Chôko Iida

A kabuki actor's mistress hatches a jealous plot to bring down her lover's son.

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)

In post-war Japan, a man brings a lost boy to his tenement. No one wants to take the child for even one night; finally, a sour widow, Tané, does. The next day, complaining, she takes the boy to his neighborhood and finds his father has gone to Tokyo; it seems the boy has been abandoned. Tané wants to leave him there, but he follows her home... (imdb)

In 1923, in the province of Shinshu, the widow and simple worker of a silk factory Tsune Nonomiya (O-Tsune) decides to send her only son to Tokyo for having a better education. Thirteen years later, she visits her son Ryosuke Nonomiya (Shinichi Himori), and finds that he is a poor and frustrated night-school teacher with a wife, Sugiko (Yoshiko Tsubouchi), and a baby boy. (imdb)

After the death of his wife, a man struggles to raise his son in nearly overwhelming poverty. When the father meets a beautiful young woman, the son becomes jealous of his father's attentions, and conflict arises between them. (imdb)

A young salary-man loses his white-collar insurance job trying to cover for an aging colleague. Unfortunately, it is 1931 and the Great Depression means few other employment opportunities. He has difficulty covering the expenses of his family. After misadventures, he runs into his former professor, now a health food café owner, who promises him aid if the young man assists him with the café.

A war widow with a young boy manages a farm with her bossy mother-in-law. When a reporter comes to interview her, the two begin an affair. He turns out to be married and won't leave his wife. Her older brother tries to marry off his children and hang on to/ extend his farm through an advantageous marriage in the face of threatened land confiscation and the desire of his children to get comfortable urban jobs instead of the backbreaking work in the paddy fields under parental control. (imdb)

It tells the story of an unemployed and homeless single father (Takeshi Sakamoto) with two sons looking for work in depression-era Tokyo, whose lives intersects with those of a single mother of a little daughter likewise forlornly seeking a way (and a place) to live. (imdb)

This film involves a wife and her professor husband and niece. The niece is a liberal woman who rebel against her. There is a clash between the wife and her niece on women's value and how women should be behave.

This eccentric comedy of manners follows a love quadrangle centered on a kendo master (Tokihiko Okada), whose chauvinistic upholding of Japanese culture screeches to a halt when he falls for a progressive (but not too progressive) office worker. He shaves his beard (after protesting memorably that "all great men have beards!" including Lincoln, Darwin and Marx), puts on a suit and learns the Western ways of wooing a woman, attracting a haughty aristocrat and a gangster floozy in the process. (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)

A Wanderer's Notebook, also known as Her Lonely Lane, is director Mikio Naruse's hollow biopic of authoress Fumiko Hayashi, whose work the director often adapted for the screen. (Slant Magazine)

In this film, Sumiko Kurishima plays a woman whose husband had deserted her, following the birth of her child. For lack of any better option, she has been forced to support her son and herself as working as a hostess at a waterfront bar. When her ne'er-do-well husband (Tatsuo Saito) returns, her first impulse is to reject him, but her neighbors prevail on her to give him a second chance... (imdb)

Uta, actress Mizutani Yaeko, a wandering actress tired of her life, is taken in by a generous and good natured tea merchant (until her troupe gets back with her) ostensibly to teach his daughter how to dance. He dies and leaves his family with a good deal of debt (there is also some social problem of having a wandering actress living with him and his family.) The merchant's son is left with the family business, which he is not experienced or learned enough to take care of, and dissolves it.... (imdb)

Based on the true story of the trial of four innocent men for the murder of an old couple.

A psychological take on the classic myth.

Shuji Kamura is out of work and as a result, he and his wife are forced to separate. Their reasons are completely financial, as both still carry romantic feelings for the other. Shuji becomes an employee at some sort of extravagant clothing store. There he becomes acquainted with his co-workers and friends to be, Shin Miki (Shin Saburi) and Ken Taniyama. (Ken Uehara)

Renowned actress/singer Takamine Mieko stars as titular heroine Nobuko, a spirited young teacher working in a conservative school. Based on a novel by Shishi Bunroku, the film follows her experiences as she challenges the school with her liberal thinking and teaching methods. (youtube)

This is ostensibly a sex-education film -- with hardly any education! -- but it's incredibly beautiful. The spring and early summer scenery in Nagano (probably) echo the budding sexuality of the film's young characters. A good dose of German romantic poetry also adds to the barely sublimated sexual atmospherics. The film isn't perfect; the cast is obviously inexperienced and the film hypocritically avoids a frank discussion of sex.... (imdb comment)

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

A teenager flirts with the girl next door, big sister of whom gets separated from her husband and moves back to her parents' house.

This tells the story of an aging geisha (Mitsuko Yoshikawa) who struggles to support her senior high school-aged son (?). He, however, is so embarrassed by his mother that he has begun cutting school -- and associating with a bad crowd. A young (late teen-aged?) colleague of his mother (Sumiko Mizukubo) also worries about the son, and urges him to not disappoint his mother. In order to show him how lucky he is, she takes him to visit her dysfunctional family. (imdb comment)

Ohara Shosuke-san lived about 200 years ago in Aizuwakamatsu. He loved sleeping late, hot springs baths and, of course, sake. He was gregarious, generous and famous for his extravagant merrymaking. Ohara Shosuke-san began his life rich. Yet he loved the simple joys of life such as taking a bath in the morning (Japanese normally bathe in the evening) that he soon spent his fortune. Despite the loss of his wealth he remained a kind and helpful friend and neighbour to all who knew him. (KG)

Family drama. A middle-aged father has just married off his third daughter, but still has his nine year old son to raise whom he resents as he was unwanted. (British Film Institute)

The story of Sanshiro Sugata, a young man who wants to learn the new art of judo. A wise teacher reveals to Sanshiro that judo is not merely a means of combat nor a demonstration of physical skill, but an art which reveals the artist to himself. (imdb)

The irresponsible Bunkichi learns to be culpable after his sister's son gets into serious trouble.

"The Dancing Girl of Izu" tells of the story between a young male student who is touring the Izu Peninsula and a family of traveling dancers he meets there, including their youngest girl. The student finds the naïve girl attractive even though he eventually has to part with the family after spending memorable time together.

"The Mistress" is the story of a young woman whose relationships with men in the past have been stormy, and who finds herself once again in a bad situation. She becomes the mistress of a wealthy moneylender, believing him to be a merchant who has been recently widowed and that he will soon marry her. She discovers his lies but cannot leave him because of the money he has given to her elderly father.

In this Golden Globe winner for Best Foreign-Language Film, director Heinosuke Gosho -- a master chronicler of Japanese middle-class life -- presents the story of Kiyoshi Yoshida (Koji Shitara), who feels estranged from both parents after his father returns from war. How the boy adapts to life with the virtual stranger his father has become is the film's focus. (Netflix)

Fumiko, mother of two children and wife of an unfaithful man who shows a low self esteem, shares her family life with her asleep vocation as a poetess. The beginning of her successful literary career coincides with her divorce and the development of a serious illness: a breast cancer, which leads her to lose her breasts. In the last stage of her life she meets a young journalist arrived from Tokyo, an admirer of her work, who want to write a story on her life. Both live a secret love history. (imdb)

Based on a Tanizaki Junichiro tale of male devotion passing into love and masochism. Okoto is blind, but her family can afford to pamper her. She takes up the koto and the family's young servant Sasuke faithfully escorts her to her music lessons. She often treats him disdainfully, but she insists on his company, and so gossip grows up around them. Sasuke's loyalty is tested when Okoto is wooed by a vacuous but persistent suitor.

As World War II escalates, the tight-knit habitants of a street in Tokyo must relocate from their homes so that the government can use the space. Kinoshita's sensitive film-beautifully and resourcefully shot on a single set-traces the fears and desires of the evacuees. (imdb)

Based on a 1956 television feature on Japan's national network, NHK, this is one of Uchida's rarest films. A socially conscious drama with a contemporary backdrop, Dotanba focuses on the attempts to rescue a group of trapped miners. (The Movie Database)

Shigezumi is a young stock broker from Tokyo. He is in love with young Taiko who lives in Osaka. The marriage seems impossible as Shigezumi had a difficult relationship to Taiko' father who bankrupted and drove Shigezumi's father into suicide. And now Shigezumi seems to be the next target of Taiko's father's business wars... (KG)

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.

During World War II a young woman quits university and instead obtains a job at a magazine about film that her mentor set up for her. The mentor herself is an actress. Here the woman meets Hara Setsuko as a colleague. The work is hard however. (imdb)

When a man of some stature and lineage decides to launch a business by renovating and converting his mansion into a hotel and putting his domestic staff like the chef and maid to work in the new venture, his wife cannot accept the change and decamps to another house. It is opening time and a girl arrives seeking a job and is given one. The clientele are not as desired, however, and instead of a classy lot the hotel is attracting shysters, pickpockets and lovers. (imdb)

While he struggles with his feelings of guilt and sees his dead wife, Oiwa, everywhere the people around him begin noticing his strange behavior and his new wife decides to distance herself from him. (mydramalist.info)

In this Japanese romance, made in Western style and set in Europe, a college skier travels to the Swiss Alps with his professor. En route, he falls for a flight attendant. Unfortunately the romance is nipped in the bud by a visit from the skier's French girlfriend. (Sandra Brennan)

1957 film directed by Miyoji Ieki. Winner of the Crystal Globe at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival. (themoviedb)

A romantic drama starring Jô Shishido & Kinuyo Tanaka.

A gangster tries to find redemption with the inadvertent help of an innocent shop girl and his jealous girlfriend will do anything to keep him. The family of an older man who runs a small sake brewery become concerned with his finances and his health after they discover him visiting an old mistress ... (imdb)

A ghost rises from the grave to seek revenge on the husband who killed her.

Japanese adaptation of Marcel Pagnol's Marius. This version is set in early 20th century Japan.

A very lower class laborer and his family endure a complex struggle in post World War II Japan.

The story of a boy who befriends a lonely middle-aged man.

Early Japanese sound film, a remake of Josef von Sternberg’s DOCKS OF NEW YORK set in Yokohama.

Heinosuke Gosho evokes in this film the family conflicts engendered by the eternal problem of a father who projects his professional desires on the life of his son. The sister Machiko is the essential link that will allow everyone to apologize to each other and achieve reconciliation.

Under an obligation to his master, her husband took his master's sin of murder and run away. His wife is worried about him. (KG)