This erotic love story depicts the love and downfall of a couple at the mercy of the IT bubble. Aoi, who moves to Tokyo from the countryside with dreams of becoming an actress, meets Odajima, the young owner and president of an IT venture, at a group date she is invited to by a friend. Eventually, Aoi falls in love with Odajima and enjoys the celebrity lifestyle of her dreams, but...
After failing his university entrance exam, Yuki Hirano sets his eyes on the role of a forestry trainee. Setting off for training he doubts his decision many times, but eventually after passing the training course, he is sent to Kamusari Village for a year of work experience - where he becomes assimilated with the beauty of nature and the warm-hearted people of the village.
Wishing to find peace, Zatoichi travels to his old village but only finds trouble when he ends up in a love triangle and finds old scores have followed him home.
After arriving in the town of Shimonita, Ichi finds that a price has been put on his head by a local yakuza boss. He's drawn into a trap, but after hearing of the slaying of a former love, Ichi furiously fights his way through the entire clan to face the killer, a hired ronin.
Zatoichi is sworn to protect the life of a young girl and without any real allies finds himself in the middle of a bloody turf war.
Childhood memories of fishing with grandpa grow so vivid they visit the protagonist's present experience.
In the wake of Pearl Harbor, a young lieutenant leaves his expectant wife to volunteer for a secret bombing mission which will take the war to the Japanese homeland.
An American woman is stranded in Tokyo after breaking up with her boyfriend. Searching for direction in life, she trains to be a ramen chef under a tyrannical Japanese master.
How the Japanese process American pop culture and make it their own -- a mind-bending odyssey through cultural mixing.
The discovery of a corpse and the ensuing probe by an idealistic journalist threatens to unravel a bumbling local politician's campaign for governor of Colorado.
Set in Tokyo in 1940, the peaceful life of the Nogami Family suddenly changes when the father, Shigeru, is arrested and accused of being a Communist. His wife Kayo works frantically from morning to night to maintain the household and bring up her two daughters with the support of Shigeru's sister Hisako and Shigeru's ex-student Yamazaki, but her husband does not return. WWII breaks out and casts dark shadows on the entire country, but Kayo still tries to keep her cheerful determination, and sustain the family with her love. This is an emotional drama of a mother and an eternal message for peace.
This documentary shows the fishing grounds of the far north. It provides an insight into the hard and dangerous work on a fishing trawler ; laying out and hauling in the fishing nets, processing the fish on board and storing it in the cold store.
On a quiet street in Helsinki, Sachie has opened a diner featuring rice balls. For a month she has no customers. Then, in short order, she has her first customer, meets Midori, a gangly Japanese tourist, and invites her to stay with her.
Revealing the flaws of Japanese society, the 1995 sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway prompted Murakami to return to his homeland, whose conformism he rejected, to examine it closely. This led to the creation of two works: Underground and 1Q84.
For centuries the Japanese warred among themselves and their neighbors, creating a colorful, rich and sometimes brutal legacy. Intriguing to outsiders for centuries, modern Japan is no less so In the 21st century. Focuses on Tokyo and its environs, with attention to scenery, shopping and shrines.
Nachtwake
A perfect day, blue skies and perfect weather. ZĂ© is going fishing. On a desert lake a strange and charismatic character rents boats using an old semi abandoned trailer. Both of them are part of an infernal cycle that will end up transforming the prey into the hunter. The one who dies kills and the one who kills is already dead.
The dark sensibilities and cultural resonances of Butoh, the radical Japanese dance movement, are explored in this multilayered work. Profoundly rooted in both traditional and contemporary Japanese culture, Butoh arose in a spirit of revolt in the early 1960s. Characterized by frank sexuality and bodily distortions, Butoh transforms traditional dance movements into new forms, stripping away the taboos of contemporary Japanese culture to reveal a secret world of darkness and irrationality.
What is peace? What is coexistence? And what are the basis for them? PEACE is a visual-essay-like observational documentary, which contemplates these questions by observing the daily lives of people and cats in Okayama city, Japan, where life and death, acceptance and rejection are intermingled.
In Burma during the closing days of WWII, a Japanese soldier separated from his unit disguises himself as a Buddhist monk to escape imprisonment as a POW.