Jitsuko Yoshimura
Are bad girls casualties of patriarchy, a necessary evil, or visionary pioneers? By tracing the concept of the bad girl in Japan as a product of specific cultural assumptions and historical settings, Bad Girls of Japan maps new roads and old detours in revealing a disorderly politics of gender. The essays explore deviancy in richly diverse media. Mountain witches, murderers, performance artists, cartoonists, schoolgirls, and shoppers gone wild are all part of the terrain.
Death-row inmate Sudo (Pierre Taki) sends a letter to magazine reporter Fujii (Takayuki Yamada). In his letter, he states that a man named Kimura (Lily Franky), also known as "teacher," committed numerous murders for insurance money. While checking out the story, based on Sudo's tip, Fuji becomes convinced that the letter is correct. But, a lot of time has passed from the incidents and Sudo's testimony isn't clear. Due to the persistance of Sudo, who is a former yakuza, and Fuji, the police begin to move.
Based on the true story of former professional boxer Iwao Hakamada who has spent over 40 years incarcerated on death row. Iwao Hakamada was arrested for the June 10, 1966 murder of a family in Shizuoka . Iwao Hakamada has always insisted on his innocence and many others also believe Iwao Hakamada has been falsely accused ...
Two newlyweds decide to build their dream home, and hire an old friend named Yanagisawa to design it. Unfortunately, Yanagisawa isn’t licensed to build homes, so they call in the wife’s father, a retired carpenter, to help out. When Yanagisawa’s contemporary ideas clash with the old carpenter’s traditional Japanese methods, the project becomes a huge mess.
Thirty years after graduation, a man and a woman meet again at an alumni reunion. They are no longer young, but the moment she sees him, memories of her first love are revived. Her love for him has never faded even though she married another man and bore his child. What has kept her going is a white shell the boy gave her and a phrase of Jean Cocteau's poem, "My ears are shells, fondly hearing the sound of the sea..." She gets a divorce, returns to her hometown and opens a bar named "Coquille," which means "shell." Without their knowing, an unexpected turn of events awaits the two...
An old man falls into a coma and dreams about his childhood during WWII.
The 43th NHK Asadora about a female volleyball player who helps out the local community. Starring Azusa Watanabe.
From the point-of-view of the children, "Mother" tells the story of the most unappreciated, loving and giving mother, who would sacrifice her own life, and sometimes the life of others, for her loved ones. In the autumn of 1955, a family of five children is living in the Tohoku area. In order to take care of her paralysed husband, the mother has to sacrifice her five children by giving them away. The children has to suffer all the loneliness and hardships that this decision has brought them. 15 years have passed, all five of them have got married. Now, they come to understand that their mother's love for them was the greatest love of all.
If You Were Young: Rage highlights the other side of post-war Japanese prosperity, focusing on the throngs of young people who missed out on the boom. We follow a group of young men that can't seem to get ahead, despite their willingness to try. Then one hits upon a plane - to work together to save for a dump truck and thus become independent contractors and be their own bosses at last. Ultimately life presents obstacles: jail for one, violence at the hands of the police for another and a girlfriend and subsequent children for the third. An early Kinji Fukasaku gem that imports the freewheeling style of the French New Wave and the hip detachment of American noir.
By turns tragic and transcendent, Akira Kurosawa’s film follows the daily lives of a group of people barely scraping by in a slum on the outskirts of Tokyo. Yet as desperate as their circumstances are, each of them—the homeless father and son envisioning their dream house; the young woman abused by her uncle; the boy who imagines himself a trolley conductor—finds reasons to carry on. The unforgettable Dodes’ka-den was made at a tumultuous moment in Kurosawa’s life. And all of his hopes, fears, and artistic passion are on fervent display in this, his gloriously shot first color film.
A woman has a brief, intense affair with a younger man while awaiting her trial for the murder of her husband's mistress.
Toramatsu is a very enthusiastic policeman. Believing that the police should help others he is dismissed the force when his pistol is stolen while doing one of his good deeds. He saves a child from drowning, restores it to his mother, then finds that someone has run off with his gun and later uses it to kill. Then he breaks up a group of hoodlums attacking a young girl named Mieko, and the police, his former friends, deciding he has gone too far, decide to sue him. On top of this the girl gets hurt and, consequently, a child from the kindergarten where Mieko teaches is kidnapped on his way home. Impersonating a policeman he tracks down the gangsters and rescues the boy. Due to this he also uncovers a scandal which allows the police to make a long due clean up in the political world. As a reward for all of this he wins the regard of the girl but now faces a stiff prison sentence for impersonating the policeman he had been and which, at heart, he truly remains.
After an American Navy base is annihilated by a secret weapon, Agent OSS 117 is sent to Japan to investigate the organization that's claiming responsibility, and threatening the US with another attack, if they don't pay.
Years of warfare end in a Japan unified under the Tokugawa shogunate, and samurai spy Sasuke Sarutobi, tired of conflict, longs for peace. When a high-ranking spy named Tatewaki Koriyama defects from the shogun to a rival clan, however, the world of swordsmen is thrown into turmoil. After Sasuke is unwittingly drawn into the conflict, he tracks Tatewaki, while a mysterious, white-hooded figure seems to hunt them both. By tale’s end, no one is who they seemed to be, and the truth is far more personal than anyone suspected. Director Masahiro Shinoda’s Samurai Spy, filled with clan intrigue, ninja spies, and multiple double crosses, marks a bold stylistic departure from swordplay film convention.
Ayako, a young woman from a rural fishing village is sold by her family into a brothel when her father takes ill. There she quickly is stripped of her innocence and illusions.
While her son, Kichi, is away at war, a woman and her daughter-in-law survive by killing samurai who stray into their swamp, then selling whatever valuables they find. Both are devastated when they learn that Kichi has died, but his wife soon begins an affair with a neighbor who survived the war, Hachi. The mother disapproves and, when she can't steal Hachi for herself, tries to scare her daughter-in-law with a mysterious mask from a dead samurai.
A woman, Tome, is born to a lower class family in Japan in 1918. The title refers to an insect, repeating its mistakes, as in an infinite circle. Imamura, with this metaphor, introduces the life of Tome, who keeps trying to change her poor life.
In the city of Yokosuka, Kinta and his lover Haruko, both involved with yakuza, brave the post-occupation period with a goal to be together.
Struggling to elevate himself from his low caste in 17th century Japan, Miyamoto trains to become a mighty samurai warrior.
