Chōichirō Kawarasaki

Professional Killers

A shikakenin was an under-the-cover trade that undertook killing in Edo. Hanemon of Otowa, an agency that introduced laborers and maids, was also one of these. Katsugoro Iseya was a timber dealer who had come in as a client. His target was the constructions magistrate Hanno, and the Tatsumiya who sipped on the benefits. Hanemon who had a stong code towards killing, where he would only kill those who do no good to be in the world, accepts this request. Baian Fujieda, a needle doctor would carry out the killing. However, the professional killer Baian fails to bring down Tatsumiya. Hanemon then looks to another shikakenin, the ronin Sanai Nishimura for the role. Although Sanai's ability with the sword is good, he lives poorly in a tenement, and accepts this commission on the condition that it is kept a secret from his wife and child. Here, they close in on Hanno and Tatsumiya again...

Shinjuku Shark

Hard-boiled suspense drama series about a detective feared as the "Shinjuku Shark" who bravely stands up to evil.

Tokyo Cinderella Story

Tadashi Matsui

Yukiko (Wakui Emi) has been living in Tokyo for three years. Inside her heart, she believes that this beautiful city will certainly bring her happiness. This belief starts to realise one day when she has a chance encounter with Masashi (Karasawa Toshiaki) while welcoming her brother, Kikuo (Kishitani Goro), at a railway station. As Masashi is the son of a very rich businessman, and Yukiko is only an ordinary girl from the countryside, their together is highly obstructed by lots of barriers. However, Yukiko's kind-hearted personality finally wins Masashi's love, and he takes out his courage to turn down marrying his rich fiancee. --Snowflakes

Rhapsody in August

Noboru

An elderly Nagasaki hibakusha spends a summer caring for her four grandchildren, whose curiosity about the 1945 bombing stirs buried memories and moral questions. When an American nephew from Hawaii visits, the family confronts grief, guilt, and the possibility of reconciliation across generations.

Tokyo Suburbia

Two couples are confronted with the fact that their children have dropped out of high school and started living together. This drama questions the meaning of “life” as they overcome a series of incidents.

A House in the Quarter

Seijun Kunugida

With her family suffering from extreme poverty, Yuko, as the eldest daughter, is sold to a successful brothel in Kyoto. There she is assigned to serve Takamatsu, one of the brothel’s top customers. But while Takamatsu falls madly in love with Yuko, she finds herself attracted to a young priest named Kunugida. Torn by jealousy, Takamatsu hatches an evil plan to tear them apart.

Vengeance Is Mine

Pawnshop Owner

A thief, a murderer, and a charming lady-killer, Iwao Enokizu is on the run from the police.

The Strange Tale of Oyuki

Take-san

A story of Japanese writer Kafu Nagai (1879-1959), a man about sixty with a huge reputation of seducer who falls madly in love for a young geisha named Oyuki. Meticulous and smartly dressed, Nagai patiently wrote in his diary his thoughts during many years. A melancholy reflection on the passage of time and a brilliant interpretive exercise.

Sketchbook of Early Spring

A home drama questions the modest happiness of the ordinary petty bourgeoisie through the life of a salaryman and his family.

Tokyo Bordello

Zennosuke Echigoya

A ruined businessman was forced to sell his daughter, Hisano, to a brothel in Yoshiwara, the largest red-light district in Tokyo. The owner of the brothel has hopes to make her a great new addition which will attract the richest of customers. But after several months of training, she tries to flee Yoshiwara when the time has come for her to take her first customer...

Giant Rumble

In this gritty tale of gamblers battling in the samurai era, Okawa Hashizo gives perhaps his greatest performance as a gambler returning to his home town. Swearing allegiance to his fiancée’s father, a decent boss, he had taken to the road after a gang fight until things cooled down. While honing his sword skills in his travels, everything in the town had changed and he descended into a virtual hell of violence. Opponents were being slaughtered by a former samurai ‘Bodyguard’ played by Tanba Tetsuro at the height of his amazing career. While these two master swordsmen are fated to meet, before that can even happen they must survive one of the longest, bloodiest swordfights in movie history!

Profound Desires of the Gods

Kametaro Futori

Tokyo engineer Kariya arrives on a primitive tropical island, where he interacts with the Futori clan, to drill a well to power a sugar mill.

Love Me Tenderly, Love Me Wildly

Yuichi prides himself on the fact that he is a family man but contrary to his conception of an ideal family life, at age 24, his wife has already run out on him. In utter confusion, he tries to reason out where he had gone amiss that such a thing should happen out of the clear blue sky. About this time, Yuichi helps Ayako, a young girl, embroiled in trouble. She returns Yuichi's kindness by making off with his precious camera. Then she returns and since his wife has washed her hands of him, he forces himself on Ayako who acts as if she had been waiting for him to enter her. Suddenly, Yuichi's wife returns...

Panic in High School

Ogata

A high school student rallies his classmates into rebelling violently when the administration refuses to take responsibility for the suicide of one of the students.

Invitation of Lust

Yazawa

Hirobe is a lonely man. After witnessing her girlfriend die with a terminal illness, he wanders through the city like a shadow. One day, he meets Masako and they begin an affair. Masako is in an unhappy marriage with Yazawa, who is also cheating on her with a younger lover. The tension builds up to an unforgiving, yet quiet climax...

Eijanaika

Nakazawa

The film depicts carnivalesque atmosphere summed up by the cry "Ei ja nai ka" ("Why not?") in Japan in 1867 and 1868 in the days leading to the Meiji Restoration. It examines the effects of the political and social upheaval of the time, and culminates in a revelrous march on the Tokyo Imperial Palace, which turns into a massacre. Characteristically, Imamura focuses not on the leaders of the country, but on characters in the lower classes and on the fringes of society.

The Great Killing

A cynical samurai is left as the sole survivor to fulfill a plot to assassinate the puppet of a villain intent on usurping the shogunate in the 17th century. A Shogunate Elder connives to rule Japan by making his puppet, the Shogun's brother Tsunashige, the next Shogun. The best strategist in Japan, Yamaga, leads a plot to stop the Elder, but his cabal is betrayed and most of the conspirators are captured and tortured.

Gonza the Spearman

Jinbei Iwaki

The tragic story of Gonza, a handsome ladies man, set in the Tokugawa Period, a time in which appearances are very important. Gonza competes with Bannojō for the honor to perform the tea ceremony to celebrate the birth of an heir to the lord of their clan. To see the sacred tea scrolls Gonza promises to marry the daughter of the family which possesses them, even though he is unofficially engaged to another. When studying the scrolls with Osai, the mother of the house, Bannojō sneaks into the house and steals their obis and runs through the town proclaiming the two as adulterers.

Manon

Kuwashiro

A story about a woman who is a research student of a theater company and the three men who are at the mercy of her.

Etorofu Harukanari

On the eve of the outbreak of war between Japan and the U.S., U.S. Naval Intelligence sent a spy to Japan to spy on the movements of the Japanese Navy. The spy's name was Kenny Saito. He was a second-generation Japanese American who had served as a volunteer soldier on the Spanish front. Meanwhile, on Etorofu Island, Yuki Okatani, whose father was a Russian sailor, had run away from the island five years earlier, only to return home after being abandoned by a man and fired from her job. Saito soon receives information that the Japanese Navy has decided to launch a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, and that the rendezvous point is Monokan Bay on Etorofu Island, and infiltrates Etorofu Island. Yuki meets Saito and falls in love with him, not knowing that he is a spy...