Ken Uehara

The legendary empire of the lost continent of Mu reappears to threaten the world with domination. While countries unite to resist, an isolated World War II Captain has created the greatest warship ever seen, and possibly the surface world's only defense.

With delicate, unobtrusive strokes, Naruse evokes both the humor and bitterness of his characters’ dilemmas, in this bleak, compelling poignant portrait of a quartet of aging geishas contemplating their troubles with men and money.

Yoshiyama Kazuko is a third-year junior high school student. One day while cleaning the lab, she smells lavender and faints. From then on, she has the power to travel through time.

A young woman takes up her new job as the servant of a noblewoman and soon discovers that underneath her facade of luxury lies great unhappiness.

An ingratiating bride develops warm ties to her father-in-law while her cold husband blithely slights her for another woman.

Shipwreck survivors found on the presumably uninhabited Infant Island leads to a scientific expedition that discovers a surviving native population along with the Shobijin, tiny twin fairy priestesses of the island's mythical deity called Mothra. After the fairies are kidnapped by an exploitative businessman named Clark Nelson, Mothra sets out to rescue them.

Michiyo lives in the small place Osaka and is not happy with her marriage, all she does is cook and clean for her husband.

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.

Setsuko is unhappily married to Mimura, an engineer with no job and a bad drinking habit. She had always been in love with Hiroshi but both of them failed to propose when Hiroshi left for France a few years ago. Now he is back and Mariko tries to reunite them. She too is secretly in love with Hiroshi.

In Depression-era Japan, a courteous bus driver carries an eclectic group of passengers from the mountainous Izu to Tokyo.

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.

Lt. Koji Kitami is a navigator-bombardier in Japan's Naval Air Force. He participates in the Japanese raid on the U.S. Naval Base at Pearl Harbor in 1941 and is welcomed with pride in his hometown on his return. As Japan racks up victory after victory in the Pacific War, Kitami is caught up in the emotion of the time and fights courageously for the standard of Japanese honor. But his assuredness of his government's righteousness is shaken after the Japanese navy is defeated in the debacle of Midway.

A Japanese family is torn apart by the tensions of an avoidable nuclear world war between the superpowers.

Iemon Tamiya is an impoverished masterless samurai who craves a better life, which he cannot have because of his marriage to Oiwa, who is completely devoted to her husband.

A wealthy family will not allow the military to grow crops on their fields due to their superstitious beliefs about their son's illness.

A young man rents an apartment in Tokyo and discover it was built by his father. He falls in love with the daughter of the mistress of the house and decides to marry her. Only to discover that his father is is in debt and wants him to marry Ranko so that she may help his company by granting 1.5 million yen. Teruko decides to borrow money from a greedy bar owner who lends her money on certain conditions and photographs her without her consent. A love traingle forms between Koroku, Ranko, and Teruko. Things complicate when Koroku marries Teruko and Tsugawa threatens them for the money causing many twists and turns.

Pre-war Asakusa was a riotous district of cabarets, dance-halls and brothels - a striking backdrop for Shimazu's story of innocence and experience. Pretty, young Reiko is the new dancer in an infamous theatre troupe, and her fellow performers try to protect her virtue in a land of vice. Meanwhile, an ageing actor wants to be a hero off stage as well as on, and the troupe matriarch Marie has to keep them all together.

The eldest daughter of a noble family is in love with an aviator while being courted by a fellow aristocrat she thinks is a dullard. This part is told from the perspective of Akemi.

Muntinlupa no yo wa fukete

A man who works late hours at a deadening job lives together with his wife and his younger sister. The younger sister's a modern girl who's starting to receive romantic attention from one of her co-workers.

Gosho’s most celebrated film both in Japan and the West, Where Chimneys Are Seen is perhaps the most compelling example of his concern for, and insights into, the everyday lives of lower-middle-class people. Based on Rinzo Shiina’s novel of the absurd, the film depicts the lives of two couples against the backdrop of Tokyo’s growing industrialization during the 1950s.

The sweet but naive denizens of a charming port town are hoodwinked by a couple of con men at the outset of World War II. But the hustlers’ plan backfires when they come down with severe cases of conscience. Keisuke Kinoshita’s directorial debut is a breezy, warmhearted, and often very funny crowd-pleaser that’s a testament to the filmmaker’s faith in people.

Part 2 starts where the first film ended, with Iemon disposing of the bodies of his wife and Kohei, marrying upward, and being blackmailed by the evil Naosuke.

Ten years into a marriage, the wife is disappointed by the husband's lack of financial success, meaning she has to work and can't treat herself and the husband finds the wife slovenly and mean-spirited: she neither cooks not cleans particularly well and is generally disagreeable. In turn, he alternately ignores her and treats her as a servant. Neither is particularly happy, not helped by their unsatisfactory lodgers. The husband is easily seduced by an ex-colleague, a widow with a small child who needs some security, and considers leaving his wife.

A married couple looking for an apartment move in with the husband's co-worker, a widower. The husband becomes jealous of the widower and his wife.

In 1976, a drifting star named Gorath is discovered to be on a collision course with Earth. Although it is smaller than Earth, its enormous mass is enough to destroy the planet totally. A mission sent to observe Gorath is destroyed after the ship is drawn into the star, with a later mission barely escaping the same fate. However, Astronaut Tatsuma Kanai is left in a catatonic state due to his near death experience. Unable to destroy the invading star, Earth's scientists undertake a desperate plan to build giant rockets at the South Pole to move the planet out of Gorath's path before it is too late.

A young doctor, Kozo Tsumura, falls for young nurse Katsue Takaishi. But she's got a secret: she's a widow with a son. Kozo and Katsue decide to run away to Kyoto, but her child suddenly became sick and she just missed the train and Kozo. She makes it to Kyoto finally, but is unable to meet him. Plus she isn't accepted into Kyoto society. She goes back to her hometown and tries to forget him. She quits the hospital to concentrate on her singing. She makes her professional debut with the hit "Aizen Katsura". Kozo is in the audience.

Sanae is left a widow after her prestigious husband dies, but holds the proceeds of a million yen insurance policy. Being childless, her former in-laws have no objection to her return to her own family.

Uta’s mother died when she was six years old; her father she never met. She was forced to adopt a traveller’s life when her grandmother died, and now she is a dancer and part of a family of actors who travel from town to town, setting up street performances. A way of escape from this marginal existence arises when she gets the chance to move to tea merchant Hiramatsu’s place, where she is asked to teach his daughter to dance.

A young student of traditional dance falls in love with a handsome young man who visits the dance school in order to take photographs.

In Kyoto a young kimono maker with traditional ideas gets involved with a married professor.

Buntaro, the president of a food trading company got tired of the day-to-day routine of life. The new secretary, Nobuko, suggested her "shacho-san" (the president) run away from the job. Nobuko took Buntaro to her home and introduced him to her own family as friend, "Sachio-san"...

Two childhood friends go their own ways but meet again some years later after they have both married. They get re-acquainted, meet each others’ families, and all is well. Then the disagreements start...

Portmanteau film about young lovers.

In postwar Japan a young woman is unable to marry her sweetheart because her family's in difficult circumstances and needs her income to keep afloat.

Japanese "kayo" film based on the song "Ieraishan" by Yoshiko Yamaguchi.

The few residents left on the streets in Tokyo share their individual stories and come to understand the melancholy of saying goodbye.

Hisshoka is a 1945 Drama film directed by four Japanese directors.

The Spy Has Not Died Yet

A businessman’s daughter falls in love with one of her father’s employees.

Romantic melodrama set in contemporary Hong Kong, Japan and Laos. Hiroshi Tanaka (Takarada) is a Japanese journalist on assignment in Hong Kong who meets and falls in love with Wu Li Hung (Ming). He proposes to Wu Li but she rejects him because of her distaste for mixed marriages (her mother was Japanese but deserted her family and returned to Japan during WWII). Tanaka locates Wu Li’s mother and unsuccessfully tries to reunite them, but eventually Wu Li accepts his proposal. A joyous Tanaka flies off to Laos to finish an assignment but on the eve of his wedding he is killed there.

Adaptation of the novel by Bunroku Shishi.

A Japanese film

Japanese drama film.

A musical film made for the inauguration of Shochiku's Ofuna Studio, with an all-star cast of the era.

Young Yuichi (Kayama) romances Sumiko (Hoshi) while helping out at his family's restaurant, singing in a band, and preparing for an important boxing tournament.

The first instalment in Toho's popular Wakadaishō (Young Guy) series.

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.

A widow raises her sickly son to be strong enough to join the army and fight on the front lines.

The story tells of Tsuchiya, a university professor and a widower who is in love with a widow who runs a small restaurant, and his son is in love with a runaway girl who turns out to be the leader of a religious sect. Kusano is the henpecked proprietor of a rice biscuit shop who dreams of owning a bird and dog shop and his daughter is in love with a boarder, employed by the private detective agency searching for the runaway girl. The agency head has his own dream of arranging thirty marriages and has already accomplished twenty-seven. Tatsumi is a newspaper reporter who dreams of a big scoop to enable him to marry a girl TV producer and his friend a mountain climbing enthusiast who dreams of joining a Himalayan expedition but is opposed by his wife. His love of the mountains is shared by a boarder in their home and by a fishmonger's son.

A woman has to give up her dream of becoming an actress when her family goes into debt, but she catches the eye of a businessman while working at a nightclub. He sets her up with her own nightclub, but with expectations attached.

A modern love story involving different affairs.

Atsuko is an office secretary who is also her family's primary source of income and caretaker in postwar Japan.

Yuuichi Tanuma, our young hero, is a senior at Kyonan University and captain of the marathon team. His parents run a sukiyaki restaurant back in his hometown. When his allowance stops coming in, Yuuichi moves back in with his folks to work part-time. He has his eyes set on nationals in the fall, until one day he runs into a young woman who's fallen into trouble with the Lightning Gang...

An Ishiro Honda film. The second part of A Rainbow Plays in My Heart released the same day as the first film.

After their lord is tricked into committing ritual suicide, forty-seven samurai warriors await the chance to avenge their master and reclaim their honor.

Four fishermen friends are caught up in a piracy plot.

Ultra-perky model likes single freedom but feels ryosai kenbo ("good wife, wise mother") pressure, exemplified by her bored-to-tears sister.

Three men vying for the same job end up chasing the same girl in this comedy-drama from noted Japanese director Yasujiro Shimazu.

Story of famed Japanese actress Kinuyo Tanaka, with an emphasis on her working relationship with director Kenji Mizoguchi.

An Ishiro Honda film. The first part of A Rainbow Plays in My Heart released the same day as the second film.

Towards the end of World War II, five men are tasked with freeing the son of a general from Chinese captivity.

Soyokaze

A Woman's Life

In the heart of the Japanese Alps, in Kamikochi, Nagano Prefecture, botany professor Kazuhiko Onuma spends time with Tsuruko, his lover. One night, Kazuhiko's wife Kazuyo comes to see them and confronts the professor about his extramarital affair, and Tsuruko, an inevitable witness to the confrontation, leaves the professor the following morning. Over the next decade, whenever he visits the mountain cabin every autumn equinox, the memory of Tsuruko will forever haunt Kazuhiko...

A love triangle among a girl, her poor boyfriend, and a rich company president.

Japanese war movie.

The eldest daughter of a noble family is in love with an aviator while being courted by a fellow aristocrat she thinks is a dullard. Told from the perspective of Ryota. In this second part, we learn that Akemi is pregnant...

Kureji sakusen: Kudabare! Musekinin

Young Girls Are Everywhere

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.

In the movies of those times, you can see young boys in the company scene often. Those boys were called kyuji (給仕), which means “waiter” literally. They are doing odd jobs in the company including serving tea, ushering visitors, buying tobacco, etc. Ordering lunch for the individual requests was also an important job. Those boys were hired often as soon as they graduated from elementary school.

Fourth entry in Toho's Wakadaishō series directed by Jun Fukuda and released on a simultaneous screening with Matango. Filmed on location in Hawaii.

Weed with Flowers

Kekkon Sanjûshi

Kempeitai fights American spies in Japan

Kosaka drops to death while ice climbing with his friend Uozu to see the sunrise on the New Year’s Day. The investigators try to find the cause of the death, then discover that the cut rope was made in the factory for which Uozu’s brother works.

Melodrama by Kiyoshi Saeki

Thriller drama by Kon Ichikawa

Melodrama by Kon Ichikawa

Bittersweet shomin-geki drama by Keigo Kimura

A family comprised of a man, woman and their only son is torn apart when the father, who is a doctor with his own clinic, is to go off to war. Soon the wife and the son are left without an update of his status and whether he is alive or not. With the clinic lying dormant the doctor's wife rents the premises to her husband's underling. This is a man who does not accept payment from the poor. The woman, in the meantime, works at a restaurant whose owner being ill has given her additional duties. Her younger sister is an unmarried finance writer who also lives with them. It is both sisters, however, who receive marriage proposals.

The president learns that the company's biggest stockholder is also a friend of his singing teacher and spies on his movements.

The narrative is about a woman who faces hard times, when her husband is arrested for a crime committed by his boss. The woman also has a child to look after, and they end up meeting several colorful personalities.

Most of the students studying Ikebana with Kozoe Iemoto are daughters of rich Tokyo families. Kozoe meets and grows close to a doctor who proposes marriage but whose mother harbours ill feeling towards her because of an incident in the mountains where a child got into difficulties. Kozoe rejects the proposal but falls ill and when she recovers, decides to devote herself entirely to the world of flower arranging.

Inoue was something of a rarity in the sense, that he was a Shochiku house director who seems to have worked mostly in period films, often with big stars like Hasegawa or Bando. "Sumidagawa", named after the river that runs through Tokyo, is also a period film, but thematically a modern one. All the themes that you associate with the normal Shochiku women's films set in the present day are in this film, just in a different context: love, the planning of a marriage, career, family relations and societal melancholy. There is no action or swordplay.

歌う野球小僧

A new third-class president wins an appointment thanks to his marriage with the former president's daughter.

Naomi Tazawa (Hiroko Kawasaki), who works at Isetan Department Store, was told by an executive at a film company (Ken Uehara), that he was going to make a film about her. She was scouted to become an actress, but she held strong. Around that time, her adoptive father dies, and at the time of his death, she learns that her real father was a man of high rank.

Young Guy (Kayama) competes in an electric guitar competition and plays American-style football. Released alongside Invasion of Astro Monster.

Musume no boken

1962 Japanese movie

Kitamori Yuki was particular about her promise to her mother-in-law Hana. The promise is that, as the daughter-in-law of Koichi, the eldest son of the Kitamori family, Hana entrusts everything to Yuki, but wants her entire family to come see her on her birthday. At that time, her second son Keisuke's daughter Megumi, who is her private taxi driver, made a mistake, and she was overwhelmed and approached Yuki for advice. Eventually, her mother Kayo of Megumi learned about this, but a period was quietly struck by her women coming to a conclusion that should be the food for Megumi's growth.

1939 Japanese movie

1962 Japanese movie

1962 Japanese movie

A love affair between a beautiful fashion designer returning from France and a naïve young judo player against the backdrop of Japan in the early post-war period, where new customs and old traditions mix.

Momoko and Asako are half sisters, daughters of the famous architect Tsuneo Mizuhara, who also have another half sister in Kyôto, Wakako, whom they have not had. While Asako is a sweet young lady, Momoko, the eldest, goes out with whomever she wants, thus hiding the trauma caused by seduction and abandonment during the war by young Keita Aoki. One day Keita re-enters her life.

Akiko Hojo, a nurse at Aisei Catholic Hospital, is spending another public holiday at Kotaro Hidaka's house. Hidaka, who is a poor musician suffers from tuberculosis, feels an unbearable love for Akiko, who takes great care of him during his visits. Because of his worries about his illness he doesn't want Akiko to be as unhappy as he is. Akiko loves Hidaka but there was one question. Is it because one side of Akiko has the essence of a woman living in an era when she's alone? Or, maybe it's because she nods to the reality of life...

A boy aviator endures rigorous training and a sad fate, and grows into a strong man with his eyes set on becoming an eagle.

1948 adaptation of Golden Devil

1948 adaptation of Golden Devil, part 2

Japanese horror movie from1957.

1945 Japanese movie

Machiko falls in love with a mysterious man, but her family wants something different for her.

The 35th NHK Asadora about a man who enters the world of popular theater.