Kô Nishimura

A crafty ronin comes to a town divided by two criminal gangs and decides to play them against each other to free the town. (imdb)

July, 1945: Japan's army is on the run. A platoon in Burma sings to keep its spirit up. Inspiration comes from their self-taught lute player... (imdb)

Ryunosuke is a sociopathic samurai without compassion or scruples. When he is scheduled for an exhibition match at his fencingschool, the wife of his opponent begs Ryunosuke to throw the match, offering her own virtue in trade (imdb)

In Kurosawa's HAMLET-like story of corporate scandal in post-war Japan, a young man attempts to use his position at the heart of a corrupt company to expose the men responsible for his father's death. (imdb)

A young girl is born and raised to be an instrument of revenge. (imdb)

Mr. Ogata lives a complicated life: he's is a pornographer making two skin flicks per day and trying to stay beneath the radar screen of the local mob (imdb)

A guilt-haunted samurai warrior attempts to stop a massacre taking place. (imdb)

Misumi Kenji's Zatoichi: The Festival of Fire finds the famous blind swordsman becoming mixed up with a blind but powerful gangster. The town is a brutal place where women and children are regularly available to the highest bidder. Zatoichi takes a fancy to two local women, and this causes him to earn the ire of both two local men - one of them a Yakuza. (Perry Seibert, Rovi)

Lupin risks death to learn the secret and intentions of a wealthy and seemingly immortal, but certainly ruthless, recluse. (imdb)

Zatoichi arrives in a town where a gambling house is kidnapping its poor, debt-ridden patrons. A rival establishment moves to pay those debts and free the peasants, but this house's seemingly altruistic boss is actually laying the groundwork for a ruthless money-grabbing scheme.

Zatoichi is forced to kill a young man who owes a debt to a yakuza boss. Moments later, his sister Osode arrives with the money she earned (prostituting herself) to pay his debts. The bosses true motives are revealed and he attempts to steal Osode even though the debt is paid. Zatoichi realizes his grievous error and protects the girl from the gang... (imdb)

Kiba gets involved in the transport of three criminals being taken to Edo for execution. When the prisoners' escorts are called to assist a group of officials stricken by poisoned water, Kiba accepts payment as a yojimbo to see the criminals to their destination. Kiba has a soft spot for one of the prisoners, a thief named Magobei, because he bears a resemblance to Kiba's late father. (lardbiscuit.com)

In detailed fashion, the film investigates the troubled psyche of a dull, uneducated lower-class housewife in a backward northeastern, province. The woman is so stupid that she is scarcely aware of the drabness of her life with a petty, bickering husband and his whining mother, or of her own thwarted sensuality... (IMDB Comments)

Hanzo is not your typical constable. He is well known in Edo. He is equal parts Dirty Harry, Robocop, and John Holmes. Hanzo's techniques are far from clean. His ends justify his means. (IMDB Comments)

It is the early 19th century in Japan. Nariatsu, a high ranking official and son of the former Shogun, is engaged in an animal hunt. In his reckless pursuit of the game, he crosses borders to a neighboring fief and kills a peasant who happens to be in his way. The lord of that fief also happens to be nearby, and witnessing the incident, calls him out on his ruthlessness.

Four orphaned siblings struggle against the crushing poverty that threatens to separate them. Unfortunately, no one else in the town is in very good economic shape either. Even though the children receive all the sympathy they need and kind offers of whatever food the townspeople have available, it slowly becomes apparent that their efforts to stay together are woefully unrealistic in the face of economic pressures. (All Movie Guide)

He's Hanzo "The Razor" Itami; the incorruptible and uncompromising samurai cop, and he packs a weapon more devastating than any sword. In the name of justice, there's no torture he won't endure, no pain he won't inflict, and no superior he'll bow to. (surrealmoviez.info)

A wealthy landowner named Chobei Onuma is haunted after a curse is placed upon him by one of his tenants whose untimely death was a direct cause of the landowners' greed. Onuma forces the dead farmers' wife and daughter to work for him to help pay off the remaining debt that he left behind. After each new evil dead the curse soon expands to the rest of the Onuma clan who like their patriarch Chobei Onuma start seeing those who they wronged come back from beyond as ghost. (10KBullets.com)

The "Legends of the Poisonous Seductress" saga continues in this sequel to Female Demon Ohyaku that finds avenging swordswoman Okatsu (Junko Miyazono) seeking the blood of a corrupt magistrate. The daughter of a famous swordplay instructor, Okatsu learned how to wield her deadly weapon when she was just a young girl. Raped by one of the magistrate's assistants who then goes on to slaughter her father, a furious Okatsu vows to claim the official's head even if it costs her own life. (Allmovie.com)

Newcomers to faded fishing village are a man who's escaping gangsters he crossed and his girlfriend who has her own aims, as well as hiding, in returning to her hometown. This place, the definition of deadsville, may be as safe as any to lie low in. Couple find preoccupation in opposite ways. She settles in and becomes part of the community. He, bored and fretting at first gravitates to local corruption and becomes a betrayer, later he finds himself.

Teiko, a young newlywed, bids farewell to her new husband, Kenichi, in a Tokyo station, as he leaves to conclude business in Kanazawa, promising to return on December 12. But the 12th comes and goes with no word from Kenichi. Teiko's only clue to her husband's whereabouts is a couple of strange postcards she finds among his belongings. When Kenichi's employers invite her to Kanazawa to help them locate him, Teiko finds herself embroiled in a complicated mystery. (sansebastianfestival.com)

In a time of economic disaster for wage earners, Hanzo discovers a conspiracy among high officials to "borrow" gold from the shogunate's treasury and loan it out to the destitute, including impecunious samurai - exacting either interest payments or family heirlooms from the debtors. (imdb)

A cunning female jewel thief named Black Lizard who tries to kidnap Sanaye, a wealthy jeweler's beautiful daughter as part of a plot to steal the jeweler's expensive "Star of Egypt" diamond. To thwart the planned kidnapping, the jeweler hires Japan's number one detective, the brilliant Akechi. (imdb)

A man captures a beautiful woman and makes her his wife, but the woman is very demanding. Partly a ghost story.

Ishikawa Goemon, a talented young ninja becomes embedded in a twisted scheme to assassinate Oda Nobunaga, an evil warlord bent on ruling feudal Japan with an iron fist. Deceit, treachery and loads of ninjas lurk around every corner as Goemon travels the countryside to complete his task of winning back his honor, and ultimately his life.

An ancient evil threatens to destroy modern-day Tokyo in this supernatural chiller based on Hiroshi Aramata's novel and featuring conceptual designs by H.R. Giger. A thousand years have passed since madman Masakado was sentenced to death for crimes against humanity, though the lingering influence of his blackened soul has haunted Tokyo ever since... (allmovie.com)

A group of farmers finds themselves in debt to a loan shark and Oryu is enlisted to help them out.

A minister unofficially asks a samurai to lead a squad of assassins to eliminate an annoying Lord. Director Eiichi Kudo plays with the absurdity of the feudal system; where loyalty and honor are used to enslave men; where samurais are only tools of the political game. (asiatorrents.com)

Bushido, a.k.a. "The Way of the Warrior" is the chivalrous code of the samurai that has influenced the Japanese way-of-life for centuries. This epic film spans several generations of a typical samurai family, and illustrates the intricate system of loyalty, honor and sacrifice which bound the samurai in ages past, and which, in many ways, persists to this very day. (amazon)

A rumbunctious and ribald tale of a troupe of travelling actors who alternate highlights of kabuki theatre with strip shows. (imdb)

For his second film, Imamura was assigned by the studio Nikkatsu to direct this vehicle for singer-comedian Frank Nagai. The result is a comedy about a hen-pecked drugstore owner who spends his days reminiscing about a wartime romance in the tropics. (KG)

In SWORD OF FIRE, Nemuri is hired to kill an innocent girl who is hiding out as a washerwoman in a small town. Realizing that she has done nothing wrong, Nemuri concocts a plan to mete out justice to those who want her dead.

In this atmospheric tale of revenge from beyond the watery grave, a pirate-ransacked freighter's violent past comes back to haunt a young woman living in a seaside town. Mixing elements of kaidan (ghost stories), doppelganger thrillers, and mad-scientist movies, Hiroshi Matsuno's The Living Skeleton is a wild and eerie work, with beautiful widescreen, black-and-white cinematography. (criterion.com)

Very fast-moving sketches of a corrupt politician, a jaded geisha, an impoverished family with 18 children and a boarder who works as a day-laborer and manufactures atomic bombs at night. (Audie Bock)

Hama-chan and Michiko have a son, whom they name Koitaro. At the office, Su-san's nephew begins work at the construction company and becomes friends with Hama-chan. When the nephew runs off with the sister of Hama-chan's friend, he and Su-san go looking for the young lovers ? and fishing, of course.

Set in 1945, near the end of WW II, Kenichiro Nogami is reported to have died in a Swiss hospital. In fact, Kenichiro Nogami is working behind the scenes to save Japan from destruction. For this cause, Kenichiro Nogami has left behind his wife and nation to work in hiding.

"The Dancing Girl of Izu" tells the story of the interactions between a young male student from Tokyo, and a small group of travelling performers that he meets while touring the Izu Peninsula. (Wikipedia)

Tokugawa era, during the Obon festival, when the souls of the departed leave the underworld to visit their loved ones on earth. (mubi.com)

Mizuhara did his time in jail for Boss Komori. Now that he is out, the old gang wants to say welcome back with a bullet. (imdb)

Tadanaga, the younger son of Shogun Hidetada has signed a dangerous pact with the intention of preventing his older brother Iemitsu from taking his rightful place as heir to the shogun's seat. During the early years of the Tokugawa shogunate highly skilled ninja groups carried out secret missions, and it falls upon Iga Jigoza's force of 17 ninja to infiltrate the enemy's stronghold and steal the pact from Negoro leader Saiga Magokuro. (The Movie Database)

The life and times of Kûkai, a Japanese monk who studies Esoteric Buddhism in the far reaches of India, China and Tibet, then uses their combined influence to establish the Shingon school during the Heian period in early 9th Century AD. (letterboxd.com)

Based on a true story about a jailbird who was sentenced for 41 years and escaped seven times. In 1947, Ueda robs a drug dealer and his woman for morphine and kills them. He gets imprisoned in Hiroshima, but escapes next year. From then on he gets caught and imprisoned over and over. (thehawaiiherald.com)

A hunchbacked caretaker presides over a forlorn mansion inhabited by the ghosts of his previous masters. An unbelieving trio (a doctor, his assistant and his niece) fail to heed the caretaker's warnings and are slaughtered horribly by the jealous occupants. (themoviedb)

When the enigmatic woman Ryoko (played by Mishima-discovered female impersonator Akihiro Miwa) arrives at the Black Rose Mansion to perform, not only do the gentleman patrons seem smitten by her mystery and beauty, but past flames arrive to vie and die for her affections, as well. But things get even more complicated when the Mansion's manager and his wayward son both fall for the same dangerous woman...

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.

Based on a mystery by Taiwanese-Japanese author Chin Shun-shin. After two elderly men in Yokohama quarrel over a Yang dynasty artifact, one of the men turns up dead with mysterious claw marks across his face. A detective takes up the case and uncovers secrets dating back to war crimes committed during Japan's invasion of China in WWII.

Odoshi is a 1966 film directed by Kinji Fukasaku.

In Hiroshima Prefecture during the Meiji era, simple housemaid Seki accepts the proposal of Moichi, an educated mail carrier, who has decided to quit his job and save money for a warehouse by transporting goods with his wooden cart. Seki's parents disown her for not asking for their approval, and also Moichi's mother, a widow, does not accept her as her daughter-in-law, treating her disdainfully.

The seventh in the shocking "Jingi Naki Tatakai" movie series, which exposes the true lives of the yakuza that is hidden by a mask of "jingi". The next stage of this continuing drama is the Kanmon Channel where the Owada and the Kyoei groups are battling for territorial rights and drug smuggling. The Owada sends their man, Tetsu, and his friend Shuji to kill the Kyoei boss. With the promise of fame and riches, Shuji takes the fall and goes to jail for 7 years. (AT)

A yakuza leader must balance his violent tactics necessary for the rough streets of 1960s Tokyo with the domestic needs of his daughters.

After a rich man drowns, his scheming relatives gather in his old house to get what is coming to them.

It tells the story of Rock, a puppy whose mother is killed by a tiger and a fox. To fulfill his revenge, will achieve together a large number of animals.