The film is a series of vignettes from Taiji Tonoyama's life and film clips, interspersed with a dialogue to camera by Nobuko Otowa, addressing the camera as if she is addressing Tonoyama himself, recollecting events in his life. The film focuses on Tonoyama's alcohol dependence and his various...
2H combines documentary and dramatic film techniques to depict the psychological passages of two Chinese expatriates in Tokyo as they attempt to accommodate their existence to the two universal events of life - birth and death. Ma Jinsan is a 95 year-old former Kuomintang general who defected to...
On the eve of the year 2000, two stories centered around money unfold in Beijing. One is the story of a merchant who was poisoned for money -- 1000 years ago. Trapped in a black bowl, the merchant's ghost encounters an old beggar, and regales him with the story of how he came to be inside a bowl....
The film looks at the history of Yasukuni Shrine in Chiyoda, Tokyo, where more than 2 million of Japan's war dead are enshrined. More than 1,000 of them are war criminals convicted at the 1946–48 Tokyo tribunal, including 14 Class-A war criminals, Hideki Tōjō among them. The film shows not only...
Japanese filmmaker Li Ying directs the documentary Aji (Dream Cuisine), a portrait of master chef Hatsue Sato. In her late seventies, Hatsue is one of the last chefs who honor the traditional cooking style of China's Shandong province. She and her husband, Koroku, run a restaurant in Tokyo, but she...
Kyoko, a native of Shanghai, China, studied in Japan and later married a Japanese man. However, Kyoko hid a certain fact from her husband about her time in China.
Xiu Xiu was abducted from her hometown in Hunan and taken to rural Fujian and raised to be a bride. Twenty years later, she tracks down her biological parents and finds they have fallen on hard times.
