Although it might not always be obvious in Edinburgh, spring has come around again, which means the return of the annual Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme. Back at Filmhouse, this year’s programme once again features a range of Japanese films premiered over the last two years. Strikingly, and perhaps in quiet conversation with a recent trend in arthouse world cinema, seen in films such as Alpha (2025), Hamnet (2025), Romería (2025), and Dreams (Sex Love) (2025), trauma emerges as one of the strongest threads running through this year’s selection. Yet the way trauma unfolds in these films feels quite different from their western counterparts. In contemporary Japanese cinema, trauma is often less a dramatic act than something embedded in ordinary life, lingering in family ties, daily routines, and acts of endurance.

Love Doesn’t Matter to Me (2025), directed by Igashi Aya, follows three college age girls, Miyata (Minami Sara), Enaga (Baba Fumika), and Kimura (Honda Miyu), as they struggle to navigate toxic relationships with their parents. In each case, parental love becomes a force of control, leaving an enduring grip on their lives. The film explores trauma through these intergenerational dynamics, especially the way exploitation can be justified in the language of love. Miyata, for instance, is financially trapped by her irresponsible mother, who manipulates her into taking part time work and supporting the household under the guise of maternal love. Her mother is never openly abusive, yet Miyata remains suffocated by what is repeatedly framed as love. While working at a convenience store, she becomes friends with Enaga, a withdrawn and emotionally disengaged girl, and the story later brings in Kimura, who comes from a wealthy family but is constrained by an overly protective and controlling mother.

Questions of love and its redefinition have long been central to contemporary Japanese independent film and literature, especially in response to the deeply conservative view of family and relationships that still shapes mainstream Japanese society. Within that context, Love Doesn’t Matter to Me is attentive to the ways financial, physical, and emotional exploitation can all be normalised in the name of love. What makes Igashi’s film more compelling is that it does not simply present these girls as mirrors of one another. Even though they are all harmed in similar ways, they do not automatically understand each other. On the contrary, they often turn against one another, unable or unwilling to imagine what another person might be going through and how hard it can be to get out of such a relationship. That refusal of easy solidarity gives the film a sharper emotional edge.

At the same time, the film’s focus remains intensely individual, and this also reveals its own limitations. In a way that feels familiar in Japanese cinema, trauma is treated as something to be endured and resolved on a personal level. The film shows the suffocating effects of parental love, but it does not really ask why this form of love takes shape in the first place. Is it rooted in broader social pressures, historical conditions, or generational trauma? The mothers remain only partially developed, fathers are notably absent, and the younger generation is ultimately left to manage the damage alone.

On a related note, She Taught Me Serendipity (2025), directed by Oku Akiko, offers a more ambitious and emotionally layered film about grief, mourning, and the possibility of healing together through love. Hagiwara Riku plays Konishi Toru, a college student grieving the recent loss of his grandfather, while Kawai Yuumi plays Sakurada Hana, the girl Konishi becomes drawn to, who is herself carrying the weight of a long unresolved loss. Kawai gives a magnetic performance: Sakurada is estranged within her college environment, but she is also luminous, charismatic, and quietly unknowable, as though she is always carrying an inner world too deep and dynamic to fully disclose.

The film begins almost like an ordinary campus romance. Konishi moves through his uneventful student life with only one close friend, gradually developing feelings for Sakurada. He then seems to find himself in the middle of a love triangle. Yet as the narrative unfolds, what initially resembles a conventional youth romance reveals itself to be something much more moving: a story about the long afterlife of grief and the enduring traces left by those we have loved.

What is especially remarkable about Ohku’s screenplay is the way it situates personal mourning against the backdrop of the genocide in Gaza. In a nation where cinema is often characterised as politically restrained, this direct engagement with such an urgent and horrifying reality feels unusually bold. The film draws a careful parallel between individual grief and the death of a child in Gaza, and in doing so produces something quietly devastating. Yet, Ohku didn’t overstate the news in a loud way. Instead, it leaves behind a lingering atmosphere of sorrow that remains long after the film ends. Crucially, Ohku handles this parallel with delicacy. The child’s death is not exploited for emotional effect, but becomes part of a wider reflection on mourning itself and on the unbearable losses.

Kawai Yuumi also appears in another standout title from this year’s programme, Teki Cometh (2024), directed by Yoshida Daihachi. In this black and white drama, the film centres on Watanabe Gisuke (Nagatsuka Kyozo), a retired professor of French literature living alone after the death of his wife. What first appears to be an ordinary portrait of solitary routine gradually shifts into something far stranger and more unsettling. What begins with a life that recalls the poetic rhythms of retirement seen in Perfect Days (2023) slowly transforms into a haunting psychological work closer in spirit to a Kurosawa Kiyoshi thriller.

What surfaces in Watanabe’s life is not one single trauma, but several overlapping forms of unease: inherited memories of wartime violence from before his birth, unresolved mourning for his wife, guilty fantasies of infidelity, and the encroaching fear of death itself. Yoshida moves fluidly between waking life and subconscious dream states, and it is through this unstable boundary that the film suggests trauma never truly disappears. It simply settles into one’s life, sometimes so deeply that it can seem forgotten, until something brings it back to the surface. In a manner that is both slow and playful, Teki Cometh shows how a man sustained by habit, careful home cooking, and the rituals of a cultivated middle-class intellectual life can still lose his grip on reality. The ghosts of the past, along with the secrets he has buried for decades, have never stopped inhabiting the space beneath his daily existence.

Taken together, these films suggest a quietly powerful current running through this year’s JFTFP. Trauma is everywhere, but rarely in forms that announce themselves loudly. Instead, it lingers in families, in memory, in grief, in shame, and in the small repetitions of everyday life. If there is a shared strength across these films, it lies in the way they refuse to treat trauma as extraordinary. They show it as something woven into the textures of the ordinary, and in doing so reveal how modern Japanese cinema continues to find ways of thinking about pain, love, and survival.