first thought was, well, literature degree, screenwriting seems like a natural fit. She thought she was applying to write dramas. That’s brilliant. The best kind of career misdirection. Applies to be a writer, ends up starting as an assistant director and a television series. Yeah. And her main duties for the first what decade, they were intensely practical, logistical, like the real grind, the trenches, finding the perfect locations, making sure the character settings were detailed, accurate, basically handling all the, you know, organizational chores that keep a set running. That’s 10 years spent right there. And that practical background, I I think it’s key. It gives her directing work this certain grounded realism, this logistical efficiency you can feel. Definitely. It wasn’t until 2005 that she made the decisive shift. You know, declared she wanted to work primarily as a director and she made her debut with the TV series Yimushu. And when she started directing, she just didn’t slow down. She’s become synonymous with some of the biggest, most critically acclaimed television dramas, which in Japan, that’s a massive part of the industry’s creative output, isn’t it? Oh, huge. Absolutely huge. The shows that really brought her global recognition. Yeah. Well, there’s the medical mystery Unnatural, the uh highly competitive restaurant drama Lron Mesa on Tokyo. Great show.
Penwise’s sources collectively provide a comprehensive overview of the 2025 Japanese film “1st Kiss,” detailing its creative team, plot, and reception. The movie is a time-travel romance/fantasy about a wife, Kanna (played by Takako Matsu), who loses her estranged husband, Kakeru (played by Hokuto Matsumura), in an accident and travels back 15 years to the day they met to save him. Key collaborators include acclaimed screenwriter Yuji Sakamoto, known for films like Monster, and award-winning director Ayuko Tsukahara. Reviews praise the film for its balance of emotional depth and humor, its focus on the significance of everyday love, and its decision to skip overly complex science fiction explanations, trusting the audience’s familiarity with the time-travel genre. Additionally, Box Office Mojo confirms the film’s international box office success following its February 2025 release in Japan.