Chōko Iida Movies

A bad day gets worse for young detective Murakami when a pickpocket steals his gun on a hot, crowded bus. Desperate to right the wrong, he goes undercover, scavenging Tokyo’s sweltering streets for the stray dog whose desperation has led him to a life of crime. With each step, cop and...

An aging actor returns to a small town with his troupe and reunites with his former lover and illegitimate son, a scenario that enrages his current mistress and results in heartbreak for all.

After the death of her husband, an elderly woman and her youngest, unmarried daughter are forced to sell their house to cover his debts and decide to move in with one of the former's children, each of whom is scarcely happy to accommodate.

Doctor Sanada treats gangster Matsunaga after he is wounded in a gunfight, and discovers that he is suffering from tuberculosis. Sanada tries to convince Matsunaga to stay for treatment, which would drastically change his lifestyle. They form an uneasy friendship until Matsunaga's old boss Okada...

A poor rickshaw driver finds himself helping a young woman and her son after the woman's husband dies suddenly.

A silk factory worker is persuaded to support her son's education up to a college level despite their poverty. Many years later, she travels to Tokyo to visit her son.

An errant salaryman's son gets lost until a man from the Tokyo tenements brings him to vendor Tane, who's reluctant to let the kid board.

A professor, Komiya, and his bossy wife, Tokiko, are to look after Setsuko, their high-spirited niece from Osaka. Despite being a minor, Setsuko is a liberated woman who does whatever she wants, including smoking. She even convinces Koyima to take her to a geisha house. When she gets rather tipsy,...

Graduate Okajima finds his old-fashioned beard makes life difficult in a comedy exploring the tension between tradition and modernity.

Students Watanabe and Yamamoto unknowingly compete for the same girl.

Slice of life film centered on a couple of years in the life of a rural high school girl.

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

An aging geisha, whose angry teenage son is ashamed of her profession, works alongside a young geisha, resentful of her family for forcing her into a life of ignominy.

An unemployed Japanese man and his two sons wander the industrial flatlands of Depression-era Tokyo, until he chances upon an old friend and befriends a woman and her daughter, who are in a similar predicament.

Fumiko, mother of two children and wife of an unfaithful man, shares her family life with her budding vocation as a poet. The beginning of her successful literary career coincides with her divorce and her breast cancer diagnosis. In the last stage of her life, she meets a young journalist from...

Keitaro is a law student and Yaeko is a high school girl. They are neighbors, and their friendship is starting to develop into something more romantic. Then, Yaeko's sister Kyouko has a breakup with her husband and returns home. Kyouko is clearly interested in Keitaro and Yae becomes anxious.

In Depression-era Tokyo, a young man struggles to provide for his family after he is fired from his job.

Considered one of the finest late Naruses and a model of film biography, A Wanderer’s Notebook features remarkable performances by Hideko Takamine – Phillip Lopate calls it “probably her greatest performance” – and Kinuyo Tanaka as mother and daughter living from hand to mouth in Twenties...

A middle-aged father has just married off his third daughter, but still has his nine year old son to raise whom he resents as he was unwanted.

College student Yuichi Tanuma is fired up for Nationals where his university Kyonan will face off against their rivals, Seihoku. Yuichi has his sights set on winning football gold, but his father, who wants him to take over his sukiyaki restaurant, isn't too keen on this. Set in Kyoto, Hong Kong,...