Movies: Taizō Fukami

Kanji Watanabe is a middle-aged man who has worked in the same monotonous bureaucratic position for decades. Learning he has cancer, he starts to look for the meaning of his life....

Over more than a decade, the daughter of a Kyoto Imperial University professor comes of age as she witnesses her father fired for opposing the rise of fascism in Japan and becomes involved with two of his students....

Umekichi, a geisha in the Gion district of Kyoto, feels obliged to help her lover Furusawa when he asks to stay with her after becoming bankrupt and leaving his wife. However her younger sister Omocha tells her she is wasting her time and money on a ...

Three bank robbers, Eijima, Nojiri, and Takasugi, flee the police and escape into the mountains. At an inn high in the Japanese Alps, Eijima and Nojiri encounter a young woman and her father, as well as Honda, a mountaineer. The inn folk do not reali...

Set in post-war Japan, The Lady of Musashino tells the story of Michiko, a disillusioned young woman trapped in a loveless marriage. She confides in her younger cousin, Tsutomo, and the two become close, but decide not to consummate their affair. He ...

Two brothers compete for the amorous favors of a young woman during a seaside summer of gambling, boating, and drinking....

The film was produced during Second Sino-Japanese War, before the Pearl Harbor Attack in 1941. The film mainly concerns the training of newly-recruited pilots and their daily life, then their subsequent fighting experiences in China. Army supported t...

The premature death of a young mother serves as inspiration for her husband and son....

The critical establishment was clearly not prepared to accept a woman's prison film featuring former prostitutes recovering from venereal diseases, unwanted pregnancies, and estranged lovers. With its cat fights, hysterical tantrums, film noir lighti...

A bus making its precarious way across a winding mountain road picks up some unwelcome passengers....

An airplane loaded with 50 million yen for the reconstruction of Amami Oshima crashes en route from Kagoshima, Kyushu, but neither the money nor the remains of the pilot can be found....

1962 Japanese movie...

Shortly after arriving in Kobe, "Jiro the Lefty", a killer with a natural talent, witnesses a man die in a crane accident which turns out to be a cover-up for a murder. Jiro soon finds himself on the run, tailed by a determined cop....

A dangerous mobster threatens the life of a businessman's mother in this thriller. As Ryuji oversees the building of a bridge in Japan, a powerful gangster plans to stop the project. By any means necessary....

A story about a wealthy family and the greed and selfishness of three daughters and relatives, after the passing of their old father...

In A Tale of Archery, young, timid bowmaster Kazuma (Akitake Kôno) seeks to beat the archery record set by Hoshino Kanzaemon, a mysterious figure who, it is rumored, drove the previous champion (Kazuma’s father) to suicide. Possessed of much raw tale...

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The second film in the "Suruga yukyoden" series, in which Shintaro Katsu plays Jirocho Shimizu. The film features Omasa, Komasa, Ocho, who will become Jirocho's wife, as well as other members of his future family. There is a particularly great swordf...

A Fond Face from the Past is also set in a rural community, specifically a village outside Kameoka, near Kyoto. In some ways this short, thirty-six-minute film is Naruse's most moving negotiation of the militarist restrictions of the time, perhaps be...

This is the only surviving “Mito Komon Manyu-ki” film. This release also known as "Adrift Tour Memoir" or literally "Mito Komon's Pleasure Trip" is an 80-minute compilation of the first (東海道の巻 or "Tokaido no maki") and second (日本晴れの巻 or "Japan's Fin...