Kumeko Urabe

A troupe of travelling players arrive at a small seaport in the south of Japan. Komajuro Arashi, the aging master of the troupe, goes to visit his old flame Oyoshi and their son Kiyoshi, even though Kiyoshi believes Komajuro is his uncle (imdb)

A young man and his wife struggle within the confines of their passionless relationship while he has an extramarital romance.

Michiyo moved to Osaka two years ago, when her husband Hatsunosuke who works at a stock brokerage was transfered from Tokyo. She wash, cook and clean 365 days a year. All the dreams and hopes she had when they got married five years ago seems to be gone. From here on we follow the everyday life of Mr. and Mrs. Okamoto. (imdb)

Five prostitutes work at Dreamland, in Tokyo's Yoshiwara district. As the Diet considers a ban on prostitution, the women's daily dramas play out... (imdb)

Schoolteacher Hisako Oishi struggles to imbue her students with a positive view of the world and their place in it, despite the fact that she knows full well that most of them will die in the war. (imdb)

Fusako Owada, a young woman in postwar Japan, is the mistress of a notorious drug dealer. Fusako's tenuous grasp on meaningful life is shaken when she learns that her lover is having an affair with her sister. (imdb)

Taki no Shiraito is a very independent young woman with a famous water juggling act in a travelling carnival troupe. She falls in love with an orphaned carriage driver Kinya Murakoshi, and pledges to put him through law school in Tokyo. She always encloses money in her letters to him, until one hard winter there is no work to be found. (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 trials, tribulations, and joys of raising a child. The film follows the everyday events of a family with one boy, coming up to his second birthday, interspersed with occasional thoughts of the child. They initially live in an apartment building, and then move into the doting grandmother's house. (imdb)

Character study revolving around four characters: a sock salesman, his wife and their two young lodgers.

A veteran police officer and his younger partner search for a fugitive in heat of the summer.

A young teacher struggles to overcome prejudices in early 20th century Japan.

It's a man's world. Shimamura, an artist, comes to this snowbound town to rejuvenate himself. He connects with Komako, a geisha he met on a previous trip, and it seems like love. She's the foster daughter of a local family, almost engaged to the family's son Yukio, now dying of consumption. He's tended by his sister Yuko who's angry at Komako for abandoning her brother. Shimamura returns to Tokyo but promises he will be back soon. (imdb)

SOMEWHERE BENEATH THE WIDE SKY (1954, aka KONO HIROI SORA NO DOKOKA NI) came near the end of Masaki Kobayashi's formative period as a director -- scripted by the sister of his mentor Keisuke Kinoshita (and scored by Kinoshita's brother), this drama of middle-class life in postwar Japan tells the story lower-middle-class workers in the city of Kawasaki, and their troubles and travails. (KG)

"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.

The film opens with Tora-san arriving home in Shibamata, at the family's sweets shop in Tokyo, just as his sister Sakura and her husband, Hiroshi are visited by their son's substitute teacher, 20-something Masako Yagyu. Of course Tora-san instantly falls for the pretty young woman. As his embarrassed family looks on, Tora-san completely usurps the meeting away from Sakura and Hiroshi, chatting away and trying to charm the teacher, even to the point of walking her home.

The story is based on the author's personal experience as a teacher dispatched to Matsuyama on the island of Shikoku. Set at a middle school in Matsuyama. Botchan (young master) is the first-person narrator. He grows up in Tokyo as a reckless and rambunctious youth. In the opening he hurts himself jumping from the second floor of his elementary school, fights the boy next door, and tramples a neighbor's carrot patch by wrestling on the straw that covers the seedlings.

A shipyard worker gets an offer of free lodging in the company seaside rest house. Upon arriving there, he finds out that he also has to take care of a flock of undisciplined youngsters. (imdb)

This early gem starring the great Mifune Toshiro tells the tale of Katakana Yonetaro aka "The Shark," a rough-and-tumble horse trader in Japan's rugged northernmost territory of Hokkaddo... (imdb)

A blind samisen player wanders across Japan for 50 years and becomes a musical sensation.

When a young woman is named as the prime suspect in a murder, her girlfriend and her girlfriend's boyfriend set out to prove her innocence. Their investigation leads them to an isolated, creepy house in the middle of nowhere, where sinister goings-on abound.

It follows the lives of the wealthy Makioka family of Osaka from the autumn of 1936 to April 1941, focusing on the family's attempts to find a husband for the third sister, Yukiko. It depicts the decline of the family's upper-middle-class, suburban lifestyle as the specter of World War II and Allied Occupation hangs over.

A film based on the works of Nagai S?kichi.

Story of a beautiful blind daughter of a wealthy businessman who falls in love with a servant.

Iyo is a teenage girl from a privileged family living nearby the Sea of Japan. Someday, her father finds an unconscious woman on the beach and decides to bring her back to home. When she wakes up she is amnesic. A long trip trough painful memory begins for her, Iyo, and her family. (MUBI)

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.

Yutaro Kida, a worker at the Sasebo Naval Arsenal, volunteers for the navy but finds himself a cook's mate in the galley of a gunboat. But his dream is eventually realized when he is transferred to the new and powerful destroyer Yukikaze which he helped to build. When the Pacific War breaks out Yukikaze performs valiantly in the South Pacific, and while on shore leave...

Nishina Saburouta is a powerful but corrupt priest. One night, an old samurai who couldn't bear him anymore attempts to kill him, but without success. Saburouta is rescued by his niece, Keisuke at the last moment. Keisuke is a a good-for-nothing. Since that event, he always turns to his uncle when he needs money. Recently Keisuke feels his uncle isn't as generous as he used to be, he suspects that Saburouta has found out about the illicit relationship between Keisuke and his uncle's young mistre

A fun little drama.

Based on the comic book by Jūzō Yamasaki and Kei Sadayasu.

Pierre Marsac, a French engineer working for the Nagasaki shipbuilding yards, has fallen in love both with Japan and a charming Japanese girl named Noriko. But Françoise Fabre, a French journalist and Pierre's former lover, contacts him while visiting the Land of the Rising Sun. They meet again, find out their love might not be dead. Meanwhile, Pierre gradually becomes estranged from sweet, humble Noriko. One day, a typhoon strikes Nagasaki... (Guy Bellinger)