Dumped by a bored pet owner, a mixed-breed mutt ends up with three time loser Yasuyuki, who's loveless, homeless and jobless. Yasuyuki finds solace in the dog, whom he calls Tamura, and uses it to mend fences with his ex, who's distracted by her mother's debilitating illness. A trip to a hospital reveals Tamura's ability to comfort dying patients, leading to dog and master attending the real-life Japanese Therapy Dogs training school.
An assassin fends off numerous attacks from her comrades, who are trying to move up in rank by killing off the competition.
Ito
Three WWII veterans, reunited by family circumstances, quickly find their life savings threatened by a private corporation; they band together to fight back.
Man at Park
Yuriko, once a concert pianist, now practices home-making while husband Takashi stays out late with co-workers, leaving her to decay into severe mental illness.
Street person
Roman Porno from 1972.
The Akiba and Shimura crime families run the streets of “K City”. With the construction of new buildings and new factories underway, the city has sprouted into a boomtown and business is good. Two of the most infamous mobs of Tokyo want a piece of the pie. As out-of-town yakuza flood the city overnight, the crime boss of the Akiba family, Tezuka (Joe Shishido), is released from prison after a five year sentence. He does not like the "change" he sees.
Japanese crime film
A professional hunter, Tetsuya, returns from Alaska to find that his hometown had become a lawless slum. He is shocked to learn that his younger sister had committed suicide after being raped by unknown men. One day, he rescues a girl from being attacked by some gang, and discovers that the same gang had driven his sister to death. Using his lethal hunting skills, Tetsuya begins to take revenge…
A young man with a strong sense of justice is torn between two girls: the flighty Taneko and the serious Suzuko. With wisdom, courage and honor in a Japanese spirit of manliness he wins the day.
Barbershop Owner
Two brothers seek revenge on the yakuza responsible for the death of their father.
Sadako, cursed by generations before her and neglected by her common-law husband, falls prey to a brutal home intruder. But rather than become a victim, she forges a path to her own awakening.
Employee
On a small island, inhabited by only fourteen hundred people, a young fisherman's son, Shinji falls in love with Hatsue, the daughter of the richest and most difficult man on the island. Despite their differences in class, they begin to meet and rumors spread of them having an illicit affair. Soon after, Shinji jumps into a stormy sea to help a ship in distress. The vessel turns out to be owned by Hatsue's arrogant father, who now becomes an understanding and sympathetic parent and allows the two lovers to marry.
Based on the loosely autobiographical novel of the same name by Toko Kon. Ken Yamanouchi stars as Togo Konno, the titular bastard.
Terumi Matsui
When a mysterious stranger muscles into two rival yakuza gangs, Tokyo's underworld explodes with violence.
After their father dies, his children try to get by on a house boat.
Hayasaki
An unofficial sequel to Million Dollar Match (1961) which also starred Koji Wada as a young energetic boxer. This story deals more with betting action surrounding a boxing match, concentrating mostly on the high-powered Yakuza gambling dens.
Not too long ago, Soichiro was considered one of the most powerful men in business. But his business had failed, his granddaughter had committed suicide. There was nothing in his life anymore that he could look forward to. Sochiro was ready to put an to it end to all. As he drives down the Usui Pass, headed toward his summer house in Karuizawa, a girl in red heels, wearing nothing else but a coat jumps in front of the car.
Worker A
Set in Kawaguchi in the early 60s, this simple story chronicles the lives of foundry families and one girl's dreams of higher education.
On summer vacation, university student Shintaro gets involved with a magic troupe as they travel from festival to festival.
Kyuro
In the city of Yokosuka, Kinta and his lover Haruko, both involved with yakuza, brave the post-occupation period with a goal to be together.
In the nine part Wataridori series (1959-1962), Kobayashi played a wanderer on Japan’s back roads with most of the accoutrements of a Western hero, from a horse to fringes, guitar and even a trusty bullwhip.
Miyamoto
Japanese comedy film.
Mega star Akira Kobayashi stars as Jiro in the rambunctious tale of a chef who opens a restaurant in the busy Ginza district. His culinary skills and dashing good looks bring in the women as well as unwanted trouble, while an explosive political scandal builds around his girlfriend’s business...
The young rambler, Shinji Taki, with his guitar arrives a hot spa town at the foot of Mount Aizu Bandai. Of course he solves the problems in the town while encountering the sinister rival, Masa "the pistol guy".
A young doctor falls into a despair of developments. He plans to revenge the disgrace inflicted upon his sister, whose engagement was broken as a result.
The 3rd film of the famous "Wataridori" (The Rambler) series from Nikkatsu. The young rambler, Shinji Taki (Akira Kobayashi), with his guitar arrives in Sadogashima Island, Niigata, Japan. Of course, Shinji meets yet another beautiful girl named Noriko, who closely resembles the famous actress Ruriko Asaoka again. Of course, Noriko is in trouble. Of course, Shinji's yet another skilled rival named "Tetsu, the Gunman" comes to Sado shortly. Of course, the villain tries to kill Shinji and Tetsu. Of course, Shinji solves the problem and leaves Sado suddenly.
Koreyoshi Kurahara’s ingeniously plotted, pocket-size noir concerns the intertwined fates of a desperate bank manager, blackmailed for book-cooking, and his resentful but timid underling, passed over for a promotion. The marvelously moody Intimidation (Aru kyouhaku) is an elegantly stripped-down and carefully paced crime drama.
Clerk of Inn
A sharpshooter kills two prisoners in a police van at night. The guard on the van is suspended for six months; he's Tamon, an upright, modest man. He begins his own investigation into the murders. Who were the victims, who are their relatives and girlfriends, who else was on the van that night? As he doggedly investigates, others die, coincidences occur, and several leads take him to the Hamaju Agency, which may be supplying call girls. Its owner is in jail, his daughter, the enigmatic Yuko, keeps turning up where Tamon goes. Tamon believes he can awaken good in people, but has he met his match? Will he solve the murders or be the next victim? And who is Akiba?
Rambler Shinji arrives in town armed with nothing but a guitar. With assistance from an old gun-for-hire friend, he sets about to stop the mob from turning an honest ranch into a gambling resort.
Arriving in the town of Hakodate, a wandering musician, Shinji Taki, is soon recruited by the local gang as a hired hand. However, with the arrival of a sinister gunman, Taki's mysterious past catches up with him.
Aioi Station policeman A
A man is wrongfully accused of murder.
Kensaku Muro and his father manage a farm in Sakudaira at the foot of the Yatsugatake Mountains. One day Kensuke saves a suicidal woman, Fukiko Uzu, who jumps into a waterfall. Having injured his eyes in the process, he is brought to Tokyo for medical treatment. In Tokyo, Kensaku visits his mother Kaneko who left her son years ago. She now owns an exclusive club and has a son, Isao, with the president of Kobe Concern. Isao plots to steal Kensuke's farm as part of a land development scheme with Fukiko's husband. Without knowing they are blood related, their conflict over the farm intensifies.
Takeuchi
A prisoner escapes from prison to find the real criminal.
Janitor at bank
College students come up with a scam to rob a gambling house. When it comes time to collect, the money isn't there, leading the young men into even more serious crime.
This short comedy concerns the extramarital affair of a drugstore owner. It is based on a popular song by the star of the film, Frank Nagai.
Artisan
The moment he's released from prison, the honorable gangster Miyamoto recovers the stolen diamonds he had stashed before getting pinched. When he returns to his haunt to make good by friend who took a bullet for him, he is diverted by the greedy boss Oyane and his insatiable taste for Miyamoto's precious stones. Replete with film noir style, "Underworld Beauty" is one of Suzuki's best nods to the American gangster genre.
A young doctor discovers that the city hall of records has a record of his death. He and some friends try to seek out the person who reported it, and uncover a shady group of criminals with a sinister plot.
Shibata's henchman
A former boxer gets involved with a club hostess trying to escape the clutches of her gangster employer.
Shin
In a warehouse area at night, a drunk chief engineer is stabbed to death by someone who whistles. After the break of dawn, two seamen join the crew of a rusty cargo ship Kaiyo Maru. One is a troublemaker with bad attitudes, Senkichi Nomura, who pursues an enemy in order to take revenge for his father's death. The other is Keizo Sasaki, a buff, eagle-eyed man on board for a certain mission.
Painter
Shokichi, the owner of the clothing store, lives with his daughter Hideko and plans to open an art gallery. One day, Hideko led a handsome art student, Shohei and a poor painter, Sohei. Sohei’s painting was praised by a great printer at the completion ceremony of the art gallery. Since he became successful as a painter, but he looked quite indifferent. Around the same time, Shohei’s sister brought Sohei’s pictures to the gallery and Shokichi noticed that she was a daughter of his first love.
Kanako is an intelligent and beautiful girl in her third year of high school, but there was a dark shadow. Raised by her father, Jusaburo, who is the owner of the Matsukawa troupe, she grew up without knowing the love of her mother. She has been on stage since she was a child, but oneday she cried and complained to her father, and she stopped going to school. In a mock exams, Kanako overtook her classmate Tetsuji to take the lead. That evening, Kanako went to the Yasue Theater in the neighboring town with Eikichi, and saw the affair of her stepmother, Yumi, who should have been resting due to her illness. The man ran away in a hurry, and Yumi confessed that Kanako's mother, Miyako, had also run away for the same reason...
Saheji, a man-about-town, gets stuck at a high-class brothel when he can’t pay the bill. He makes the best of his situation by performing various tasks amidst the tumult of the end of the shogunate—but always by making sure to get a “commission” for his troubles.
Roppeita is big in size, clumsy and full of energy. When his grandfather orders him to move out to Tokyo to save a sinking milk delivery business a distant relative of his runs, he encounters the most strangest of clientele.
A group of rank-and-file Japanese soldiers are jailed for crimes against humanity, themselves victims of a nation refusing to bear its burdens as a whole.
Ice Man
A jobless young couple, Yoshigi and Tsutue, wind up at the outskirts of the Suzaki red-light district in Tokyo. Tsutue talks her way into a job pouring sake for male customers at a small bar run by a sympathetic older woman, while Yoshigi is shunted off into a nearby noodle shop, where he gets a job delivering noodles. Tsutue charms and runs off with one of her clients. Yoshigi, ignoring the attentions of a sweet co-worker, pursues Tsutue.
Sailor B
A romantic adventure tale about a young guy working on a whale-hunting vessel and his love for a childhood sweetheart.
Oyama
In the War's closing days, when a conscience-driven Japanese soldier fails to get his countrymen to surrender to overwhelming force, he adopts the lifestyle of a Buddhist monk.
Private Detective Ippei Shizuno faces off against a serial killer and a wealthy woman's society who runs an illegal gun trade.
Red District Businessman
The female members of the family of the Minister of Health and Welfare, who has just proposed a program of birth control, become pregnant one after the other. - Nikkatsu
An adaptation of the Kawabata Yasunari short story.
At the close of the war in Japan, a widowed mother makes every possible sacrifice to bring up her ungrateful son and daughter who are unimpressed with their poor standard of living at home. They gradually reject her in search of the material comforts that working as a maid cannot provide. The mother's despair becomes interminable.
A businessman runs afoul of the law and commits suicide, leaving behind a wife and five children. The eldest son takes the family to Tokyo and labors to restore its name and fortune
This film was mainly shot in the Japanese skiing resort Hokkaido in 1937-38 and was intended to create support for the coming winter olympics of 1940 in Japan which however were cancelled because of the Japanese-Chinese war. A Japanese production, it was nevertheless made with German involvement in the form of skiing champion Sepp Rist and celebrated cinematographer Richard Angst (who also contributed to the script). Both had regularly worked with the inventor of the mountain film genre, Dr. Arnold Fanck, who had helmed the German-Japanese co-production "Die Tochter des Samurai", also shot by Angst, the year before. Angst apparently stayed in Japan until mid-1939 when he returned to Germany, carrying this film with him. Angst submitted it to the German censors later that year, but for reasons unknown to me it took three more years before the film was finally shown in Germany under the name "Das heilige Ziel" (The Holy Aim). (Karargara)
Circus Boy
On vacation's eve, a boy is sent to the countryside to live with his uncle after his father is imprisoned and accused of embezzlement.
Kotarô (as Tokkan Kozô)
Yuki is a young, single mother supporting herself and her son, Haru, with a job as a bar hostess.
During college military training exercises, the bond between two friends and athletic rivals is tested when one of them becomes involved with a woman who may be a prostitute.
Tomio
A professor, Komiya, and his bossy wife, Tokio, are to look after Setsuko, their high-spirited niece from Osaka. Despite being a minor, Setsuko is a liberated woman who does whatever she wants, including smoking. She even convinces Koyima to take her to a geisha house. When she gets rather tipsy, the professor calls Okada, one of his students, to take her home. The wife becomes suspicious of Setsuko when she sees Okada bringing her home.
A silk factory worker is persuaded to support her son's education up to a college level despite their poverty. Many years later, she travels to Tokyo to visit her son.
Family drama. A middle-aged father has just married off his third daughter, but still has his nine year old son to raise whom he resents as he was unwanted. (British Film Institute)
Zenko
Kihachi, an unemployed worker, wanders around the industrial flatlands of Tokyo's Koto district with his two young sons, Zenko and Masako. He is unable to find a job and has to rely on his sons catching stray dogs to earn reward money for their meals. As days go by, Kihachi and the boys no longer have enough money to stay at an inn for the night. Luckily for him, he encounters an old friend, Otsune, who finds him a job and allows them to stay at her eatery house.
If you throw this child away
Don-ko
A Japanese film
Domestic comedy involving a strong wife and a "henpecked" husband taking place in a family-run judo school.
Kanichi as a boy
The story focuses on the widower Nemoto, ostensibly a businessman, who has one son, Kanichi, the hero of the title. Nemoto remarries; his new wife is a widow with a son and daughter of her own. However, Nemoto’s business turns out to be out a shady scam, and he disappears, leaving his wife to raise the three children alone. In order to support the family, she is obliged to become a bar hostess. She conceals this shameful employment from the children, but the truth comes out years later, after her daughter is rejected by her husband’s family when they investigate her background.
Tomibô
In a back alley of the Shitamachi district of Tokyo, Kihachi bears witness to a series of romantic complications involving the inhabitants of the neighborhood. Considered to be a lost film.
Boy at liquor shop
This pair of gentle yet witty and inventive comedies from the director of The Neighbour's Wife and Mine typify both the formal experimentation of early Japanese sound cinema and the social milieux that Shochiku tended to depict. 'Virtually plotless, and feeling more like comic sketches than fully developed stories,' writes Arthur Nolletti, Jr, 'these light comedies, or farces, take a wholly trivial matter (often a socially embarrassing situation) and use it as a springboard for a succession of gags.' Much of the films' distinction comes from the wit of Gosho's direction, the imaginative use of the new sound technology and the charm of the acting, particularly of the heroines (Kinuyo Tanaka in Bride; Hiroko Kawasaki in Groom). Yet in both films, Gosho finds room for some shrewd observation of character and environment, subtly exploring the values and assumptions of the suburban petit bourgeoisie.
Tomi-boh
An aging actor returns to a small town with his troupe and reunites with his former lover and illegitimate son, a scenario that enrages his current mistress and results in heartbreak for all.
Shigeru, Ôsaki's brother
The story is centered around the devastating experiences of two villagers, Osaki Shuichi, and his cousin, Nishimiura Kinue, when they leave their hometown for the metropolis of Tokyo. They are in love with each other, but Kinue is expected to marry the lawyer Kanda Seiji. In consequence, Shukichi leaves for Tokyo, where he becomes tutor to the son of the rick Iwaki family. The heartbroken Kinue also makes her way to the capital, where she becomes a bar hostess.
Period film from 1934.
Bellboy
Mikio Naruse’s final silent film is a gloriously rich portrait of a waitress, Sugiko, whose life, despite a host of male admirers and even some intrigued movie talent scouts, ends up taking a suffocatingly domestic turn after a wealthy businessman accidentally hits her with his car.
Tomio (as Tokkankozo)
Two Tokyo co-workers come across a destitute young lady in search of a place to live.
Shôkiku's younger brother
An aging geisha, whose angry teenage son is ashamed of her profession, works alongside a young geisha, resentful of her family for forcing her into a life of ignominy.
Neighbour's child
An actress returns to Tokyo after a successful stint in Hollywood to reclaim—with the help of her gangster brother—the daughter she abandoned years before.
Keiji
Two young brothers become the leaders of a gang of kids in their neighborhood. Ozu's charming film is a social satire that draws from the antics of childhood as well as the tragedy of maturity.
boss of the children (as Tokkan Kozô)
This 1932 adaptation is the earliest sound version of the ever-popular and much-filmed Chushingura story of the loyal 47 retainers who avenged their feudal lord after he was obliged to commit hara-kiri due to the machinations of a villainous courtier. As the first sound version of the classic narrative, the film was something of an event, and employed a stellar cast, who give a roster of memorable performances. Director Teinosuke Kinugasa was primarily a specialist in jidai-geki (period films), such as the internationally celebrated Gate of Hell (Jigokumon, 1953), and although he is now most famous as the maker of the avant-garde silent films A Page of Madness (Kurutta ichipeji, 1926) and Crossroads (Jujiro, 1928), Chushingura is in fact more typical of his output than those experimental works. The film ranked third in that year’s Kinema Junpo critics’ poll, and Joseph Anderson and Donald Richie noted that 'not only the sound but the quick cutting was admired by many critics.
Kato's splendid mustache is an obstacle when it comes to finding a job. However, he gets a job as a security guard at a construction site. The president of the construction company tries to grow a mustache like Kato's and, failing, orders Kato to shave off his.
Kendo no shinpan (uncredited)
Graduate Okajima finds his old-fashioned beard makes life difficult in a comedy exploring the tension between tradition and modernity.
First son
A salaryman finds some money in the street and gets a reward for returning it to its rightful owner. However his colleagues immediately start borrowing money and selling him things he doesn't need, much to his wife's annoyance. Considered to be a lost film.
The adventures of a modern day descendant of a famed Edo era thief are the basis for this short supernatural comedy romp.
Masao
Landlady's son
This bittersweet comedy tells the tale of a group of college roommates attempting to cheat their way through their exams. As the title goes, things don't work out for our roguish main character, but his classmates soon find themselves in a similarly sorry state...
Kurô, Child
Silent comedic short by Mikio Naruse
Tetsubo
A kidnapped boy proves to be more than his abductor can handle.
Third son
When Sakamoto is made redundant he cannot bring himself to tell his wife. Instead he investigates other employment opportunities. Considered to be a lost film.
