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...
When an American is murdered in a Japanese inn, Tokyo police detective Munesue follows the trail of the killer to New York. There he is joined by a New York City detective named Shuftan and together they sort out the crime.
Kitagawa is an engineer charged with construction of a gigantic tunnel through the Japan Alps for the transportation of equipment in the building of the massive Kurobe Dam. The tunnel crosses an earthquake fault and Kitagawa is beleaguered not only by cave-ins and flooding, but by strife between...
An Indian prince leaves his world of comfort and riches behind to wander and meditate for six years in search of spiritual enlightenment. Siddartha (Cojoin Hong) turns his back on the old religion when people are starving needlessly and holy rituals include human sacrifices. During his meditations,...
In Osaka's slum, youths without futures engage in pilfering, assault and robbery, prostitution, and the buying and selling of identity cards and of blood. Alliances constantly shift. Tatsu and Takeshi, friends since boyhood, reluctantly join Shin's gang. Shin's an upstart and moves his gang often...
Masako, a five-year-old girl living, gets a scratch on her finger. After that, she suffered horrible spasms. The doctor checks on her and arrives at the conclusion that she has tetanus. Her parents have to bear the sufferings of their child. The once peaceful family has changed completely.
A young Japanese-American man arrives at his grandmother's old hometown in Yamaguchi, begins to stay at her family's elite but dysfunctional household, and gets entangled in a sinister plot of murder.
A car going at 25 mph plunges into the sea at Shinko Harbour, Toyama prefecture. Inside is the local business magnate Fukutaro Shirakawa, who perishes. Riding alongside him and surviving unhurt is his second wife, Kumako. It soon comes to light that Kumako’s husband was insured for 300 million...
Aya successfully stages a fashion show in Osaka and in the train on her way home to Tokyo accidentally treads on a man's foot. The man whose name is Rentaro is not amused. Just afterwards she notices that he is reading a magazine which carries her picture which he crushes and throws under his seat....
A young girl knows that she is going to die and in this she is supported by the devotion of the boy who loves her. They originally met at the hospital. There it transpired that the only way to save her life was to sacrifice an eye and part of her face. The operation seems a success. Later, however,...
The story of the silk industry and the young girls who worked as silk spinners in the early 1900s in Japan. The silk mills were located in Okaya which lies just beyond the Nomugi Pass. The women and girls worked in a hot, humid atmosphere without rest, and endured those conditions and sexual...
Fukuzo, Kato and Matsuko, Kato's wife, are operating the "Kurenai Sightseeing Service" in Tokyo. Fukuzo and Kato were comrades during the war. One day Fukuzo guides Harumi, an old woman, to the Yasukuni Shrine where the souls of fallen soldiers are enshrined. Finding she has no place to go, Fukuzo...
In the dying months of the Meiji era, a sympathetic student befriends a married couple, but soon realizes they share a curiously strained relationship stemming from an unknown incident in their past.
The university professor Ozeki Hitoshi (Ryu Chishu) is regarded as an eccentric by people in his surroundings. When his daughter Tokiko is asked to marry a colleague, she and her mother are overjoyed, but Hitoshi is not satisfied with the situation.
In the War's closing days, when a conscience-driven Japanese soldier fails to get his countrymen to surrender to overwhelming force, he adopts the lifestyle of a Buddhist monk.
