Yōzō Tanaka
Birth : 1939-05-17, Nihonbashi, Tokyo, Japan
History
Yōzō Tanaka is a Japanese screenwriter. He was born in Nihonbashi, Tokyo. After joining the production department of Nichigeki Music Hall, he started writing radio scripts. While he was a student at Waseda University, he met Atsushi Yamatoya and Kaname Kawachi. Before becoming a screenwriter, Tanaka worked as a reporter, conducting a series of interviews with eccentrics in the magazine Weekly Sankei. After joining Nikkatsu, he joined a screenwriting team led by director Seijun Suzuki. Individuals in this group such as Tanaka, Yamatoya, and Chūsei Sone also contributed to various projects at Wakamatsu Productions during this period of the 1960s.
He is also a driving force behind the heyday of Nikkatsu Roman Porno, writing numerous screenplays. He continued to collaborate with fellow veterans of the aforementioned series such as Shinji Sōmai and Kichitaro Negishi.
His disciples include Haruhiko Arai and Miho Nakazono.
In 2005, he worked as an associate professor at the Graduate School of Film and New Media, Tokyo University of the Arts.
In 2007, a book of Yōzō Tanaka's essays and other archival materials such as interviews and screenplays was published.
Screenplay
16 years after the fateful "revenge of the Forty-seven Ronin," involving samurais from the Ako domain who avenged their leader and then commited seppuku (ritual suicide), the sole survivor of that incident, Kichiemon Terasaka (Koichi Sato) traverses the country on a mission. His purpose is to find the families of the fallen samurais and spread the truth of the ronin uprising.
Screenplay
This enticing period melodrama depicts a long-suffering woman's relationship with her brilliant but self-destructive writer husband in postwar Tokyo. Based on a semi-autobiographical 1947 novel by Osamu Dazai, the story centers less on the womanizing, heavy-drinking, suicidal hero than on the wife who loves him. Written by Palm Springs International Film Festival
Writer
Translucent Tree is centered around divorced Chigiri, a suburban middle-aged mother taking care of her teenage daughter, Mayu, and her ailing father Kaho. Her life is mundane and rather hopeless until Go, a TV producer from Tokyo, pays a visit to her town and the tree they shared time under some twenty years back after a TV commercial shoot. His remembrances of her, the tree, and the long unrequited love stir both of their hearts to fumbling action as they re-discover the love between them.
Screenplay
Attending the funeral of one of his friends, Satoru sees a woman who looks exactly like his deceased wife Shizuko. The film mixes reality with death and parting, when the ghost of the deceased wife chases her husband.
Screenplay
One night, as pub owner Sotaro is caring for his sick wife, Shizuko, she asks him to promise that if she dies, he will never remarry. Thinking she is just being dramatic, he promises and tells her to go to sleep. When he wakes the next morning, however, Shizuko is dead. Sotaro keeps his promise, until one day he meets Satoko. The two quickly fall in love, and agree to get married. Their first night together, however, is interrupted by Shizuko, who is angry over her husband's broken promise. Sotaro and Satoko must find some way of appeasing the spirit before she drives them from their home.
Screenplay
A delightful and moving coming-of-age story. One summer, three young boys take an increasing interest in an eccentric old man who lives alone in a house surrounded by an overgrown garden. The boys form a bond with the recluse and set about weeding and replanting the garden.
Screenplay
Following the life of Japanese artist and poet Yumeji Takehisa through the imagining of an encounter with a beautiful widow with a dark past.
Screenplay
A hulking man from the country pursues his beloved to the underworld of Tokyo nightclubs, where he finds work as a sideshow wrestler and becomes involved with a faded opera singer.
Screenplay
A woman named Fujiki Asuka arrives as an acquaintance of a sister in law for a day under the bar master Tamura who had guided Yakuza's escaping as a shoji. Tamura who lives on the second floor of the store for the time being the son who wants to work here. A few days later, Tamura finds a handgun from Yuko's baggage and holds a suspicion ....
Writer
Travel into Japan's nuttiest apartment house and meet its volatile inhabitants: Kyoko, the beautiful and mysterious new apartment manager; Yusaku, the exam-addled college student; Mrs. Ichinose, the drunken gossip; Kentaro, her bratty son; Akemi, the boozy bar hostess; and the mooching and peeping Mr. Yotsuya.
Screenplay
A young jazz musician's desire to advance in his career runs afoul of organized crime in this thriller from Haruki Kadokawa. After a saxophonist starts playing at a particular nightspot, a thug from the Yakuza adopts him as a special friend for no greater reason than he plays one of his favorite songs well. As the dangerous life of the gangster intertwines with that of the musician, it brings harm to the musician's girlfriend, who is raped. This changes the young saxophonist's attitude about his patron, but his Yakuza "friend" is still too embroiled in his own problems to worry about anything else.
Screenplay
A young girl gets adopted by a family that holds her like a slave and is later freed by a young man working for the family's company. 10 years later, she gets involved in the murder of one of her step-sisters.
Screenplay
Filled with guilt over his forbidden desires, a young man leaves home and his studies. He finds a new smaller place to stay, a low-paying but satisfying job and a girlfriend. Then his mother, unable to fight her forbidden desires, shows up.
Screenplay
Set in the 1930s in the international city of Shanghai, the film follows the extravagant life and times of a group of jazz musicians, living from one advance paycheck to the next, as the country teeters over the brink into the Second Sino-Japanese War.
Writer
Screenplay
A young man tries to overcome the hostility of his girlfriend's father, a tuna fisherman, by getting the father to teach him the trade's secrets.
Screenplay
A high-school girl inherits a declining yakuza organization, which seeks to repair its fortunes under her leadership.
Screenplay
A 1920s playwright meets a beautiful woman who may be the ghost of his patron's deceased wife.
Screenplay
Yuko is in love with an old poet who happens to be also a married man. She waits patiently for him and only him, yet she is constantly being lust by others.
Screenplay
A teacher, Sakiko Kurata, receives a phone call regarding one of her former students. Young Sueko is accused of being a prostitute and has requested Sakiko’s help. This minx seduces random strangers for sex, but does not ask for payment. Sakiko has moved to another town and barely remembers Sueko, but there’s something about her that awakens painful memories of her own secretive past. What is that strange paint thinner smell on Sueko? Who is the man in the nylon ski mask that violently assaulted Sakiko many years ago? In her search for answers, Sakiko discovers that her past may have inadvertently destroyed another family’s future.
Screenplay
A man travels with his pill-popping girlfriend to the headquarters of her yakuza boss husband, in order to claim her for himself.
Screenplay
A surreal period film following an university professor and his eerie nomad friend as they go through loose romantic triangles and face death in peculiar ways.
Writer
This is a film about a real person. Sanada Yukimura fought a war against Tokugawa Ieyasu.
Screenplay
Roman Porno from 1979.
Screenplay
Screenplay
Hell manifests itself through the sins, shame and desires of an upper class rural family and a mother's grief from beyond the grave.
Writer
A plot to steal money from gangsters leads to trouble...
Screenplay
Nikkatsu Roman Porno
Screenplay
Yasuji Hajima runs a butcher shop. When he was younger, he was just as interested in the sex as the next man but lately he has a hard time satisfying his wife who is still oversexed at her age. The Hajimas have one son, Shuichi, who is studying to enter Tokyo University. It is after he sees his parents acting in which he considers an odious manner that he changes entirely and raises the roof in every whichever way.
Story
Mr. Harry, who suffers from a "peanut sized" penis complex, comes to Japan to undergo a genital transplant operation, the first of its kind in the world. The operation is a success but Harry soon is involved into a shady plot related to his organ donor.
Screenplay
The background is Yuraku-cho in Tokyo and the film shows how desperately the women, who had led sheltered lives before the war, struggled to keep alive and the innate strength of post-war women.
Screenplay
After a fight with a local girl gang, Yoko serves time in prison. After her release the world she once knew has changed. When she is drugged and raped by a local yakuza she seeks revenge…
Screenplay
Satirizing the Roman Porno genre, and the Office Lady Journal series in particular. Naomi Tani and Yuko Katagiri appear as themselves in the film, making fun of their on-screen personae.
Screenplay
Cherry blossoms are in full bloom. It is time for college students to go on a drinking spree under the cherry tree - It's "Hanami" time! Two freshmen and a sophomore are ordered to stake out a spot for the entire pep squad. Plans are initiated from the night before; three of them have to pull an all-nighter. Once the night falls, the sky turns pitch black. Rival pep squad of the Roka College emerge from the darkness and an all-out turf war begins.
Screenplay
In the summer of 1947, various men and women gather at a mansion in the countryside at the invitation of Kazuma Utagawa. They are artists, novelists, poets, painters, playwrights, actresses, etc. Then the murders begin, one after another. The incident seemed to have no continuity...
Writer
Zenjiro (Masaru Shiga) is a lowlife criminal, roaming the country with his merry band of crooks, gamblers and rapists. When he gets done with his latest escapade of banging a samurai's wife, he finds that his love Okoyo (Eiko Matsuda), has managed to be recruited as one of Shogun Tokugawa Ietsuna's (Kantaro Suga) concubines. While attempting to win her back, Zenjiro becomes involved in increasingly murderous palace intrigues.
Screenplay
“Get them all – girls, school credits, money – without an effort!" These are the rumors that freshman Hachirota Kawachi heard about the pep squad; his reasons for instant enrollment. Hachirota may fall a few screws short of a hardware store, but when it comes to yakuza ties, he has plenty. He is the direct descendant and heir to the notorious Akushin-kai gang. Although this was enough information to keep the pep squad seniors quiet, it’s not quite enough for Aota.
Screenplay
Life in the pep squad is all about harsh discipline. Seniors are "Gods", juniors are "Humans", sophomores are "Slaves" and freshmen are treated like "Trash". One sunny day, two freshmen are entrusted with the task to dry out the squadron's flag; the most cherished and symbolic item of the squad. When they accidentally burn a hole in the flag with a cigarette, they blame Aota. Aota attempts to take full responsibility by committing "harakiri", but changes his mind during the process – a deep stab to the stomach has inspired him with a better idea.
Screenplay
Roman Porno from 1976.
Screenplay
Two bank robbers specialize in "smash and grab" style heists. The thieves dream of escaping Japan and going to Brazil...
Screenplay
The sequel depicts Yuki's love affair with a young brothel owner who was once a Noh singer, and his complicated relationship with a woman who follows him around. Their love triangle nearly dissolves in Yuki's favour, but takes a sudden turn after an intervention of a perverted painter who believes in fatalism.
Screenplay
The seventh in the shocking "Jingi Naki Tatakai" movie series, which exposes the true lives of the yakuza that is hidden by a mask of "jingi". The next stage of this continuing drama is the Kanmon Channel where the Owada and the Kyoei groups are battling for territorial rights and drug smuggling. The Owada sends their man, Tetsu, and his friend Shuji to kill the Kyoei boss. With the promise of fame and riches, Shuji takes the fall and goes to jail for 7 years. But when he's released, he discovers that he and Tetsu have been all but forgotten by the Owada. Feeling betrayed, Shuji takes natters into his own hands and becomes an unsuspecting pawn in an internal conflict and an assassination attempt on the Owada boss. And now angered, Shuji seeks revenge...
Screenplay
Natsu, the older of two sisters, has a relationship with Yonosuke, the local kimono trader. Unlike her more conservative sister Oshichi she tries to use sex as a means to climb to a better social position. To even attempt that she first needs to get out of the Buddhist monastery she is working at...
Screenplay
Based on a manga by Kosuke Miki and Tadashi Matsumori, this film follows the adventures of Yuki, who works in a Kyoto red-light district house of ill repute as a "tamawari," or "virgin-breaker." She's the gal who gets first dibs on the new recruits to the brothel (some willing, some not), and it's her job to break them in for future clients. The film finds Yuki involved with a group of political rebels and anarchists after the Peace Preservation Law was passed in 1925 and walks a fine line between black humor and severe cruelty.
Screenplay
Roman Porno from 1975.
Screenplay
Based on the comic by Kazuo Koike and Satomi Kôe.
Screenplay
Writer and ladies-man Yonosuke, who gives inept English lessons (using Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet), is ushered into a lonely woman's house one rainy night. Her husband is at the front in the war with Russia and, as our hero will soon discover, she's wearing a chastitity belt...
Writer
A wife charges her husband with sexual battery. He escapes from the police and goes into hiding. In three years, she divorces him and tries to put the pieces of her life back in order, when suddenly he returns. Obsessed with rage and hatred, he kidnaps her and brings her to a house in a remote wooded area. There he disciplines her vehemently, subjecting her to increasingly shocking forms of sexual torture, tetherings, suspensions and humiliations. Astonishingly, through the rage and lust, the pair develops a relationship that pushes the boundaries of lurid passions and perverse obsessions.
Screenplay
Roman Porno from 1974.
Screenplay
Shizuka is the aristocratic wife of the president of a large company. When she wants to divorce her domineering husband, he orders his employee Yoshi, the son of an adult toy store owner, to train his wife to become sexually submissive.
Writer
Nikkatsu Roman Porno
Screenplay
Roman Porno from 1974.
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Roman Porno from 1974.
Screenplay
A delirious roman porno re-imagining of Seijun Suzuki's 'Branded to Kill'. Directed by Atsushi Yamatoya and scripted by Yôzô Tanaka, both 'Branded to Kill's' screenwriters and Suzuki's regular collaborators.
Screenplay
Roman Porno from 1973.
Screenplay
Roman Porno from 1973.
Screenplay
Monk Seigen saves Misako the daughter of an area Yakuza boss from some tough guys. The two become a couple and find themselves being pursued by some criminals. Seigen plunges deeper into a life of crime and sin.
Screenplay
Roman Porno from 1973.
Screenplay
Members of the Japanese royal family seeking to appease a "Death Goddess" through ritualistic temple sex.
Screenplay
Roman Porno from 1973.
Screenplay
Roman Porno from 1973.
Screenplay
In post-war Japan, a publisher goes to visit her former teacher for help on a modern translation of a legend about a mummified Buddhist monk who was revived and who, centuries later, turned into a sex demon who terrorized a village in pre-modern Japan.
Screenplay
Roman Porno from 1972.
Screenplay
Sold into prostitution by her "uncle", a young girl is so innocent and naive that she doesn't know what she has to do.
Screenplay
After botching his latest assignment, a third-ranked Japanese hit man becomes the target of another assassin.
Assistant Director
A press photographer returns to Japan from the war in Vietnam after losing his friend and fellow photographer on the battlefield.
Writer
A press photographer returns to Japan from the war in Vietnam after losing his friend and fellow photographer on the battlefield.
