Michiyo Yasuda

Renji Ishibashi, starring in the movie for the first time in 18 years, plays a hero with two faces, a dull novelist and a legendary killer. Susumu Ichikawa, an obsolete writer with no manuscript at all, had another face - a legendary hitman. But the truth of the matter is... he had never shot a person. One day, he receives a murder request from a friend. Seeing this as an opportunity to achieve the ideal hard-boiled novel, he decides to hire a real hitman and demands that he report to him the assassination situation as it was.

Whether it's someone mixing burnables and recyclables or noise from a neighbor's domestic spat, there's always something occupying the residents of a housing project in the suburbs of Osaka. However Hinako (Naomi Fujiyama) and Seiji (Ittoku Kishibe) couldn't care less. Having moved in just six months ago after the closure of their herbal medicine shop, the old couple is reluctantly putting their life back together. But when Seiji disappears, the apartment rumor mill churns: divorce, murder, dismemberment? As the story spins out of control, and a mysterious man with a parasol puts in a tall order of natural remedies, the truth turns out to be even more fantastic than gossip. Ranging from incisive comedy of errors to absurdist adventure to moving late life romance, "The Projects" is one of the biggest surprises of the year.

Rui is the charismatic leader of a new religious group. Consequently, he starts to gain attention from the mass media. After becoming involved in a car accident, Rui goes to a remote island with ex-gangster now bodyguard. On the island, Rui reveals more about his religious group, while a set of ominous events are about to occur.

The annual kabuki show is the main attraction in a rural Japanese mountain town. However, Yoshi's life is thrown into disarray days before the performance when his estranged wife and former best friend arrive back in town...

The story of a young man who has felt since childhood utterly alien from others around him. Since that time he has learned to put on a face to hide his alienation. He feels incapable of belonging to the human society, especially so by society's refusal to take him seriously. He then follows a descent into alcohol, drugs, & suicide ...

A son quits his job and is persuaded by his father to head off to a cottage in the remote mountains. Together, the two of them manage to get through their days while wearing old jerseys left by a deceased grandmother. The following summer, the two once again leave the stifling heat of Tokyo, as if escaping to the mountain cottage. However, the next summer is very different...

Based on the first novel, Spring Snow, of Mishima Yukio's Sea of Fertility tetralogy, it follows the troubled and illicit affair between two youngsters amongst the aristocracy and rich of early twentieth century Japan.

On the surface, the Kyobashis appear to be a happy family. Despite a family agreement that they are all open with each other, the entire household knows the opposite is true.

A man is trying to flee from his past, and he ends up in an underworld filled with strange characters. He finds a job skewering meat in a dirty old room in a shabby old house filled with prostitutes, gangsters and a weird old tattoo master. He clearly doesn't fit in to this new world, and the inhabitants of it immediately despise him.

Blind traveler Zatoichi is a master swordsman and a masseur with a fondness for gambling on dice games. When he arrives in a village torn apart by warring gangs, he sets out to protect the townspeople.

Awkward and withdrawn, Masako kills her sister in an explosion of pent-up humiliation and rage that sends her tumbling into fugitive life.

Hisashi gets fired from his temp job due to his impulsiveness. One day he meets Chikako, a housewife who constantly shoplifts at the supermarket he regularly goes. He somehow agrees to help her to look for her run-away son, Masaru. Unfortunate to Hisashi, Masaru starts following his around instead of returning home, after he was found by Hisashi. Then they end up stealing a gun from a police officer! In their course of running away, the similar two who cannot adapt to society very well start to develop a mutual friendship…

Following the life of Japanese artist and poet Yumeji Takehisa through the imagining of an encounter with a beautiful widow with a dark past.

Mugiko, an 18-year-old attempts to escape her unhappiness with village life by going to Tokyo to live and work in the geisha house run by her aunt. The daughter of a once great geisha, Mugiko is entitled by blood to train in the geishas ancient art of classical Japanese song and dance.

In the 12th century, Buddhism was still a relatively new religion in Japan. At that time, one school (Shingon) offered extensive training in complex and very demanding practices which might eventually bring about spiritual purification and realization. Various Zen schools offered students a lengthy path, literally composed of a blank wall and unceasing meditation. Yet another school (Tendai) emphasized complex metaphysics and the study of philosophical systems. Basically, all of them were designed to cater to the few who were able to give up everything else in their lives and focus on liberation, such as scholars and noblemen. In this historical and biographical drama, this is the situation that the young Shinran (1173-1263) discovered when he began exploring Buddhism as an alternative to the violence and ceaseless civil wars that racked Japan at the time.

Based on a polemic novel by Amy Yamada, Bedtime Eyes is about the intense love relationship between a second rate Japanese jazz singer and a black American GI on the margins of the law.

The melodramatic story of a pink crew’s tragi-comedic adventures on location. A fictionalized adaptation of set photographer Ichiro Tsuda's 1980 book The Location (Za Rokēshon), an illustrated 229-page document about the cameraman’s experiences with pink cast and crew on the sets of several films produced in the late 1970's.

A 1920s playwright meets a beautiful woman who may be the ghost of his patron's deceased wife.

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.

When bribe money from a rigged election funnels into a dam construction project, collusion, lust, greed and even murder are on the ballot.

In the fifth film of the Lone Wolf and Cub series, Ogami Itto is challenged by five warriors, each has one fifth of Ogami's assassin fee and one fifth of the information he needs to complete his assassination.

In feudal Japan, women are vulnerable, in need of protection, and capable of deception. Jokichi of Mikogami, a drifter, has not yet fully revenged the death of his wife and son. He searches for Kunisada Chuji, who in turn has hired the knife-throwing Windmill Kobunji to kill him. Kobunji and Jokichi meet in the winter, near Sasago Pass, when both have rescued women: Jokichi has saved the lute-playing Oyae whose clan and whose lover want her dead; Kobunji has rescued Oharu, a well-born woman married to an innkeeper. Is this rescue a whim or something deeper? And why does Jokichi become the consumptive Kobunji's protector? What ultimately will Jokichi do about Oyae?

The woman gambler Ginko risks her life for her brother-in-law.

Seijiro and Shizue meet in Niigata and fall in love. Seijiro has to go back to Tokyo soon after, and they promise each other to meet again a year later. However, Seijiro gets jailed for five years. Unable to find him, Shizue gets married to a yakuza boss who can help her family business.

Wicked woman Ogin is a concubine of a powerful feudal lord Tayu. At first Ogin gains power by poisoning lawful wife of Tayu. To gain more power Ogin let her lover Isogai Iori, kill whoever interrupts her. Film it is based on Jun'ichirō Tanizaki's novel "Kyofu Jidai".

Story about a big boss who built the foundation of an industrial city.

The Shinobi-no-Mono series was so successful that Daiei Studios dipped into the well one more time, making the best 60′s B&W ninja movie ever seen in the otherwise color-dominated year of 1970. Issei Mori directs Hiroki Matsukata as the reluctant leader of a small band of spies charged with kidnapping a noblewoman from a heavily ninja-proofed castle. The finality of the air slowly began to fill like smoke, and in all that had become dark the loyalty of the Ninja who dared to go shone like light as they entered a world shrouded in mystery. Things do not go as planned in what is possibly the darkest and most fatalistic of the already noir-ish 60′s fare. Both the decade and it’s distinctive style of shinobi cinema went out on a high note with Mission Iron Castle.

Yasuda plays Omon, a woman using bamboo leaves as darts/blades to disable and kill her enemies.

As a child, Okin the one-armed one-eyed swordswoman was disfigured by Lord Daizen-dayu, who was after her family's most treasured possession, the famed Drenched Swallow sword. As an adult, she has become a skilled swordswoman and lives a carefree life with her adopted family. One day, Okin saves a girl from a group of yakuza, and in doing so, gets involved in a grand conspiracy involving religious leaders, government officials, the yakuza and Lord Daizen-dayu, the man who killed her father and mutilated her body...

Japanese crime film

Eleventh film in the long-running series Daiei Studio's Woman Gambler with Kyoko Enami starring where she plays the woman gambler Ogin.

Japanese crime film

One of the nuns at Senjuan is Sister Shunko (Michiyo Yasuda). Unlike the usual nun, however, she often goes out to see the world, being of the opinion that nuns should not lead cloistered lives but should see something of modern life. She makes the acquaintance of a young girl named lkuko (Kayo Mikimoto) and saves her from the advances of a gangster named Goro (lchiro Nakatani). In the meantime she turns down several propositions and, in revenge, one of her admirers denounces her to the Mother Superior (Kuniko Miyake). This lady is of liberal views, however, and refuses to do anything about it. Then Shunko is visited by Goro's gang boss who wants lkuko back and says he will blackmail Shunko unless she agrees.

Sixth film in the long-running series Daiei Studio's Woman Gambler with Kyoko Enami starring where she plays the woman gambler Ogin.

Japanese crime film

Ken Ogata plays Shiro Miyagi, a sprinter with Olympic aspirations whose dreams were shattered by WWII. A broken man, he leads the dissolute life of a gigolo until a chance meeting with a fiery young athlete named Hiroko (Michiyo Yasuda). Realizing that she has talent as a sprinter, Miyagi sees a second chance at Olympic glory in becoming her coach. Following Miyagi’s unconventional, military-style training, Hiroko sets a record for the 100-meter dash, but her greatest hurdle proves to be a “sex check” which all professional athletes must pass.

A prostitute and her stepfather are falsely accused of murder, imprisoned, sexually abused and tortured. The real murderer will be discovered - and the girl will take revenge.

Fourth film in the long-running series Daiei Studio's Woman Gambler with Kyoko Enami starring where she plays the woman gambler Ogin.

A middle-aged factory engineer trains, marries, and ultimately loses a teenage bride after she enslaves him to her whims.

In late 1940 the Japanese were anxious to conclude peace in China and to that end sent Colonel Hidaka to inaugurate negotiations. He was mysteriously assassinated, however, when his car was blown up. The General Staff Headquarters in Japan, sends Lieutenant Shiina, a graduate of the famed Nakano School of Spies inaugurated by Colonel Kusanagi, to investigate the matter. Arriving in Shanghai, he disguises himself as a Chinese coolie and sets out to watch for developments, the only clue being a silver dollar found beside what was left of the victim.

During a Soviet circus tour in Japan, a small street musician, Ken, meets a clown, Yuri Nikulin. Upon learning that his sick father is being treated in the Soviet Union, Ken sets off in search of him. The friendship of the great clown and the boy continues in Moscow.

[Period Covered: 1570-1573] Towards the end of the Tenmon Era, Shogun Ashikaga`s powers were weakening by the day and many were there who planned to overthrow him. It was the beginning of the Sengoku (Warring States) period. Three men attack a gunpowder maker in a farmhouse, the first chopping off his arm with his sickle-&-chain weapon, the second blinding him with sword, the third giving the killing blow. His son Kojiro Kosume escapes the attackers as everything he has known up to then explodes into conflagration. He grows up & enters the start of the Tokugawa Era, intent on avenging his father.

Zatoichi's trek through 88 temples to atone for his violent past is interrupted as he stumbles into a village terrorized by a violent yakuza boss.

Keizo Tsujiguchi believes his wife Natsue was having an extramarital affair when their child was kidnapped and killed. He believes of her extramarital affair she was unable to watch over their child properly and blames her for their daughter's death. To exact revenge on his wife, he then adopts the killer's child without telling the truth to his wife or their newly adopted child.

A father decides to put his delinquent daughter into a temple in Kyoto known for its austere novitiate. Initially resistant to all forms of discipline, she ends up falling in love with the nun who is in charge of her.