Teiji Takahashi

Comedy about the trials and tribulations of youth.

A father curries favor with his bosses to further his career, but his wife has lost faith in him. She returns to her family home while they rent out their house during the summer to pay off their mortgage, and there she meets a lonely old man...

6.8/10

Shochiku's commemorative 3000th film production; a suspenseful period drama.

The story tells of Tsuchiya, a university professor and a widower who is in love with a widow who runs a small restaurant, and his son is in love with a runaway girl who turns out to be the leader of a religious sect. Kusano is the henpecked proprietor of a rice biscuit shop who dreams of owning a bird and dog shop and his daughter is in love with a boarder, employed by the private detective agency searching for the runaway girl. The agency head has his own dream of arranging thirty marriages and has already accomplished twenty-seven. Tatsumi is a newspaper reporter who dreams of a big scoop to enable him to marry a girl TV producer and his friend a mountain climbing enthusiast who dreams of joining a Himalayan expedition but is opposed by his wife. His love of the mountains is shared by a boarder in their home and by a fishmonger's son.

In Kabuki style, the film tells the story of a remote mountain village where the scarcity of food leads to a voluntary but socially-enforced policy in which relatives carry 70-year-old family members up Narayama mountain to die. Granny Orin is approaching 70, content to embrace her fate. Her widowed son Tatsuhei cannot bear losing his mother, even as she arranges his marriage to a widow his age. Her grandson Kesa, who's girlfriend is pregnant, is selfishly happy to see Orin die. Around them, a family of thieves are dealt with severely, and an old man, past 70, whose son has cast him out, scrounges for food. Will Orin's loving and accepting spirit teach and ennoble her family?

7.9/10
8.6%

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.

7.9/10
8.8%

Two men at an ironworks encounter roadblocks: the first does not have the grades to get a job, while the other finds himself falling for a co-worker.

6.9/10

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

8.1/10
10%

The proprietress of a long-established sushi restaurant in Asakusa is a war widow who has raised three children. A film that lightheartedly depicts a generational battle between a mother who is anxious about the issue of an heir and her modern children.

An Ishiro Honda Film.

8.5/10

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

7.9/10
10%

A young widow, made world weary by her abusive, neglectful husband, finds herself in a minor scandal when she's seen with her intense, no-nonsense childhood sweetheart.

6.7/10

This period film is inspired by one of the most notorious scandals to have taken place in Edo-period Japan. The heroine, Ejima, was a lady of the Ooku, the harem of Edo Castle in which the Shogun’s mother, wife and concubines resided, forbidden from contact with any other man except in the presence of the Shogun. The institution played a key role in the Byzantine world of Japanese court politics during the Edo era. In 1714, Lady Ejima was sent to pay her respects at a Buddhist temple in the city, and chose to pay an unauthorised visit to the kabuki theatre – a violation of protocol that was to have tragic consequences.

Historical drama about two samurai who fight over everything yet unite together to fight an evil lord.

At the close of the war in Japan, a widowed mother makes every possible sacrifice to bring up her ungrateful son and daughter who are unimpressed with their poor standard of living at home. They gradually reject her in search of the material comforts that working as a maid cannot provide. The mother's despair becomes interminable.

7.3/10

A young student falls into a hopeless romantic attraction to an invalid girl whom he can only see from afar.

6.9/10

Follows six male friends from elementary school whose career paths diverge—newspaper reporter, engineer, boxer, sushi restaurant owner—but whose romantic lives intersect. (MoMA)

It chronicles the experiences of a neighbourhood doctor, whose taste for tonkatsu (a popular Japanese dish, similar to a pork schnitzel) earns him the nickname ‘the pork cutlet prince’ (‘Tonkatsu Taisho’, the film’s Japanese title) from the affectionate residents of the tenement in which he lives. When a local hospital, run by a female doctor, plans to expand, the future of the tenement is called into question.

7.2/10

Melodrama that lovingly portrays working people who live in poverty but righteously. Kosaburo Yoshimura, the master of "women's films," cast Yasuko Fujita, an unknown newcomer, in the leading role for this masterpiece about the joy of love. The Yoshikawa family is a typical small town family. With only the father's and daughter's salaries to support the family's six members, life is not easy.

kikyou - The Return

Drama directed by Yasushi Sasaki.

A 1949 Japanese film.