The Weavers of Nishijin captures the process of traditional textile manufacture in Nishijin.
In the Sengoku period, a woman and her daughter are raped and murdered by soldiers during a time of civil war. Afterwards, a series of samurai returning from the war through that area are found mysteriously dead with their throats torn out. The governor calls in a wild and fierce young hero to quell what is evidently an Onryō ghost.
A businessman with a disfigured face obtains a lifelike mask from his new doctor, but the mask starts altering his personality and causing him to question his identity.
Late in the 1500s, an aging tea master teaches the way of tea to a headstrong Shogun. Through force of will and courageous fighting, Hideyoshi becomes Japan’s most powerful warlord, unifying the country.
Two young women must come to terms with the fact that a man they're deeply linked to is a murdering rapist.
After the closure of a coal mine leaves her husband unemployed, Fumiko travels from Kyushu to Kyoto with her daughter Kimiko, and they become hostesses at a cabaret.
Nagisa Oshima's documentary details the rise of Chairman Mao during the revolution and shows the Communist Party's struggle and cultural upheaval. Made in 1969 for NTV station, this TV documentary also questions Mao's dictator tendency during the cultural revolution.
A sex-obsessed woman, a suicidal man she meets on the street, and a gun-crazy wannabe gangster become trapped in an underground hideaway.
The ship Kaijin Maru is left adrift after losing all means of navigation in a storm. The four people on the ship are becoming increasingly desperate as food and water run out.
A man wanders into a seemingly deserted town with his young son in search of work. But after a bit of bad luck, he joins the town's population of lost souls.
Murase is a bodyguard of yakuza group. Ochiai is a police officer who once was a student activist. When they meet, they are surprised how identical they look.
The world-famous woodblock artist Hokusai (1760-1849), a widower in need of a steady income, lives with his daughter Oei in the house of his friend Bakin.
A retired actress whose husband has recently died visits her summer home. There she has encounters with old friends and acquaintances who bring various stories and news of death and the past
A mountain man beheads his many wives to prove his love to an alluring woman he meets in an enchanted forest.
A woman takes revenge on her husband after he leaves her for a younger woman by harassing the couple with unwanted phone calls at night.
A college professor wants to bring the joys of sex to his frigid wife. He convinces his son in law to sleep with her because the idea arouses him, while also making him insanely jealous. The professor keeps a journal of his fantasies in a locked cupboard and hopes that his wife will find the key and read it.
Suzuko, a woman in her twenties who has a brother with political problems (due to communist reprisals), lives for over five years in a love affair with Tate who's a young lieutenant in the Army, ultimately becoming a right-wing fundamentalist revolutionary. She marries another man, one totally dedicated to the rigorous practices of Noh theatre, in an arranged marriage, but the bond that connects her with Tate is too strong.
After an elderly man is discharged from a hospital following a misunderstood, life-affirming impulse toward a fellow patient, he finds himself caught between his wife’s empathy and his children’s judgmental scorn. As his health wavers, he and his wife attempt to reclaim their intimacy and vitality during a seaside getaway, even as their son becomes entangled with the same young woman from the clinic.
Tells the story of the samurai Gengobe, who seeks revenge after falling prey to the schemes of a geisha and her husband.
The men who surround and torment the young protagonist (demanding teacher, owner of the company that rapes his own daughter, despotic and uncompromising father) are opposed to women (victims of men) as embodiment of salvation.
A group of young men go treasure hunting in the sea.
About an establishment where old men pay to sleep besides young girls that had been narcotized and happen to be naked, the sleeping beauties. The old men are expected to take sleeping pills and share the bed for a whole night with a girl without attempting anything of bad taste like putting a finger inside their mouths.
After over 50 years of wandering up and down Japan, finally in the 1970s, the rough-hewn blind shamisen player and folk-song collector named Takahashi Chikuzan became a musical sensation. This biographical drama chronicles his wanderings and his life, with a particular focus on his humble beginnings as a peasant on a remote and arid island.
During the Vietnam War, an American G.I. deserts his base in Japan and escapes to Tokyo with the help of his Japanese bar hostess girlfriend. In the capital he gets involved with an anti-war organization while dodging the military police.
A well-respected drama teacher confesses to his housekeeper that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima has left him impotent. With the coming of spring, the sympathetic housekeeper suggests that the Master observe the Yobai , a custom in which the young men of a village steal into the bedrooms of susceptible women to have sex.
Based on the novel of the same name by Yoshio Kataoka.
It is based on the story of The Ballad of Narayama updated to the present day, with the substitution of putting a parent into an old people's home for the abandonment of the original. The film won the Golden St. George and the FIPRESCI Prize at the 21st Moscow International Film Festival.
The son of an assassinated feudal lord, in the Muromachi period, attempts to avenge his father's death and meets Kagemaru, a renegade ninja helping peasants and farmers rebel against Oda Nobunaga's regime, all depicted through an experimental form of filming pages from the original manga set to sound.
You-chan is a young man who delivers eggs from Tochigi Prefecture to Tokyo's city center, and he is an avid fan of yakuza movies. One day, he encounters an escaped prisoner during deliveries and becomes friends with him. Detective Arabuka shoots the man dead, and You-chan is arrested for obstruction of justice. After three days in jail, he becomes a member of the dead prisoner's organization.
A five-part documentary chronicling Toshio Matsumoto, the legendary filmmaker known as a pioneer of experimental cinema in Japan and also active as a film theorist, who exerted a profound influence on innovative film expression from the 1950s onward. Directed by filmmaker and critic Takefumi Tsutsui—himself both a filmmaker and critic like Matsumoto—the project was filmed over the course of ten years. Interweaving excerpts from Matsumoto’s works with an extensive series of interviews with collaborators and critics, the documentary retraces, through the figure of Matsumoto, the tumultuous decades from the 1950s to the 2000s across five parts, totaling 700 minutes.
Nobuko Otowa plays a former Seto Inland Sea island farmer who has moved to the mainland in order to find work, but instead ends up dead. The film begins with the discovery of her corpse, which leads to an investigation that uncovers the narcotics, prostitution, and murder in which many poor farmers had found themselves trapped after World War II.
