Even before In the Realm of the Senses and now Empire of Passion made Nagisa Oshima box-office material in the U.S., his films were considered masterpieces in this country, in particular Death by Hanging, Diary of a Shinjuku Burglar, and Boy. Variously called the “Godard of Japan” (he jokingly calls Godard the “Oshima of France”), a “one-man Japanese New Wave,” and any number of other labels for his genius, Oshima has realized films with a profoundly modern dialectic, uniting metaphysical introspection with a committed left-wing social viewpoint.

Death by Hanging is probably the most powerful film against capital punishment ever made. Based on a 1958 news story about a Korean boy accused of rape and murder, the film is at once a clear political indictment of Japanese racism against Koreans, and a profound Kafka-like dissertation on guilt and redemption, crime and punishment viewed in the pre-sociological abstract. French director Luc Moullet called Death by Hanging “the most fantastic scenario in the history of cinema; a masterpiece,” and Donald Richie describes Oshima's “Brechtian form”:

“The young Korean, though hanged, refuses to die and so the police officers must act out his crime in order to convince him of his guilt. This inept pantomime alienates to the extent that we understand the irony of this crime within a crime within a crime, the latter being capital punishment itself. The police, says the film, are more obsessed with the idea of crime than any criminal is.... This is brilliantly displayed when one of the police, carried away, attempts to kill. He is so intent upon creating a role that he assumes it completely.”