Minamimura, who had always wanted to be free, suddenly quits his job. His hardworking wife is surprised and angry, and throws him out of the house. Confused by his sudden freedom, Iosuke ends up living as a vagrant under a bridge. His wife, Komako, also finds herself freed and is unable to ignore...
Every day a car accident happens in the city. The involved parties are prey to the settlement agents (jidanya), mediators between the parts and the insurance companies to avoid time-consuming legal actions that could come when no settlement is reached (while cheating both parties out of some piece...
An early Japanese sound film, notable for being the only Japanese film ever to use the Western Electric Sound System. Contrary to most Western sources that give sole directing credit to Eizo Tanaka, it was actually co-directed by six different directors, Tanaka, Kazue Kimura, Kazuo Takimura, Ryoji...
Ushimatsu's father told him never to reveal his lower-caste heritage; years later, he now contemplates confiding in an activist fighting against such discrimination.
The investigative unit of the Metropolitan Police Department organized a special investigative team to uncover a series of frequent gang robberies and car gangs... This is the first film in the Nippon G-Men series, of which four more films were later released.
Kazuo Miyagawa’s prizewinning black-and-white cinematography draws out the moral shadings of Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata’s 1952 novel Thousand Cranes, a quietly devastating story of a young man, orphaned during the war, who stumbles into a passionate yet tragic relationship with his late...
In Japanese theater, women's roles are traditionally played by men. The man playing the woman's role, the Onnagata, does not imitate the woman, as in the West, but tries to capture her significance. He need not stick close to his model, but draws far more from his own identity - a shift of value...
Detective Katahachi meets a young and beautiful pickpocket and doesn’t arrest her because she was not in the act. Instead, he listens to the story about her parents who killed himself and died for overwork to feel sorry about her.
Four sisters are all named after flowers. While the two youngest are married, the eldest two remain single, much to the annoyance of their long-suffering mother. The mother and her brother try various schemes to find husbands for them.
