Kōgo Noda

TV remake of Ozu's 'Late Spring'

One day a company executive learns that his younger brother, whom he recommended, embezzled company funds. To save the situation he withdraws his life savings and gives money to his younger brother. He then suddenly disappears…

The Kohayakawa family is thrown into distress when childlike father Manbei takes up with his old mistress, in one of Ozu’s most deftly modulated blendings of comedy and tragedy.

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. The leading actress Sumiko is jealous and so, in order to humiliate the master, persuades the younger actress Kayo to seduce Kiyoshi.

Later in his career, Ozu started becoming increasingly sympathetic with the younger generation, a shift that was cemented in Equinox Flower, his gorgeously detailed first color film, about an old-fashioned father and his newfangled daughter.

Two sisters find out the existence of their long-lost mother, but the younger cannot take the truth of being abandoned as a child.

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

A childless middle-aged couple faces a marital crisis of sorts.

Two journalists and their lovers share an uncertain future.

Noriko lives in postwar Tokyo with her extended family. Although she enjoys her career and her friends, her more traditionally minded family worries about the fact that she's still single at the advanced age of 28. When 40-year-old business associate Takako proposes marriage, Noriko's family press her into accepting. But when her widowed childhood friend Kenkichi returns to the neighborhood, she finds her heart leading in another direction.

Setsuko is unhappily to Mimura, an engineer with no job and a bad drinking habit. She had always been in love with Hiroshi but both of them failed to propose when Hiroshi left for France a few years ago. Now he is back and Mariko (Setsuko's sister) tries to reunite them. She too is secretly in love with Hiroshi.

A woman's struggle for equality in Japan in the 1880s. Eiko Hirayama leaves Okayama for Tokyo, where she helps the fledgling Liberal Party and falls in love with its leader Kentaro Omoi, just as the party is being disbanded by the government.

A lawyer fights doggedly for a more just legal system to rid Japan of its draconian penal system.

Japanese propaganda film about the Normanton Incident

Hiromasa Nomura World War II era film

A man and his girlfriend work for a cosmetics company, but would like to open their own store. The company is planning to send someone to Paris for special training and the man tries to get the general manager to send his girlfriend since this training would help them to start their own business. The general manager selects another woman and the trouble begins.

This film was mainly shot in the Japanese skiing resort Hokkaido in 1937-38 and was intended to create support for the coming winter olympics of 1940 in Japan which however were cancelled because of the Japanese-Chinese war. A Japanese production, it was nevertheless made with German involvement in the form of skiing champion Sepp Rist and celebrated cinematographer Richard Angst (who also contributed to the script). Both had regularly worked with the inventor of the mountain film genre, Dr. Arnold Fanck, who had helmed the German-Japanese co-production "Die Tochter des Samurai", also shot by Angst, the year before. Angst apparently stayed in Japan until mid-1939 when he returned to Germany, carrying this film with him. Angst submitted it to the German censors later that year, but for reasons unknown to me it took three more years before the film was finally shown in Germany under the name "Das heilige Ziel" (The Holy Aim). (Karargara)

A young doctor, Kozo Tsumura, falls for young nurse Katsue Takaishi. But she's got a secret: she's a widow with a son. Kozo and Katsue decide to run away to Kyoto, but her child suddenly became sick and she just missed the train and Kozo. She makes it to Kyoto finally, but is unable to meet him. Plus she isn't accepted into Kyoto society. She goes back to her hometown and tries to forget him. She quits the hospital to concentrate on her singing. She makes her professional debut with the hit "Aizen Katsura". Kozo is in the audience.

Three men fall in love with the same young girl who works in a tonkatsu restaurant in the Shitamachi district of Tokyo.

The eldest daughter of a noble family is in love with an aviator while being courted by a fellow aristocrat she thinks is a dullard. This part is told from the perspective of Akemi.

In a back alley of the Shitamachi district of Tokyo, Kihachi bears witness to a series of romantic complications involving the inhabitants of the neighborhood. Considered to be a lost film.

The film tells of the strained relationship between a mother and her two sons after the death of the family patriarch.

Ryoichi and Chikako, brother and sister, live together. Chikako toils during the day and, at night, prostitutes herself to fund his college tuition.

Part two of Shimizu's major silent Seven Seas, a family drama of the intertwining fates of the rich, decadent Yagibashis and the far less prosperous Sone family.

In No Blood Relation, a gripping early example of Mikio Naruse’s cinematic boldness, featuring a screenplay by Ozu’s famed collaborator Kogo Noda, an actress returns to Tokyo after a successful stint in Hollywood to reclaim—with the help of her gangster brother—the daughter she abandoned years before.

When a young man inherits his father's lucrative business, he cheats the system to set up three of his college friends with jobs.

A young man falls in love with a prostitute and is disowned by his family. He is then drafted, and heads off to war. Script exists - considered to be a lost film.

The film is a lengthy work interweaving characters from different backgrounds and social strata in a narrative centered around the experiences of its heroine, Yumie Sone. Over two hours long, Seven Seas was released theatrically in two parts, with the first part entitled "Virginity Chapter" coming out in December 1931, while the second part, "Chastity Chapter," followed in March 1932. Near the beginning of the narrative, at a garden party given by the wealthy Yagibashi family in Tokyo, Yumie meets Takehiko, the Yagibashis' playboy son and the brother of Yumie's fiancé, Yuzuru. Yumie, a young middle-class woman, lives with her ailing father, a retired ministry official, an older sister, and a younger sister still a child (played by a very young Hideko Takamine). Takehiko, who has just returned from a trip to Europe, is attracted to Yumie and contrives to have her stay overnight at his family's mansion where he takes advantage of her.

Mr. Omura, a teacher, leads a group of male students in an outdoor drill. One slight, comic young man, Shinji Okajima, has no shirt under his jacket; he scratches at fleas and makes faces behind Omura's back. Jump ahead several years, Shinji is married with three children. He sells insurance, and on the company's annual bonus day, he protests when an older worker is fired. Shinji loses his own job as a result, and he and his wife must find ways to cope. Lassitude, pride, the demands and needs of young children, and relationships from bygone school days all play a part in the outcome of their struggle.

Bored in his marriage, a dentist flirts with a young woman on a train. However he soon finds himself embroiled in a series of misunderstandings with his wife, the young woman and her husband. Considered to be a lost film.

A farmer’s boy, obsessed with his balsa-and-paper flying models and with dreams of real aircraft, develops a friendship with the daughter of the local squire, who introduces the lad to her pilot brother and his flying officer friends; through hard work, and despite the handicap of a lowly class status, he eventually succeeds in qualifying as a pilot and joining the air force.

The film revolves around a desperate man who commits a crime in order to support his family, and the moral dilemma the policeman who tracks him down finds himself in.

A salaryman finds some money in the street and gets a reward for returning it to its rightful owner. However his colleagues immediately start borrowing money and selling him things he doesn't need, much to his wife's annoyance. Considered to be a lost film.

A young couple jump into the sea as part of a suicide pact. The man is rescued and subsequently discovers that his lover is also alive and working in a dance hall. Considered to be a lost film.

The remaining fragments of an early Ozu film. It is the simple story of two friends who live together in a poor tenement and who share about everything in life (food, hopes, work...). Everything goes well until they gallantly rescue a young (and pretty) woman injured in a road accident. Since the lady has nowhere to go, the two good-hearted friends invite her to their home. She soon becomes their housemaid and they soon begin to seek her favors. Alas, she falls for a young student she has met in the neighborhood, much to the two friends' dismay.

When Sakamoto is made redundant he cannot bring himself to tell his wife. Instead he investigates other employment opportunities. Considered to be a lost film.

Two criminal brothers try to go straight but face opposition from one of their criminal cohorts. Considered to be a lost film.

Early feature film by Hiroshi Shimizu.