In 2013, to mark the tenth anniversary of the Japan Foundation's annual UK touring programme of related Japanese films that have not been granted widespread distribution, a catalogue of works collectively entitled ‘Once upon a time in Japan’ was put together to be played throughout the UK. Concerned with films set in and reflective of a variety of historical periods, this collection underlined what has become an increasingly prevalent feature of contemporary Japanese cinema: namely a pervasive looking back, a re-viewing of the past, with a concomitant sense of the futility that such an undertaking may carry within it, the sub-textual concern with the present as a question as much as an answer. In other words, the past is opened up in many modern Japanese jidai-geki for a number of contrastive reasons – in order to reflect on the present and also to probe the past as part of a variously self-reflexive or even subversive discourse on modernity and postmodernity as cultural modes. As such the prominent return to the historical drama that characterises modern Japanese cinema, most often in the guise of the samurai film, frequently engages with a cinematic history as much as (if not more than) a social one, a lineage of the past onscreen rather than a window onto any empirically viable or objective past, and a consideration of the discursive practices of historicity and historiography in place of narrative or generic transparency. Even those films that do not dwell on history as spectacle nonetheless retain a subtly trangressive imperative wherein they deny or frustrate any simple or unitary diegtic suture or illusionist realism. They are often about the respective limits and the possibilities of cinema as an agent for transmitting or representing what Robert Rosenstone terms ‘the burden of the past’ (1995, p. 4), and as such have broader ramifications for a study of the jidai-geki and its popular and populist face in the chambara (swordplay) film.