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.
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.
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.
1962 Japanese movie
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.
Kazuko Yoshiyama 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.
Melodrama by Kiyoshi Saeki
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.
Michiyo lives in the small place Osaka and is not happy with her marriage; all she does is cook and clean for her husband.
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.
The president learns that the company's biggest stockholder is also a friend of his singing teacher and spies on his movements.
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.
1939 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.
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, Tokiko, 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.
1962 Japanese movie
1962 Japanese movie
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.
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.
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 musical comedy about a spirited orphan who forms a youth baseball team and gets caught up in a mix of sports, singing, and crime when he tries to return a star player’s lost money.
A new third-class president wins an appointment thanks to his marriage with the former president's daughter.
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.
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.
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.
Where Chimneys Are Seen focuses primarily on the interconnected lives of two couples in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in Senju, a poor industrial section of Tokyo.
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.
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.
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.
A young student of traditional dance falls in love with a handsome young man who visits the dance school in order to take photographs.
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...
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 Japanese family is torn apart by the tensions of an avoidable nuclear world war between the superpowers.
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.
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 boy aviator endures rigorous training and a sad fate, and grows into a strong man with his eyes set on becoming an eagle.
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.
1948 adaptation of Golden Devil
1948 adaptation of Golden Devil, part 2
Young Guy (Kayama) competes in an electric guitar competition and plays American-style football. Released alongside Invasion of Astro Monster.
During a packed game at Korakuen Stadium, Eagles’ star Tsubota faints, while singer Kyoko Tsukita collapses on stage at Cabaret Copacana. Goro Hayatori, deputy director of Hayatori Hospital, grows suspicious of Akuri, founder of the new religion “Reihi-kyo,” who had predicted these incidents. Together with his fiancée Mitsuko Nogata and friend Chief Kamimura, he investigates Akuri. It’s revealed that Akuri conspired with Dr. Sakurada, a psychiatrist, using a brainwave-disrupting ray to cause Tsubota and Tsukita’s collapse. Disguised as “Busujima,” Sakurada operates from a nearby villa. Meanwhile, Dr. Stanley from Monotor Republic plans to assassinate conglomerate Maurice and enlists Sakurada to create a half-animal man. Soon after, Akuri predicts Tsubota’s death as Sakurada aims to showcase the creature’s power for profit.
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.
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.
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.
1945 Japanese movie
Machiko falls in love with a mysterious man, but her family wants something different for her.
In Kyoto a young kimono maker with traditional ideas gets involved with a married professor.
1947 Japanese movie
A melodrama based on the novel by Yasunari Kawabata, telling about the tragic fate of a mother and daughter who are attracted to the same man.
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...
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.
Portmanteau film about young lovers.
In order to get Kanako (Izumi Yukimura) married, her mother places a rental listing in the student medical school newsletter and attempts to find a suitable lodger who will catch the eye of her daughter.
Japanese counterpart to Romeo and Juliet
A spectacular comedy with a star-studded cast that depicts unusual trials and unexpected verdicts regarding the five deadly sins: the crime of beauty, the crime of a terrifying wife, the crime of taking the wrong course, the crime of seducing, and the crime of killing with laughter.
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.
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
A musical film made for the inauguration of Shochiku's Ofuna Studio, with an all-star cast of the era.
Japanese drama film.
The first instalment in Toho's popular Wakadaishō (Young Guy) series.
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.
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 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.
Though plagued by ill health all his life, a young Japanese man is obligated to fulfill his family's longstanding military tradition.
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.
Story of famed Japanese actress Kinuyo Tanaka, with an emphasis on her working relationship with director Kenji Mizoguchi.
Three men vying for the same job end up chasing the same girl in this comedy-drama from noted Japanese director Yasujiro Shimazu.
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.
The film adaptation of Yuzo Yamamoto's novel tells the story of the difficult fate of a single mother in pre-war Japan.
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...
Japanese war movie.
A love triangle among a girl, her poor boyfriend, and a rich company president.
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...
Seven employees rise up in rebellion against an irresponsible company.
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
A beautiful but sad romantic melodrama about three sisters who are uninhibited, pure and lovely, and who stand tall like the peaks of a place that has endured the winds and snow of love! Eisuke Taniguchi (Shimizu), president of Towa Electric Works, has three beautiful daughters. The eldest, Kozue (Todoroki), is an intelligent and dynamic modern girl, the second, Yoko (Otowa), is a modest girl with Japanese tastes, and the third, Hanayo (Wakayama), is a mischievous girl who has not yet lost her schoolgirl temperament. All three have feelings for Kiichiro Matsuzaki (Uehara), the president of a magazine company. He was married to Kozue, the eldest daughter, by agreement between their parents, but it was Yoko whom he loved, so he asked her to end her engagement to him.
The third and final chapter of MP & GI's Toho Trilogy expands the geographical reach of the franchise, taking stars Lucilla You Min and Takarada Akira across the Pacific to Hawaii, where scenic travelogue passages add to the cross-cultural affair. Also expanded is the romantic entanglement, as the love birds find themselves embroiled in an intricate love pentagon! By then a rising star of Toho boasting multiple talents, Jimmy Lin was bestowed the unenviable task of playing one of the five, the Lucilla character's long-lost fiancé…
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?
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.
After running away from her mother, Ashiko works as a maid at an inn and changes her name, but she finds herself torn between her past and a new relationship with a lonely trader on the beach of Atami.
A film by Toshio Sugie
A youth drama set in the Japanese alps. Two robbers, chased by the police, escape from the youths of a university mountain club who are trapped in a lodge during a blizzard. This ski action romp has the tempo of a musical, and Okamoto Kihachi's style is on full display. Tsuruta Koji makes a special appearance as a senior member of the mountain club.
Caught in a corporate power struggle, a man uses betrayal and strategy to expose corruption and settle personal scores—only to find true support where he least expects it.
When a corrupt executive takes over his struggling company and violates his girlfriend, a young salaryman declares war, leaving his job to expose the truth by any means necessary.
The night in Ginza was shimmering with neon lights. A grand celebration was being held for the seventh anniversary of the club "Ayako." Among the celebrities gathered for the beautiful Madame Ayako were Ayako's patron, businessman Hisamatsu Kozo; Madame Kahoru of "Black Pearl"; Madame Reiko of "La Bonne"; and the drunken, disheveled Fukiko, the owner of "Pahiyon," who relentlessly insulted Ayako. The next day, Fukiko jumped from the roof of a building. Her suicide, the result of her failure to attract customers, seemed to symbolize the harshness of Ginza beneath its glamor.
May Kawaguchi is a famous Japanese fashion designer. Returning to Tokyo from her home in New York, she travels incognito with a tour group, in hopes of having a quiet vacation without being noticed. But she is spotted and the press has a field-day with the returning celebrity. Her hopes of rest shattered, she agrees to put on a large-scale fashion show.
Engineer Shuichi defies his wealthy family to live with bar hostess Kazuyo, whose loyalty to her struggling family complicates their love. As class, pride, and temptation test them, true affection proves stronger than circumstance.
When corruption spreads through a real estate company, president Hiyoshi brings in his honest friend Ryūtarō to reform it. Facing union unrest and betrayal from within, Ryūtarō exposes an embezzlement scheme and helps restore order. After the company stabilizes, he quietly leaves for Kyushu, urging his colleagues to carry on without him.
Romantic melodrama about the loves and adventures of Kageyama (Takarada) and his fellow oarsmen at Meikyo University.
Shuichi, a young doctor working at a hospital in Bangkok, falls in love with the daughter of a wealthy Chinese trader.