366 Days has been a major hit in Japanese cinemas. After releasing on the first weekend of 2025 the film has enjoyed positive word of mouth to grow week-on-week and even top the box office on its fourth week of release, grossing over 2 billion yen to date. It’s a great film, too, specific in how it uses music and geography to explore how far we would go to shield those we love from pain.
Yet in spite of this success, news of the film being picked up for a Hollywood remake were a surprise, to say the least.
The film is mostly original, though credits HY’s 2008 hit song of the same name as the source material from which this story is inspired from. First-year high school student Miu Tamashiro (Moka Kamishiraishi) becomes interested in a third-year senior at her school in Okinawa named Minato Makiya (Eiji Akaso) after noticing they share similar tastes in music, making each other custom playlists for that whir away on Mini Disks under the beating sun. Their shared tastes bring them closer, and after the death of Minato’s mother makes him lose passion for music, Miu convinces him to keep going
Just before leaving for university in Tokyo, the pair start dating and keep up their long-distance relationship as Miu studies hard in order to join him in the big city. Two years later, she moves to Tokyo to pursue her dream of being a translator, while the two start a life together in the city.
366 Days is a tribute to the power of music, a message of love, filled with heartfelt meetings and painful goodbyes - but there’s a sincerity that helps this film to soar. Moka Kamishiraishi is a true standout in this film, able to portray such pure and unapologetic romantic joy from just a simple smile, just as effective as a young lovestruck schoolgirl or a struggling mid-20s jobseeker torn by her desire to stay with the person she loves as her dream begins to slip away. She’s the beating heart of the film in such a way that it’s quickly become one of my favorite recent performances, handled with an authenticity that’s impossible not to get wrapped up within.
It’s easy to fall head over heels for this couple and the passion that keeps them faithful even at a distance, fueled by near-universal seishun musical hooks that any audience can instantly resonate with. A film doesn’t need to be original if it can convince you that the love of its main characters is truly the center of the universe as tears stream down your cheeks during the closing credits. Particularly with the fascinating wrinkle brought to the story through childhood friend Ryusei’s spark of unrequited love and dedication.
I don’t want to pretend that 366 Days is unique or unlike anything you’ve seen before, but it’s delivered with such genuine heart and care that it barely matters. The film also ties into a recent trend of movies utilizing music either as direct source material and/or weaponizing their emotional resonance to the human experience, seen in anime films like Colors Within and A Few Moments of Cheers, Kyrie, and the popular Netflix J-Drama based on Utada Hikaru’s hit song, First Love.
Each ties into the monocultural idea of the seishun song as a defining sound of youth and nostalgia and the shorthand to our own experiences that they imply.
Hollywood are no strangers to adapting Japanese stories. The Grudge, The Ring, Pulse. Shall We Dance. Dragonball Evolution. Godzilla. There’ll be more, too, if the remake of Makoto Shinkai’s Your Name ever finally enters production. Subtitled media is more popular ever to English-speaking audiences with shows like Alice in Borderland, Squid Game, Shogun proving audiences are willing to read subtitles, but this is Sony taking their own work and remaking it with the hope of cashing in on a new audience.
You could argue that the different divides between rural and city life, or that the cultural ways we view illness or the ways different genders view their roles in relationships make it difficult to translate the story to American life. The reality is you can easily adapt this while keeping the intent the same. Yet it’s the musical core of the film that makes the cross-Atlantic journey a more difficult sell.
Beyond the way any remake would be divorced from HY’s song that at least contributed to the film’s success (I struggle to think of an equivalent English-language song that could fill this void), how people interact with and associate music with times of our life is the core idea tying the emotional beats of the film together, and that differs greatly between the countries.
How audiences share music, and the idea of a universal ‘sound’ emblematic of a stage in our lives that evokes nostalgia, coming-of-age, first love and self-discovery, doesn’t exist in the same way it does in Japan. It’s easy for a Japanese audience to be swept up in the whirlwind of emotions felt by these characters not just because of the script and acting, but because this song and those like it universally put words to the specific turmoil of adolescence, whether from HY or artists like Spitz, Yuzu, Superfly, Bump of Chicken, Mrs. Green Apple or so many others.
Indeed, Japan’s long-running infatuation with coming-of-age romance in film and drama is a specific blend of music, acting, young talent and yearning that we don’t see replicated in Hollywood. Even those less-common stories that successfully channel this difficult period, stories like Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird or The Breakfast Club, explore it through a more generalized ennui, an exception within that cinematic landscape. Romance stories also typically focus on older characters, not the school-age childhood love seen here.
I’m sure that 366 Days could make for a fine US adaptation, but I have to wonder why you would bother. It’s hard not to feel it would be better to create something new that could evoke those more personal emotions by specifically evoking the universal anxieties and romantic feelings of love while coming-of-age in 21st century America, rather than retrofitting this story that feels out-of-step with the desires of US audiences.
If nothing else, this news puts a new spotlight on a gem of Japanese cinema in these slow opening months. 366 Days is a truly great film, with one of the most sincere portrayals of love that’s almost-impossible not to get swept up in. At the very least, it’ll keep you entertained till we see what, and if, the Hollywood remake has to offer.
