Chieko Nakakita

Yuzo and his fiancée Masako spend their Sunday afternoon together, trying to have a good time on just thirty-five yen... (imdb)

After a battle with rival criminals, a small-time gangster is treated by an alcoholic doctor in post-war Japan. The doctor diagnoses the young gangster's tuberculosis, and convinces him to begin treatment for it. The two enjoy an uneasy friendship until the gangster's former boss is released from prison and seeks to take over his gang once again. The ailing young man loses his status as gang boss and becomes ostracised, and eventually confronts his former boss in a battle to the death. (imdb)

This film is about the story of the relationship between a daughter-in-law (Setsuko Hara) and the father (So Yamamura) of her neglectful and selfish husband (Ken Uehara). As the father becomes more and more aware of the unhappiness of Hara, he takes ever more unconventional steps to try to rescue his son's marriage. Though the issues of infidelity, abortion and divorce swirl through this film, the tone is remarkably low-key and unmelodramatic (IMDB Comments)

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 mothers 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. (imdb)

This is the story of Mama, a.k.a. Keiko, a middle-aged geisha who must choose to either get married or buy a bar of her own. Her family hounds her for money, her customers for her attention, and she is continually in debt. The life of a geisha is examined as well as the way in which the system traps and sometimes kills those in it. (imdb)

Hard luck Yukiko (Takamine Hideko) remembers the days of wine and romance back in Indochina but Kengo (Mori Masayuki) isn't having any of it. The war is over, the survivors are back in Japan and Yukiko wants to rekindle the old flame. (IMDB Comments)

Kyoji Fujisaki, a young doctor, contracts syphilis from a patient during wartime surgery. After the war, he returns to his fiancée and rejects her without explanation. His nurse Rui learns the truth, however. When Fujisaki encounters the man who had infected him in the war, the doctor forces the man to take responsibility for himself and for the man's wife, who expects a child. (imdb)

Sanae Sakanishi, widowed at the film's outset is left a substantial inheritance that soon becomes the instigator of much familial discord. (Slant)

A 19 year old girl loses her husband in war. Bombing destroys his family's shop and the widow stays to rebuild it as the rest of the family flee and runs it for 18 years out of love for her dead husband and his mother. After 18 years when a new supermarket threatens to put them out of business, the sisters conspire to turn the shop into a supermarket and get rid of their brother's widow. (imdb)

Keijiro and Ayako Kono (Masayuki Mori and Chikage Awashima) seem like a picture-book upper middle-class family. He is a respected professor and the couple has two amiable children (a high school-aged girl and middle school-aged boy). But the Kono's domestic siutuation is more complicated than it seems on the surface. The children are actually the illegitimate children of Kono's long-time mistress, Miho. To compensate for giving up the children, the Konos subsidize a bar which Miho operates. (imdb)

Kiyoko is 23 and works as a tour guide. She lives with her mother and has two sisters and a brother, all from different fathers. Despite and because of various forms of pressure, the problems she sees and experiences around her make her suspicious of men and marriage, and very ambivalent about her relations to her own family.

The greatest shock of Sudden Rain comes when Ryotaro Namiki (Shuji Sano) declares to his wife Fumiko (Setsuko Hara) that she has no dreams. For those familiar with Hara's typically incandescent screen presence this is less of an insult than pure blasphemy, though it's all to director Mikio Naruse's subversive point. (Slant Magazine)

Study of the relationship between children of the Ainu tribe in Hokkaido and their pure Japanese neighbours and schoolmates. (bfi.org.uk)

A teenaged girl witnesses her widowed mother's attempt to sustain her family. (imdb)

The competing husband and wife voiceovers that open the 1953 Mikio Naruse melodrama Wife set up a character dialectic that never comes to fruition and though the title suggests the resulting imbalance may be intentional, the film still plays out as a deeply flawed examination of marital discord. (Slant Magazine)

This film from the great Naruse has her stretching her acting muscles, playing Oshima, a woman who goes through situations in which men treat her wrong. Somehow, in a sometimes fun way, she emerges intact and stronger. (imdb)

A poor rickshaw driver finds himself taking care of a young woman and her son after the woman's husband dies suddenly. (imdb)

Upon the outbreak of a wide scale nuclear war, Japan and its people are caught in the middle.

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.

Based on a screenplay by Keinosuke Kinoshita, "Koibumi" explores the wounds of war, the limits of love and the need to forgive. (imdb)

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 (Hara, Setsuko) working with her dead fiance's sister. The engaged man had gone to war and never returned. (The Movie Database)

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 die the other boy and the girl find they cannot forget him. (The Movie Database)

At Rabaul, ace pilot Wakabayashi leads a rapidly depleting squad of airmen trying to defend Japanese forces from air attacks. Known as “Devil” Wakabayashi, he rules with an iron fist – taking issue with men who spend their time in local bars and pointedly refusing to send rescue craft for crashed pilots. (Windows on Worlds)

Kiyoko, along with her husband Shinji (Keiju Kobayashi), wants to open a coffee shop and so goes to Kenkichi to ask for a loan. (Slant)

A 1957 drama starring Kinuyo Tanaka based on a story by Hideji Hôjô

With one of the busiest film industries in the world, Japan was able to submit several films into competition at the 1957 Berlin Film Festival. One of the best of these was Arashi, directed by Hiroshi Inagaki of Rickshaw Man fame. Anticipating Hollywood's Table for Five by nearly a quarter of a century, the film concerns the efforts by a recently widowed high-school teacher to raise his four children alone. Chihu Ryu is terrific as the central character, while Izumi Yukimura is... (themoviedb)

The woman-only prison has a cast all with a story of their own and with no dull or routine day. There is an employee who is divorced after her husband had an affair. She loves the jailed criminals and almost sees them as family. One day at a workshop someone faints while working hard to make money because she has a poor boyfriend. Another inmate is knocked up Another is a mother and has her child with her. (imdb)

First Japanese vampire film, one where the creature is not supernatural and all with the film being a riff on The Cat and the Canary. The story of a professional nude model stalked by a bizarre, unknown man wearing a hideous mask.

Afraid of the ultimate consequences, a married man, who is having an affair with an employee, inadvertently becomes the only person who can free an accused murderer.

The life history of a woman who faced disillusion from her husband and disappointment from her son, but lives to welcome her grandson. (bfi.org.uk)