Across the history of the cinema in Japan images and stories of women have remained salient, if not central, to numerous films, filmmakers and genres. The prevalence of female-centred narratives can be traced back to the country's earliest films; this was even the case when women were officially prohibited from acting on the screen (as they had similarly been prohibited from appearing on stage), when the theatrical figure of the onnagata, or female impersonator, predominated in lieu of any actual female performers. However, this pervasive interest in and recourse to onscreen narratives anchored by women has traditionally not found a correlative in women behind the camera. There have traditionally been few opportunities for female filmmakers to work within Japan's studio system, and prior to the 1990s there had been only a small number of women working as directors. This despite the fact that women writers have for centuries held a pre-eminent position as authors, with some of the most celebrated titles in the Japanese canon – including Genji monogatari/The Tale of Genji and Makura no sōshi/The Pillow Book – being written by female writers (Murasaki Shikibu and Shonagon Sei, respectively).

Japan is, and always has been, a markedly patriarchal society. In the immediate post-war years (following a 1946 decree), there was an enforced move to guarantee gender equality and women's rights constitutionally, and thereafter the rapid development of Japan's bubble economy helped to bring into focus ongoing issues and problems surrounding what Vera Mackie has termed ‘the politics of everyday life and everyday relationships’ (2003. p. 1). It has been a protracted and difficult process; women's liberation only began as a visible movement in the 1970s, whilst statistics even in the 1990s and later suggested that gender inequality in the workplace was still a problem, with Japan ranking fifty-fourth in a 2009 United Nation's poll on this very subject. Furthermore, as Kumiko Fujimura- Fanselow has discussed in detail, whilst the early 1990s in particular had been seen by some as an era of and for women – Onna no jidai – such thinking did not remain viable or its results a practical reality beyond this decade (2011, p. 17).