Nobuko Miyamoto
Ichinoi, a 75-year-old woman living a peaceful life, unwittingly buys a Boy's Love manga one day…and is fascinated by what she finds inside. When she returns to the bookstore to buy the next volume, the high school girl working there–Urara, a seasoned BL fan–notices a budding fangirl when she sees one. When Urara offers to help Ichinoi explore this whole new world of fiction, the two dive into BL fandom together, and form an unlikely friendship along the way.
Tamio Akanishi works at a public office in Yokohama. He is going through one of the worst periods of his life, having been left by his fiancée. One day, his boss tells him to take care of a big, white dog, abandoned by its previous owner. Tamio begins to live with the dog, who doesn't bark and only makes a sound that sounds like "haw", and thus he names it Haw. While living together, the connection between the two deepens.
A mother, daughter and two of their friends live in an old Western-style house in Suginami. As secrets are revealed, they face challenges together.
18-year-old Urano Suzu marries Hojo Shusaku and moves from Eba City to Kure City in Hiroshima Prefecture in the middle of the Pacific War. As Japan slides into a war it cannot get out of, the townspeople go on with their “ordinary” lives. Supplies are short, and family and friends get sent to the battlefield. Suzu and the Hojo family battle such anxieties as they try to live positively.
Why did an abused solitary boy become a murderer? A sad but powerful gut-wrenching drama portraying the destiny of humans seeking love, starting up-and-coming actor Yuma Nakayama.
The 17-year-old Yatabe Mineko grew up in a family of seven in a mountain village in northeastern Ibaraki Prefecture. Her father Minoru has gone to Tokyo to work in order to earn extra money. However, her life completely changes when her father does not come back for the New Year. Mineko asks her family to let her go to Tokyo to find him and promises to send money home. In the autumn of 1964, she and two childhood friends Tokiko and Mitsuo are hired to start working at a small factory in Tokyo’s working class neighborhood. After work each day, Mineko searches for her father and gets disheartened at times. Mineko overcomes challenges and starts to lay down roots in Tokyo as she experiences many meetings and farewells amid the laughter and tears with regulars, people of the shopping street, friends, and colleagues. But will she be able to find her father?
Mayu Daimon is a woman who does not remember her mother's face, and her father is the only person she has blood relationship in this world, but he is going to die soon. Mayu has just started a new life as a detective at the Criminal Investigation Division which deals mainly with murder cases soon, and has to handle with two corpses of old men continuously. One corpse found frozen buried in the snow and the freezing sea. Soon with a detailed investigation she finds out a connection between the two cases which seemed to be completely different at first glance. It was just the breach to open a history of an incident which had origin back to the 1960s in Aomori Prefecture. Growing more and more as a detective, Mayu has to unravel the mystery of a case which goes beyond time and space and which ends in Hokkaido with a result that no one expected.
Botchan (Kazunari Ninomiya) has sense of strong justice and does not lie. He is offered a teaching job at a middle in a small village far away from his hometown of Tokyo. Botchan accepts the position and begins to work as a math teacher. The assistant principle there wields absolute power. Botchan has a hard time dealing with his fellow teachers and the students.
Hiroyuki Tachikawa is 28-years-old. He quits his job due to severe quotas and difficult relations. His girlfriend, Chieko Takanashi (Eriko Nakamura), also kicks him out. Hiroyuki Tachikawa then decides to go to the small port city of Tsuyazaki in Fukuoka Prefecture. There, he meets a 72-year-old woman, Fukuko Hanada. She doesn't know why, but she likes Hiroyuki Tachikawa and takes him to different places. The young man soon picks up on the meaning of happiness.
Found inside a shining stalk of bamboo by an old bamboo cutter and his wife, a tiny girl grows rapidly into an exquisite young lady. The mysterious young princess enthralls all who encounter her - but ultimately she must confront her fate, the punishment for her crime.
Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto (1884-1943) was the Japanese Naval commander who was given the order to attack Pearl Harbour, an order he was duty bound to obey which went against his own personal beliefs. While this infamous attack is a low point in Japanese and US history it wouldn’t have happened if the Japanese government had listened to Yamamoto in 1939 and searched for a more peaceful way to end their war campaign, proving his many ominous presages of the outcomes of the attack to come true.
"Hankyu Densha" follows the lives of various people who commute on Hankyu Railway's Imazu Line - connecting the cities of Nishinomiya and Takarazuka in Hyogo prefecture. One of the commuters is Shoko (Miki Nakatani), an office worker in her 30s who lost her boyfriend to a younger colleague. There's also a college student (Erika Toda) who is so easily persuaded by her no good boyfriend. Other commuters include a grandmother & granddaughter, a house wife, a female high school student, and a female otaku college student. Although the train ride takes only 15 minutes between two stations, the lives of these commuters are changed as they interact with each other...
Sakiko, works independently at a travel agent in Tokyo. She was raised by her mother, Tatsuko, is hospitalized, Sakiko returns to her hometown Tokushima on Shikoku. The town is famous for its annual Awa Dance Festival. She is told by doctor, Terasawa Daisuke, that her mother has terminal cancer.
The 36th NHK Taiga Drama is Mori Motonari. This series chronicles the life of Mori Motonari, a warlord of the early 1500s who stood at the vanguard of the Warring States era. All Japanese school textbooks contain the Mitsuya no kyokun, Mori's famous lesson to his three sons that teaches that while one arrow is easily broken, three arrows together cannot be broken. In 1997, 500 years after his birth, NHK dramatizes Motonari's rise from a chief of the region of Aki (now Hiroshima) to a daimyo who rules over ten provinces of the Chugoku region. Motonari was 64 years old and already the patriarch of a powerful dynasty about the time Oda Nobunaga and Takeda Shingen appeared on the scene. And even after his death, the Mori family figured prominently in Japanese history. His grandson Terumoto became a loyal Toyotomi vassal. Defeated at the Battle of Sekigahara, Ieyasu confiscated most of his lands, leaving him only with Suwo and Nagato, later known as Choshu. But 260 years later, the Mori got their ultimate revenge, leading the imperial forces against the Tokugawa in the Meiji Restoration.
In this made-in-Japan drama/comedy/gangster movie from director Juzo Itami a star actress, Biwako (played by Nobuko Miyamoto), is the sole witness to a grizzly murder. The cops persuade Biwako to play the bait to catch the killers. Two veteran detectives are assigned to protect her at all times, and as the film progresses the guardians have no choice but to deal with the overly dramatic, hilarious, and sometimes harrowing ups-and-downs of Biwako's life. Beautifully shot and dynamically structured in a way that only the Japanese are capable of, Marutai reminds us that sometimes the most loyal friendships are formed under the darkest circumstances.
Goro's supermarket is not doing well; the rival "Bargains Galore" threatens his business. A chance encounter with Hanako, an energetic woman he knew in grade school, results in big retail and life changes.
Melodrama about the life of a mentally handicapped young man and his devoted sister after their famous novelist father and housewife mother go to Australia on a business trip.
A successful Japanese movie director in his 60s becomes increasingly ill while working on his latest film. His family, friends, and doctor try to keep the secret of his terminal cancer from him, but it gradually becomes clear. Coming to terms with his own mortality is painful, and involves some major conflicts with his wife and the hospital staff.
Making of Daibyonin, directed by Juzo Itami, also known as "The Last Dance"
A grand old Japanese hotel is trying to get a prestigious contract as the site of a summit meeting of important foreign officials. Unfortunately, this hotel is quite popular with the Yakuza (Japanese gangsters) and is a favorite target of theirs for extortion. They employ a variety of schemes to con the hotel out of 'hush-money.' The hotel needs to rid itself of the Yakuza and finally begins to fight back by hiring Mahiru Inoue, a lawyer who is an expert at dealing with these criminals on their own terms. This film by Juzo Itami combines action with farce, as an all-out war ensues. Written by Tad Dibbern
The film stars two of Itami's regular actors, Nobuko Miyamoto as a geisha who brings luck to the men with whom she sleeps, and Masahiko Tsugawa as her unfaithful, sometimes partner. As well as showing her relationships with the man she loves and the men who employ her, it satirizes corruption and the influence of money in Japanese politics.
A TV production crew are making a documentary about the infamous painter Mamiya Ichiro. When they start filming at his old home, they come under attack from the ghost of the painter's wife.
Yohei, a punk rocker, becomes a Buddhist monk in order to inherit a mountain temple. Though initially rebelling against the tough monastic discipline, he learns to adjust. Then his girlfriend shows up, enticing him to return to his rock 'n' roll roots.
Ryoko Itakura returns as the government tax agent willing to tackle the toughest cases. This time she takes on a fanatical but lucrative religious cult run by a vile lecher.
Ryoko Itakura is a government tax agent who has just landed a big promotion. Her first assignment is to catch wheeler-dealer Hideki Gondo. She has a tough job, since in Japan tax evasion is an art and Gondo is, in effect, Rembrandt.
At the beginning of the film the father-in-law of the protagonist dies unexpectedly of a heart attack. The remainder of the film is episodic, moving from one incident to another over the course of the three-day funeral, which is held (as is customary) in the home. These incidents contrast old ways and new ways, young and old, ritual ceremony and true feelings, often comically, but sometimes with real poignancy.
Deaths in Tokimeki tells the disturbing, compulsive story of a hit-man waiting to carry out a job: the assassination of the leader of a religious cult, masterminded by the leader's own deputy. But it is a story that is told in blocks, like the phrases in a child's computer game, and what counts most is not the narrative but the spaces between the blocks-the gaps that are filled with undefined menaces as potent as anything in Lovecraft.
Ulysses Jenkins composed "Dream City" from documentation of a twenty-four-hour performance he organized in collaboration with David Hammons, Maren Hassinger, and Senga Nengudi. A discordant, absurdist, and poetic montage, the video weaves together jazz and punk shows, recitations by Jenkins, and shots of the Los Angeles skyline and oil wells to comment on power and nation in the early years of Ronald Reagan's presidency.
A man and a little girl meet in a bicycle parking in Tokyo. The little girl says she wants to watch the sea, and their travel begins. The man has no conscience of being a kidnapper. He asks the girl to phone her mother and tell her she’s with him. During their trip they will meet various people. But they always have to go further, or the man would to get arrested...
Katsuragi Motoko started as an NHK announcer, became a reportage writer after the war, and then an author. This story is about a woman's struggle to find her life's purpose and to survive. The 28th NHK asadora, set in the Showa era and location included Tokyo.
Natsuko is a woman of 20 who feels entrapped in her long-running relationship with another man—she wants out of a "nowhere" life and into something better. To that end, she hooks up with a photographer and poses for him in the nude—if only to break away from her restricted existence for awhile. Soon the photographer leads her to a relationship with an open-minded man who helps her along the path of individual choice and freedom. Her next relationship is with a well-known actor who is able to introduce her to an acting job—an intimation that perhaps Natsuko's life will change after all. Given enough time and men, could she eventually run for Prime Minister?
The world of adults seen by a high school girl in the valley between school and home after school, and the sparkling poison that only a daughter of this age has, gradually spreads ripples in the world of adults.
Torajiro becomes homesick during his travels after watching a television report about his hometown and meeting a young woman that reminds him of his sister Sakura. Meanwhile, a new tenant moves into Toraya restaurant.
Four sexually hungry high school students preparing for their university entrance exams meet up with an inebriated teacher singing bawdy drinking songs. This encounter sets them on a less than academic path.
A well-respected drama teacher confesses to his housekeeper that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima has left him impotent. With the coming of spring, the sympathetic housekeeper suggests that the Master observe the Yobai , a custom in which the young men of a village steal into the bedrooms of susceptible women to have sex.
The story centers on a man (Suda Masaki) who loves movies, work at movie studio in pursuit of his dreams, surrounded by great directors and star actors. He and his friend fall in love with the daughter or cafeteria played by Nagano Mei.
The story of the Tawara family, the last ninja family that abandoned its roots after an incident took place, who must take on the greatest crisis in Japanese history, threatening to shake the nation to its core.
