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.
In the Edo period, a nameless ronin accepts an assignment to go to a mountain pass and wait. Near the pass he stops at an inn where a collection of characters gather, including a gang set on stealing shogunate gold that's soon to come over the pass. When the Ronin's assignment becomes clear, to help the gang, he's ordered to kill the inn's residents, including a woman he's rescued from an abusive husband. He's reluctant to murder innocent people; then he learns that the gold shipment is a trap and he's part of a double cross. How he sorts through these divided loyalties tests of his samurai honor, and perhaps of his love for a woman.
Every year, at the festival, familiar merchants such as Toraemon, a magic trick, Tokubei, a blowgun, Kaji, acrobatics, and Unsaibo, a ritual, gather toward the port town.
In postwar Tokyo, a blunt, alcohol-soaked doctor diagnoses a swaggering young yakuza with tuberculosis, forging an uneasy bond that’s tested when the gangster’s ruthless former boss returns and drags him back toward the swampy underworld he can’t escape.
A woman remembers her own marriage when dealing with the love life of her son.
A teenaged girl witnesses her widowed mother's attempt to sustain her family.
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.
1962 Japanese movie
Two broke sweethearts wander war-scarred Tokyo on a single Sunday, stretching 35 yen as they chase housing, small pleasures, and a little hope.
Otsuta is running the geisha house Tsuta in Tokyo. Her business is heavily in debt. Her daughter Katsuyo doesn't see any future in her mother's trade in the late days of Geisha. But Otsuta will not give up. This film portraits the day time life of geisha when not entertaining customers.
An ingratiating bride develops warm ties to her father-in-law while her cold husband blithely slights her for another woman.
Sequel to "Irresponsible Age of Japan".
1962 Japanese movie
Keiko Yukawa is a former prostitute and the newest inmate at White Lily, a female rehabilitation facility.
A married Japanese forester during WWII is sent to Indochina to manage forests. He meets a young Japanese typist and promises to leave his wife. He doesn't and after the war, she turns up and the affair resumes.
Part 2 of the 'Onna bangaichi' series
A Japanese family is torn apart by the tensions of an avoidable nuclear world war between the superpowers.
When Sergeant Okubo's brother is murdered at a Japanese outpost in Northern China during the Second World War, Okubo poses as a war correspondent and seeks out his brother's killer.
A timid salaryman is the subject of this black comedy.
War widow Reiko rebuilds and runs the grocery shop in the house of her husband's family. Many years later, their business is threatened by a newly built supermarket and Reiko's in-laws plan to convert their small shop into a supermarket, to her detriment.
A husband and wife's pet peeves and minor irritations escalate into major rifts and animosity.
1962 Japanese movie
The story is about the social problems faced by Japan's indigenous Ainu, mostly centered on the reactions of the characters to their oppressed state.
1962 Japanese movie
In 1887, two businessmen, Echigo-ya and Kitahara, compete for railroad construction authorization from the government. The minister states that a local noble must not object, and his missing younger brother is the only one who could sway him. Meanwhile, Omitsu, a hotel employee tired of Echigo-ya’s wife’s arrogance, teams up with Kitahara to stage a scheme where a vagrant young man pretends to be the noble’s lost brother, aiming to trick and embarrass the wealthy woman.
1962 Japanese movie
A film by Hideo Suzuki.
1962 Japanese movie
Searching for his brother, Ryota stows away on a boat belonging to a criminal alongside two other teenagers. The group shipwrecks on Letchi island and discover the Infant Island natives have been enslaved by a terrorist organization controlling a crustacean monster. Finding a sleeping Godzilla, they decide to awaken him to defeat the terrorists and liberate the natives.
A widowed high-school teacher tries to raise his four children alone.
Young women at a precision optics factory in wartime Japan push to exceed production quotas, enduring illness, injury, and personal hardship to “serve the country.” Led by Tsuru Watanabe, they fight fatigue and setbacks to keep their line moving—even when duty collides with grief.
After her anti-fascist professor father is dismissed, Yukie navigates love, political repression, and wartime upheaval—ultimately forging her own path in pre- and post-WWII Japan.
A young army surgeon, Kyoji Fujisaki, accidentally contracts syphilis during a WWII field operation. Back at his father’s clinic, he treats himself in secret and breaks off his engagement rather than risk his fiancée’s future, even as he confronts the irresponsible patient who infected him—testing his ethics, pride, and capacity for sacrifice.
Michiyo lives in the small place Osaka and is not happy with her marriage; all she does is cook and clean for her husband.
The story of Kiyoko, a young woman who has successfully managed to make a break with her dysfunctional family who have been trying to arrange a marriage for her with a disagreeable man whom she has rejected.
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.
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.
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.
Tashiro coincidentally meets his best friend Sugimoto in a bar very close to the apartment in which Sugimoto’s wayward wife is found dead. Although Tashiro is not a suspect in the police investigation, he is racked with guilt and confesses to his wife, Masako. In an effort to further relieve his tortured sense of guilt, he then confesses to Sugimoto. Neither his wife nor his friend can believe that he could have been involved.
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.
Considered one of the finest late Naruses and a model of film biography, A Wanderer’s Notebook features remarkable performances by Hideko Takamine – Phillip Lopate calls it “probably her greatest performance” – and Kinuyo Tanaka as mother and daughter living from hand to mouth in Twenties Tokyo. Based on the life and career of Fumiko Hayashi, the novelist whose work Naruse adapted to the screen several times, A Wanderer’s Notebook traces her bitter struggle for literary recognition in the first half of the twentieth century – her affairs with feckless men, the jobs she took to survive (peddler, waitress, bar maid), and her arduous, often humiliating attempts to get published in a male-dominated culture.
A sad and troubled man finds a new job five years after the end of WWII, where he writes love letters for other people.
The story of a professional nude model stalked by a bizarre, unknown man wearing a hideous mask.
Three humorous love stories set in rural Japan.
A romance with political overtones about the relationship of a sheltered bourgeois woman and a doctor who devotes himself to caring for the poor. Over a ten-year period - from 1936 through the war - they find each other and are separated again by the events of those tumultuous days.
Banjun organizes a group of con men to fleece the greedy and rich.
Historical drama about a sleepy-eyed ronin.
Directed by Hiroshi Inagaki, the drama, set in the brothels of Shimabara in post-war Kyoto, is a moving look at the lives of women of tenacity and resilience.
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.
An irresponsible salaryman works his way to the top of the corporate ladder.
Ayako, a young woman from a rural fishing village, is sold by her family into a brothel when her father takes ill. There, she is quickly stripped of her innocence and illusions.
In "The Other Woman" the children of a distinguished professor find that the woman they have come to regard as their racy and slightly disreputable Ginza aunt is really their mother.
Suspense drama about a married salaryman whose affair with one of his co-workers is compromised when, returning from a clandestine meeting with his lover, he runs into a neighbor who is later accused of murder. Questioned by police about the neighbor, and blackmailed by his lover's neighbor, the salaryman's lies lead him on a path to destruction.
Toho-produced crime drama involving the drug trade.
Postwar Tokyo. Pin and Toku live in the squatter area of Kappanuma. Pin and Toku are avid gamblers. They take in Tsuru, a slightly demented woman who has run away from a geisha house.
A young Tokyo couple’s blissful newlywed life is turned upside down when an unexpected pregnancy arrives, sending them on a whirlwind quest for support from eccentric relatives and well-meaning neighbors.
A squadron of Japanese fighter pilots realise that they are never going to win the war when they understand that Japanese military tactics have little regard for life. Seeking the companionship of any woman who will have them, they spend their days indulging in every fantasy in order to escape the overwhelming fear of death looming just over the horizon.
A group of criminals whose diamond heist goes wrong retreat to a WWII era bunker where tensions begin to rise.
In postwar Japan, two sisters—a film studio script girl and a revue dancer—become swept up in the growing labor movement when workers around them strike for better conditions. As their conservative father opposes their activism, his own dismissal forces him to confront the realities of class struggle and join their fight for a fairer future. Now considered a lost film, Those Who Make Tomorrow was produced by Toho to promote unionization during Japan’s Allied Occupation.
Edmund Rostand's play Cyrano de Bergerac, transplanted to Japan. A poet-warrior with an oversized nose (matched only by his great heart) loves a lady. But she sees him only as a friend, so he helps another man to woo her by giving him the poetry of his own heart.
During the raging war between the Toyotomi and Tokugawa clans, the swordsman Mohei (whose family has been completely decimated) is recruited by Toyotomi to overcome the seat of power, Osaka Castle. Mohei's daredevil skills will be put to severe tests.
Saotome is a white-collar worker on the brink of a burnout who one day strikes up a friendship with Gen, a boorish drifter who approaches life one day at a time.
During the early days of the war a young student, Makito (Kazuo Funaki), falls in love with Yuko (Mayumi Ozora), the widow of a naval officer. She, however, is living with the memories of her husband and it is her younger sister, Yumiko (Nana Ozaki), who grows fond of the student. Then, one day, a young naval officer, Tadayuki (Ken Ogata), a friend of her late husband, comes to see the widow and she becomes attracted to him. Though Makito is inspired to study for the navy, he is much upset when he learns that Yuko and Tadayuki are to marry.
The legend of the birth of Shintoism. In Fourth Century Japan, the Emperor's son Ouso expects to succeed his father on the throne, but Otomo, the Emperor's vassal, prefers Ouso's stepbrother, and conspires to have Ouso die on a dangerous mission he has contrived. But Ouso prevails in the mission and returns to his father's castle under a new name, Prince Yamato Takeru. Otomo plots to have the Prince sent into even greater danger, but Otomo is unaware that the gods have favored the Prince and the outcome is far from what any of them expected.
Gang of robbers quarrel about the loot, but when one of them gets killed, his younger brother seeks them out to ice them one by one.
When an only child is struck by a car and dies, the child's mother seeks vengeance against the driver in this thrilling drama. The car was driven by the wife of a company president who is having an affair. The woman's husband manages to buy silence about the incident, but the victim's mother discovers the identity of the driver. After she secures a job in the home of the company president and his philandering spouse, the woman plans to murder the couple's son when he reaches the age of her late son.
This drama of middle-class life in postwar Japan tells the story lower-middle-class workers in the city of Kawasaki, and their troubles and travails.
In the wake of the 1956 Prostitution Prevention Law, a young woman recently released from one of Japan's new rehabilitation centers struggles to build a new life.
The story of an airport and its air traffic control crew in a remote and northern Japanese town. Three of the air traffic controllers are female with one of them working with her dead fiancé's sister. The engaged man had gone to war and never returned.
Tobe is a small-time crook who runs a prostitution business of blonde girls, as well as sells pornographic pictures. He frequents a cafe run by two women, one of them a young widow with a son. They like him and think that he is an ordinary office worker. One day, Tobe accidentally discovers pictures of an acquaintance, Kanzaburo, with a woman and sets out to blackmail him. He soon finds out that Kanzaburo died in a train accident but things may not be what they seem
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.
A story of unhappy youths and the perils of lack of sex education.
An Ishiro Honda film.
An Ishiro Honda film.
An Ishiro Honda film.
Ryô is a young leopard, Maki a rhythmical wave. The barrier between a teacher and a student gives way to the passionate embrace of a man and a woman desperately in love.
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.
The story is of two people. One is deaf, the other deaf and mute. They marry after meeting at a school reunion, and the film follows their trials and tribulations ... and joys.
With his simple appearance, eyes shining with love and a sense of justice, and voice burning with youthful passion, the eleven students felt unexpectedly in each other's hearts that "this teacher will surely be our confidant," and looked at each other and nodded their heads. This was the beginning of their collective affection for the new Ms. Shiono. The school for girls is a sacred place where the hearts of hundreds of innocent girls should ferment beautifully and freely for the day when they will become wives and mothers to come. How can we abandon them in such a state? Even after the nightmarish war was over, the nightmare remained at Shuei Girls' School.
Story about a poor Japanese woman living near an American army base who resorts to prostitution.
Two youths – the serious son of a Buddhist abbot and his rakish pal – quarrel over a restaurant keeper's daughter. When one of the youths dies, the other boy and the girl find they cannot forget him.
Easily bored, but still innocent and naive countryside girl (Mako Midori) discovers partying in Tokyo is a ton of fun. Yakuza-to-be (Ichiro Araki) is an acquaintance who tries to rape her, and the typically bland but very-good-here (Hayato Tani) the first boyfriend. Director Yasuo Furuhata (his first picture) lets his camera roll in trendy clubs amongst partying youngsters in a way that could've been out of 60s England or a Nikkatsu film. The film was inspired by an article in Life magazine (Volume 57, 1964) titled The Young Rebellion.
Tora-san returns to his family home to learn that his brother-in-law cannot go to Mitsuo's (Tora-san's nephew) athletic event. Tora-san volunteers to take his place, but gets into an argument with his brother-in-law's boss and returns to the road. He meets a young woman in Niigata who, unbeknownst to him, is a popular enka singer.
A young Tokyo salary man and his wife struggle within the confines of their passionless relationship while he has an extramarital affair.
A skilled country doctor's talents are such that he can even perform operations as difficult and novel as removing a patient's kidney for the first time in Japan. Unfortunately for him, however, his wife's addiction to gambling is of such a magnitude that he is down to selling his underwear to make money. The image sticks and he becomes known as the 'underwear doctor.' On the other hand, his successful surgery's patient is so grateful he himself wants to become a physician.
1964 Japanese movie
1945 Japanese movie
Japanese prison exploitation movie. Part 1 of the 'Onna bangaichi' series
A doctor is surprised when her long-lost love is transferred to the same hospital, and even more surprised to discover that he has a wife and child. Will she be able to confess her feelings to him before her worsening heart disease claims her life?
Based on the comic by Kaoru Akiyoshi
After killing a detective in a botched robbery, Keiichi (Natsuki) is on the run as police stake out the homes of his sisters, mother, and girlfriend.
1961 Japanese movie
Set during Japan's Bakumatsu period, the film follows Fukuzawa Yukichi, a poor samurai's son who defies societal norms to study Dutch and English. Despite facing opposition from his family and nationalist factions, he founds Keio University, becoming a key figure in Japan's modernization amid political turmoil.
Minako, a ballerina who has been dating since her school days, and Koheta, a banker. It was Koheta who was finally about to get married as a result of his promotion, but just then, a big change occurs in Minako's body..
Story of rebellious youth follows the 19-year-old son of a Hokkaido farmer who has an affair with the daughter of a wealthy trading company president.
At a coastal hot spring inn, a group of women navigate work, personal struggles, and unexpected scandals. When a guest threatens to expose one maid's past, she must decide whether to run or face it—with help from a kind local officer.
1961 Japanese movie
Fusako, a girl raised in a geisha house, tries to escape her dark past and faces repeated heartbreaks. After an unexpected pregnancy, she has an abortion and decides to start a new life away from the geisha world.
A group of hustling peddlers swindle rural towns with fake goods, facing betrayals, close calls, and constant setbacks as they chase survival and dream of a better future.
The story follows a man haunted by debt and crime, who flees with his mistress on a tense journey marked by betrayals and desperate choices. The film explores greed, betrayal, and the tragic downfall of a man consumed by money and despair.
A wealthy young man, engaged through family arrangement, meets a humble shop girl after she finds his lost ring. Their growing affection challenges class boundaries and family expectations, leading to a sincere romance that defies convention.
Thriller about three escaped convicts, one of whom (Sato), plans to murder the wife of a detective (Ikebe) whom he blames for the suicide of his pregnant mistress.