Japan has submitted films for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film since the inception of the award. The award is handed out annually by the United States Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to a feature-length motion picture produced outside the United States that contains primarily non-English dialogue. The Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film was not created until 1956; however, between 1947 and 1955, the Academy presented Honorary Awards to the best foreign language films released in the United States. These awards were not competitive, as there were no nominees but simply a winner every year that was voted on by the Board of Governors of the Academy. Three Japanese films were recipients of Honorary Awards during this period. For the 1956 Academy Awards, a competitive Academy Award of Merit, known as the Best Foreign Language Film Award, was created for non-English speaking films, and has been given annually since. As of 2009, twelve Japanese films have been nominees for Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and one film, Departures, has won the award. The only Japanese directors to have multiple films be nominated for the award are Akira Kurosawa and Noboru Nakamura. Kurosawa received an Honorary Award prior to the conception of the formal award for his work on Rashomon and the actual Academy Award for Dersu Uzala (submitted for the former Soviet Union), and had four other films submitted, with two of them accepted as nominees. Notably, Kurosawa's 1985 film Ran was deliberately not nominated by the Japanese film industry for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film due to the poor perception he had among Japanese filmmakers at the time. (Full article...)