Deguchi Ume
Comedy around a motorman and a conductor of a streetcar.
Kayo Kitagawa
Japanese romance film.
Setsuko Sasaki
The film is dedicated to the souls of flight school graduates killed in World War II. Young boys dream about becoming pilots and apply to flight schools. However, the flight schools have extremely demanding, harsh training, and once they finally become pilots, they must become suicide bombers and give their lives for their homeland.
Pinku from 1968.
Taki
A roughneck named Komakichi of Kawachi, Osaka, comes back from a three-year training course to become a chef, hoping to be with his crush Tamae, a daughter of a Japanese restaurant’s owner. His father is not happy because Komakichi has no intention to become a rickshaw man to follow in his father’s footsteps.
Fourth film in the long-running series Daiei Studio's Woman Gambler with Kyoko Enami starring where she plays the woman gambler Ogin.
An absolutely astonishing art house ninkyo yakuza film. Wandering gambler runs into a young swindler woman working with old man. They are both arrested by detective. A year later gambler is staying with gangster boss when he comes across that woman and her partner again. Boss lusts for both her and his own daughter, while the boss's crazy yakuza brother loves his daughter, who, in turn, watches the player and wants to destroy the people standing in her way. And here lies one of the film's remarkable departures from the standard ninkyo efforts: it doesn't have a third party villain, nor a clear distinction between good and evil. It's bursting with romantic emotion and wrenched with gritty realism, shot with striking black and white compositions, and explodes into shocking carnage. It has lengthier, more detailed gambling scenes than any other yakuza film I've seen. And it has a heartbreakingly beautiful score. You could call it the Ashes of Time of ninkyo yakuza films. A masterpiece!
Former playmates (Naito and Tamura), both long ago abandoned by their parents, recall their youth and fall in love.
Ichi, housekeeper
Epic saga of an idealistic land-owning family dealing with militarism, war, social change and economic reform.
Kikue Sugisaki
Popular guitarist Shunsuke Sugi had a busy schedule and lived a puppet life with manager Yoko Ohara. On the way home from the Tohoku tour, he rescued Akiko, a girl who had passed out in a car accident. Ahead of him was the bustle of Tokyo. He suddenly met Akiko during a noisy party with friends. He tried to persuade Akiko, who wanted to become a singer, to return to the village, but it didn't work. One day he invited Akiko to play in Yokohama. When they returned to childhood and talked about their dreams, they felt love for the first time. Meanwhile, returning home, Yoko turned her jealousy on the two of them, and announced the death of Shunsuke's mother...
A playboy bartender pretends to be gay in order to approach women. He is in cahoots with another opportunist, a young woman who is trying to seduce a rich married man. Their attempts at making easy money can only end tragically.
Riki Tonobe
She'd watched them go one by one. Friend after friend. White dress after another. Yet again, Shimako was attending another wedding reception that wasn't hers. She knew the procedure: watch the bride and groom get congratulated, smile to cover up the loneliness. But she didn't want to feel like this forever. In that moment, Shimako decided that the next wedding she'd attend had to be her own.
Dance teacher
This movie is based on an immortal literary work "The Snow Country," a story about a life of geisha Komako who lives in a region with heavy snowfalls.
Masako Yamashita
A seamstress seeks the love of her life while helping a troubled couple.
Ayako Wakao won the Blue Ribbon and the Kinema Jumpo for this film.
Motojima's Wife
Three robbers escape with loot from a heist before one of them kills the others. Their corpses wash up near the aftermath of a maritime calamity, provoking a policeman's interest.
Teacher Ikegami
It is 1922 and Fumiko is a high school student. Her family is poor but she loves to study literature. Her father, a peddler, does not return home and Fumiko finds herself in financial trouble, not being able to pay for her schooling and her school excursion trip. Still, she gets a temporary job at a factory and tries to make ends meet. A film about bright side of youth adapted from the television serial of the same name.
Tomiko Sekiguchi
During the war a university professor meets a girl and marries her. Very soon however, it is apparent that their needs are not matched. He would much rather be translating Shakespeare than attending to her, and she has a secret in her past - one that results in her sleeping with a great number of men.
A sake factory worker on holiday returns to his home town, where he rapes the wife of one of his co-workers in the forest. The other man returns home to find his wife changed and suspects that she has been unfaithful.
Tetsu Kawabe
Mayumi Ogawa stars in the tale of a Turkey miss—basically a prostitute who services men in Turkish baths—whose plans to get rich in the stock market, open a beauty salon, and marry her sweetie are turned upside down by the arrival of her boyfriend-stealing half sister Mako Midori. - Pulpinternational
Shigeko
Toki, Yahichi's mother
Director Jun'ya Satô's debut film focuses on the inhuman training of recruits, the brutal drill system that reigned in the Japanese army during World War II, where in the first two years of training, ordinary people were turned into inhuman killers. For his first film, the director was awarded the Blue Ribbon Awards in the Debutant of the Year nomination.
A dark family secret sends a 21-year-old French student (Hoshi) on a journey of self-discovery.
The story tells of a group of samurai who were left leaderless (becoming ronin) after their daimyo (feudal lord) was forced to commit seppuku (ritual suicide) for assaulting a court official named Kira Yoshinaka, whose title was Kōzuke no suke. The ronin avenged their master's honor after patiently waiting and planning for over a year to kill Kira. In turn, the ronin were themselves forced to commit seppuku for committing the crime of murder.
A treasury official passed over for promotion and obsessed with careerism interferes in the lives of his three sons, who seek escape from his relentless pressure in the mortal danger of mountain climbing.
Makiko
A story about the lives of four sisters and their manipulative mother who must come to terms with each of their decisions in life.
Yodogimi
From the late 1500's through the founding of the Tokugawa Shogunate many battles were fought as the great warlords vied for power over the nation. Princess Sen, a daughter of Tokugawa Ieyasu, is caught amidst the family feud between the Tokugawa and Toyotomi families. When her father Lord Tokugawa Ieyasu attacks her husband Toyotomi Hideyori's castle, her life takes a sudden turn for the worse. Will she ever find peace in her life again? One of Hibari Misora's most memorable performances, a movie you will never forget!
Mother
When two sisters fall in love with the same man, one must decide to look elsewhere.
Otake
A geisha helps a runaway who looks just like her.
Otora
Period piece about a young man who, because of his hard life alone in the world, has become a yakuza. When he hears that his mother may be living in Edo (Tokyo), he travels there, intent on finding her and leaving the swordsman's life behind. But a team of rival gangsters is hot on his heels.
1962 Japanese movie
Two obaachans become fast friends listening to music in front of a record store. They both boast about their loving sons but in reality, one had just escaped a retirement home and the other was looking for an escape from her son and daughter-in-law. With nowhere to go, the two wander around, befriending a cosmetics salesman and a kind waitress who give them beer. This biting social satire starring two memorable grandmothers, scripted by Yôko Mizuki, picked up on Japan’s aging population problem far ahead of its time.
Katsu
Towards the end of the Second World War, a downed U.S. pilot is captured and imprisoned by rural Japanese villagers, who await official instructions as to how to proceed with their “catch.”
Kimie Morikawa
Japanese comedy film.
Kitamura
In the late 1950's prostitution was banned in Japan and if a woman was found exercising this profession they were sent to a reformatory. This is a story of one of these brave women Kuniko who is released from the reformatory and tries to build a new life.
The life of a toilet-seller during the Japanese Economic Miracle.
First of three Awamori-kun movies. Based on the comic by Kaoru Akiyoshi.
Manao Horiuchi movie
Kame
Ayako Wakao portrays a downtown rice ball shop girl whose heart is set on her business. Involved in her life are three young men—stage actor Goro, businessman Kokichi and Sanpei Pachinko.
Mrs. Sotaro Uhara
One week into newlywed Teiko Uhara's marriage, her husband, Kenichi, leaves on a short business trip and never returns. Teiko travels across Japan to search for him, and along the way discovers some surprising facts about her husband's past. With only a pair of old photographs among his belongings to go off of, Teiko tries to figure out what has happened to him.
Yuki Takeuchi
Kikuyo
On his way to Tokyo one night, a truck driver picks up a country girl and has his way with her amidst a forest. A few days later he loses his job after a run-in with some punks, but is offered a job by a gangster impressed by his fighting skills. He tries to make amends with the girl he ravished, but becomes caught up in the ways of the underworld...
Fumiko
A woman and her daughter are each forced to contend with an increasing pressure to marry, particularly from three men who knew her late husband.
Mrs. Tazawa
Based on the novel of the same name by Seichô Matsumoto.
Japanese "kayo" film centered around the song "Dare yori mo kimi wo aisu" by Kazuko Matsuo.
A successful textile industrialist from the provinces, who is beloved by his employees for his kindness, cannot find a wife because of a disfiguring birthmark on his face. Even the courtesans in Yoshiwara refuse to entertain him, until an indentured peasant prostitute, Tamarazu, takes the unsavoury assignment and treats him with brash tenderness.
Aki Katsura
A reckless student contemplates terrorism in a prescient film that confirmed Shinoda as a fearless member of Shochiku’s iconoclastic New Wave. At the height of student protests, Shimojo (Shinichiro Mikami) takes his aggressions to another level, beset by seemingly insoluble feelings of alienation.
Starring Akira Takarada as a lightweight boxing champion.
Madam next to Hikariso
On a quiet spring day in the suburbs, a stray dog found the corpse of a baby. Three days after his death, the blood group of the victim was determined. Detectives Hayashi, Kaneko, Nagata and Yamagata begin their investigation, suspecting the parents of the murdered child. They use a towel, baby diapers and bruises on the baby's body as clues in the investigation. Who killed the baby?
Kiyo
Kin Narikin
A drummer falls for a pawnbroker's daughter.
Oiku Wada
Story of young love in the hills.
Kazuko Sugawara
Pu Zhe , the younger brother of the Emperor of Manchukuo, Pu Wen, marries Ryuko the daughter of a long-established aristocratic family - all in the interest of the Japanese rulers , which legitimizes the relationship between Japan and its Chinese puppet state. To the surprise of all , a deep love between Pu Zhe and Ryuko develops. It is put to the test when Japan loses the war, Manchukuo is dissolved and the imperial court must flee. The lovers now have to separate: Pu Zhe tries to escape to Japan with his brother , while Ryuko flees with her daughter Eisei over the country. A film on the relationship between Pujie (1907-94) , brother of the " last emperor " Puyi and his second wife, Marquise Hiro Saga (1914-87).
Toshiko (Yuri's mother)
Keiko, whom everyone calls Mama, narrates her story: she's a hostess on the Ginza, 30, a widow. She describes life's vicious cycle: acting cheerful around drunks, dressing and living well to convey confidence, needing money for these expenses and for her demanding mother and brother, and knowing she's growing older. She's of an age when she must choose: to seek marriage (difficult given her tarnished occupation), to be a kept woman, or to borrow money to buy a bar of her own. Each route has dangers, including investors demanding a return on their loans. Keiko has a quiet dignity that attracts men, but are they what they seem? Does she actually have choices?
Drama which shows the struggle of Fumiko, a female teacher, at work and at home.
Fusako Kaneko
A modern love story involving different affairs.
The inventor of a ground-breaking glue, Sanada, becomes rich thanks to his discovery a high executive in his company. Because of this promotion, his world is changing completely : his wife behaves like never before, considering she's now rich and has the right to do whatever she wants, even having an affair. (Also occasionally known in English as “Overflow”)
Kayoko Fukui
A lighthearted take on director Yasujiro Ozu’s perennial theme of the challenges of intergenerational relationships, Good Morning tells the story of two young boys who stop speaking in protest after their parents refuse to buy a television set. Ozu weaves a wealth of subtle gags through a family portrait as rich as those of his dramatic films, mocking the foibles of the adult world through the eyes of his child protagonists. Shot in stunning color and set in a suburb of Tokyo where housewives gossip about the neighbors’ new washing machine and unemployed husbands look for work as door-to-door salesmen, this charming comedy refashions Ozu’s own silent classic I Was Born, But . . . to gently satirize consumerism in postwar Japan.
Master swordsman, Tsukue Ryunosuke is confronted by the families of his victims. Will justice be served for the lost innocent lives? The conclusion of the famed Jidaigeki series is an amazing film, with a completely different perspective on the story from the later versions. While the international audience is more familiar with the “Sword of Doom” and “Satan’s Sword” versions of Daibosatsu Toge (The Great Bodhisattva Pass), the “Souls in the Moonlight” trilogy casts an entirely different light on Ryunosuke and his motives. Can this brutal killer be brought to justice, or is living his life as a blind wanderer a more terrible fate? His sword skills have not diminished, nor has his desire to kill!
Takako Hirasawa
An Ishiro Honda film.
A film about the life of Kiyoshi Yamashita, a Japanese painter with disabilities.
Japanese drama film.
Anzukko (Little Peach) is the daughter of a successful writer. She turns down each one of her suitors, until she marries a beginning writer named Ryokichi. Their life quickly sinks into despair.
The love between young college students Toki and the handsome Takaga is tested when Takaya's parents, who despise Toki's family's geisha house business, intervenes in their relationship.
Otsuno
This is the second installment of the trilogy based on Japan’s greatest novel “The Great Bodhisattva Pass”, following the life and times of bloodthirsty samurai, Tsukue Ryunosuke. Blinded in an explosion and further injured from a fall, the master swordsman is taken in by Otoyo, a woman who falls in love with him. Under Otoyo’s dedicated care, Ryunosuke’s physical and emotional wounds seem to heal. However, deep inside, the demons that drive him to kill yearn to resurface. Meanwhile he is being pursued by Utsugi Hyoma, a young samurai seeking to avenge his brother’s death at Tsukue’s hands. Hyoma is being aided along the way by the clever thief Shichibei.
Set in the 1860s, the final years of the Tokugawa Shogunate, The Fireflies focuses on Tose (Awashima Chikage), the mistress of the Teradaya, a small inn in the Kyoto suburb of Fushimi. She does not have an easy life. Her husband, Isuke (Ban Junzaburo), is a wastrel who fancies himself a kabuki singer and who is obsessed with cleanliness. Her mother-in-law, Sada (Miyoshi Eiko) dislikes her because of her humble origins (her family are farmers) and because she fears that she will inherit the inn instead of Sugi, her daughter. Sada's hopes for Sugi, however, are dashed when she runs off with a con artist and leaves her child behind for Tose to take care of. When Sada becomes seriously ill, it is Tose who nurses her. On her deathbed, Sada asks her daughter-in-law's forgiveness. Meanwhile Isuke spends most of his time with a mistress he has taken, forcing Tose to manage the inn by herself
A comical love story between two college students — Hitomi, a strong-willed girl, and Shogo, a handsome, earnest and poverty stricken man.
Sadako Kamiya
Japanese romantic comedy film.
Tatsuko Ono
Yuko is sent to the coastal regions to be raised away from the rest of her sophisticated family where she finds out from her ill grandmother that she is not who she thought she was.
Tane Abe
Tane, the lady proprietor of an inn for amorous couples, lives there with her three children. When her eldest daughter loses her fiancé due to the fact her mother is a mistress, her despair drives her to become a cabaret hostess.
Adaptation of the Yukio Mishima novel.
Oshima's aunt
A woman marries, gives birth to a stillborn child, and divorces, falls in love with a hotel-keeper, only to find herself subordinated to his drive for success, takes up with a tailor who cannot console himself with her strong personality.
The story of a young couple deeply in love with each other but, because of complications and misunderstandings created by the people surrounding them, they find it very difficult to achieve happiness.
Akiyama's mother
Ignoring the protests of his working-class mother, a young man becomes wrapped up in the world of delinquents and yakuza.
Kiyoko (Takamine Hideko) and her husband want to open a coffee shop. She becomes increasingly close to the bank clerk (Mifune Toshiro) she's asked for a loan.
The president learns that the company's biggest stockholder is also a friend of his singing teacher and spies on his movements.
Tatsuko Taya
The lives of five prostitutes employed at a Japanese brothel while the nation is debating the passage of an anti-prostitution law.
Kuniko's mother (uncredited)
A young girl moves to Tokyo and endures the rivalries between other high school girls of varying cultural and economic backgrounds.
A new third-class president wins an appointment thanks to his marriage with the former president's daughter.
A musical starring 3 Japanese pop music and TV stars.
Hayase, a schoolteacher, assists Sakai in editing a German-Japanese dictionary. Hayase owes much to Sakai, as Sakai raised him for 13 years after Hayase lost his parents in a war. Hayase has been secretly married to Otsuta, a former geisha, and has been unable to tell Sakai of the marriage, aware as he is that Sakai wants him to marry his daughter, Taeko. Otsuta wants Hayase to tell Sakai about her, but understands the difficulty of his position. At a festival, Otsuta is mistaken for a pickpocket and taken to the police. Because of her background as a geisha, newspaper reporters eagerly delve into her past and report that she has been married to Hayase. Unaware of what has been printed in the papers, Hayase decides to tell Sakai about his marriage. Sakai shows the newspaper to him and orders Hayase to part with Otsuta. Given no chance to explain, Hayase accepts Sakai's order.
Japanese film.
Shizuka, Eiichiro, and Mineko, their father and son, live modestly in a certain suburb, leading a dreary but happy life. Eiichiro is troubled by Shizuka's desire to live together in familiar Tokyo. Mineko is the exact opposite of Eiichiro. A literary masterpiece depicting the fateful sorrow and humor of a mother and child
Sumie Shida
The story of a group of young people who organise their own travelling symphony orchestra to provide music for people living in remote villages shortly after the war.
Lending money, job hunting for civilians and babysitting. All these things are usually not listed on a policeman's job description. But for the officers of this local police station, it‘s part of their daily routine. One day, patrolman Yoshii (Hisaya Morishige) finds an abandoned baby and a six year old girl standing in front of the station. When he's declined by the welfare office, orphanage and local health clinic to take them in, he decides to take care of them himself.
Three young women make a suicide pact, but they grow to have a better understanding of themselves.
Tomi, Shinji's Mother
Lonely youth Shinji meets Hatsue, a pretty pearl diver, on the beach and the two fall in love. But Shinji has a rival for Hatsue's affections, Yasuo.
Nobu
What is the life of a Geisha like once her beauty has faded and she has retired? Kin has saved her money, and has become a wealthy money-lender, spending her days cold-heartedly collecting debts. Even her best friends, Tomi, Nobu, and Tamae, who were her fellow Geisha, are now indebted to her. For all of them, the glamor of their young lives has passed; Tomi and Tamae have children, but their children have disappointed them. Kin has two former lovers who still pursue her; one she wants to see, and the other she doesn't. But even the one she remembers fondly, when he shows up, proves to be a disappointment.
Fusako Tashiro
An elderly woman devoted to her foster-daughter searches for a good husband for her.
A sad and troubled man finds a new job five years after the end of WWII, where he writes love letters for other people.
Mrs. Ushiyama
Comedy about a 50-something movie director, his new bride, a classical dancer, and his adult son and daughter and their loves.
Kiyoko
A human billboard and a shoeshine girl met a kid of five who got separated from her mother at a street of Ginza. They try to find a mother in a crowded town...
Ginko, a poor cobbler's daughter, becomes a geisha to support her family. She passes from one geisha house to the next, trying to find love and hope in the process. No matter how hard she tries, she just can't escape her sad fate.
A screwball tale of a suspected “lady thief” and the detective who is on her trail, following her from Osaka to her home village, where she is going to hold a memorial service for her father. Of course, the detective falls in love with his prey.
Natsu, Mayumi's mother
Parent apathy to sexual education leads to various troubles for the young cast.
Miss Shen
Jewelry shop proprietress
Following the Second World War, the lives of various people in a poverty-stricken area of Tokyo are entertwined. Pachinko parlor girls, shoeshine boys, a maker of costume jewelry, and a streetcorner artist all struggle to make their livings and to find happiness in difficult surroundings.
Osei
A teenaged girl witnesses her widowed mother's attempt to sustain her family.
Mrs. Kuwabara
1950s Japanese comedy.
Once an average and seemingly ordinary Tokyo girl, she suddenly finds herself as a TV star owing to her discovery by a casting company, which noticed photographs that her cousin had sent. When another actress falls ill she is given the role instead. Her first film is a success propelling the young actress to popularity, her own fans, money and a house. While everything looks dandy from the outside not all is well within the family however.
Kumako
Melodrama by Kon Ichikawa
Mitsue
The troubled relationship between a writer and his ballet teacher wife, who has for years loved another man, finally leads to the breakup of the family.
A Japanese adaptation of Guy de Maupassant's short story Boule de Suif, directed by Kimura Keigo
Wataru Naohiko who has the prosecutor general as his father became a young composer and its symphony "saint" invoked the world echoed. But his disciple Uchiyama and his best friend prosecutor Daisuke Toki accused his music as a sesame of pause-only technique, not a truly heart-hungry art.
Adaptation of a novel by Yojiro Ishizaka, originally released in two parts.
Yasuko
When the future of his construction company falls into danger, a controlling father pushes his children into unsatisfying marriages and careers in order to regain financial stability.
The tale of a feudal swordsman who cynically takes no responsibility for anything, relegating it to others, and then taking the credit.
A woman's struggle for equality in Japan in the 1880s. Eiko Hirayama leaves Okayama for Tokyo, where she helps the fledgling Liberal Party and falls in love with its leader Kentaro Omoi, just as the party is being disbanded by the government.
Jida-geki by Santaro Marune.
Third film of the Bannai Tarao series starring Chiezo Kataoka
Fusako, a drug dealer's young mistress in postwar Japan, loses her tenuous grasp on life upon learning about her lover's affair.
Captain's mother
Hisshoka is a 1945 Drama film directed by four Japanese directors.
The premature death of a young mother serves as inspiration for her husband and son.
1942 adaptation of Izumi Kyoka's novel.
Set in Qingdao, China, a Japanese company locates an office there and begins work and cooperation with a local Chinese company for business. Many Japanese engineers also move to China, with their families, for the company in order to construct a canal. There are young Chinese resisting the Japanese in this area.
Kiyo
What is marriage? Young couple in match-making wanted to know before they decide. They visited married couples of sisters and brothers. Love comedy in 1942.
Jurobei, a kaisen tonya (wholesaler in port) in Awa, was wronged and killed on the day of the Dance Festival by the evil merchant & the chamberlin. His brother (Kazuo Hasegawa) vowed vengeance on the day of his brother's death. So every year the villains are worried during the Awa Dance Festival (which is part of the Obon festival), but nothing has ever happened, until seven years later...
Ine Onoda, the eldest daughter of a poor family of farmers, raises a colt from birth and comes to love the horse dearly. When the horse is grown, the government orders it auctioned and sold to the army. Ine struggles to prevent the sale.
Twenty-year-old Yoshiko (Setsuko Hara) and her younger sister Asako (Yōko Yaguchi) struggle to accept changes in their home during the preparations of their widowed father's wedding to his chosen bride, Maki Tsuneko (Sadako Sawamura), who's anxious about her conduct as the bride.
Tomoko, Hideko's mother
Hideko, a young Baseball fan, determined to cheer for her favourite baseball team by creating a new song for them.
Japanese film based on the life of writer Ichiyo Higuchi (1872-1896).
Sumie
Tomotaka Tasaka's A Pebble by the Wayside (Robo no Ishi), made in 1938 and taken from a Yuzo Yamamoto novel, takes place around 1902, was about a young boy brought up entirely by his mother since his drunken father is never home. An intelligent teacher wants to send him to middle school, but instead the father apprentices him to a clothing store to which he is in debt. The mother dies and the boy is forced to quit work when his father insults the store owner. Later the boy goes to Tokyo, but only to continue his hardships. First he is forced to do a maid's job at a boarding house and later is used by an old woman to steal at funerals. Finally he is rescued by the teacher, whom he meets in Tokyo.
Film about poet Ishikawa Takuboku
Omine
