Akira Kobayashi

Shozo Hirono has managed to separate from the Yamamori family and create his own small family, and extend his circle of acquaintances. These new friendships include a powerful underboss of the Muraoka family, Noboru Uchimoto.

As Japan gears up for the 1964 Olympic Games, the cops start to crack down on the gangs, under pressure from the public and the press, adding a new dimension in the war for power among the yakuza families of Hiroshima.

Mid 50s: the trials and tribulations of Shinsuke Ibuki, freshly arrived in Tokyo from Kyushu.

In the teeming black markets of postwar Japan, Shozo Hirono and his buddies find themselves in a new war between factious and ambitious yakuza.

Island villagers find a young woman and young man swept ashore near their remote village in northeastern Japan. The two have tried to escape the girl's enforced marriage to another man, in order that they may marry themselves. The ancient custom of the village decrees that the angry sea gods must be calmed by throwing the pair back into the sea. The lovers face being sacrificed to the sea gods or perhaps something even more difficult to bear.

A delinquent young man (Kobayashi Akira) from a wealthy family decides to get in on a blackmailing scheme targeting his young stepmother (Watanabe Misako). However, he doesn't realize that his fellow blackmailers have their eyes on his girlfriend next.

Ryu (Akira Kobayashi) sets foot on the Yokohama port with a suitcase filled with 300 thousand dollars. He was sent by a jewelry company in Hong Kong to retrieve a certain diamond that was stolen from them. The "Himalayan Star" is worth couple hundred million yen and unbeknown to Ryu, it now lays in the hands of Aizu (Jo Shishido), the infamous ”Pirate of the Tokyo Bay."

A crime film released in 1962

A young yakuza in love with the girl who's to marry his clan oyabun, kidnaps the girl before fleeing with her. In Tokyo, he hides under the identity of a worker while the young woman becomes a waitress in a restaurant.

With a Kansai syndicate setting their sights on Tokyo, a former yakuza boss gets dragged back into a world of violence.

Satake Shoji had been a trapeze artist in the Ezaki Circus, but when Shingo, his team mate, slipped and fell to his death, he had felt responsible and, sick at heart, left the circus for a life at sea. On land again Shoji goes to a cabaret where he is soon involved in a brawl. Kasamatsu, the owner of the cabaret, impressed by Shoji's strength, offers him a job as his bodyguard. The next morning Shoji visits Shingo's grave and meets Miyako, Shingo's former sweetheart, who is still a trapeze performer and now the star of the Kuroko Circus which Shoji realizes Kasamatsu intends to control.

Around Ginza there is a night-city of bars and cabarets, hostesses, customers. Assisting to keep order here is Kagari (Akira Kobayashi) who specializes in the women, their problems and troubles. He has saved many a girl from blandishments of pimps, makes customers pay up and women play straight. So he is called 'the woman's police-man' and he takes his job seriously. One day, Chiyoko (Yukiyo Toake), a former hostess, comes to him. Her husband has been murdered and she wants help. The man had been a college classmate and Kagari decides to do what he can. In his investigation he overturns a whole nest of intrigue. Men he had thought irreproachable turn out to be corrupt; solid citizens are seen as the worst kind of scoundrels. Until now, Kagari has specialized in women and their problems. But, realizing the real state of affairs, he rolls up his sleeves for a good cleaning- up-at the same time discovering the murderer of his friend.

A continuation of Hungry Soul, from the same year. Reiko, who tolerates abuse in her marriage to a man 23 years her senior, is friends with Mayumi, a beautiful widow. Reiko meets her husband’s business rival, a young, capable businessman, and falls for him. Meanwhile, Mayumi enters into a relationship with Shimotsuma, a friend of her late husband.

Saheji, a man-about-town, gets stuck at a high-class brothel when he can’t pay the bill. He makes the best of his situation by performing various tasks amidst the tumult of the end of the shogunate—but always by making sure to get a “commission” for his troubles.

A 1970 crime film.

A story about the development of a bright and strong yakuza. Otaki is an old-fashioned respectful yakuza who tries to protect his small yakuza family. When his boss gets shot, he decides to go after the plotters.

It had been a year and four months since Mitsuo was last on a movie set. Welcomed back by director Ishizaki and his film crew, Mitsuo is excited to star as the lead in "My Sweetheart". One day, half way through production, he meets his friends from a popular rock group, "The Spiders". Through their discussion regarding the climax scene, they criticize that the script is too grim. In a notion to protect their friend's career, they decide to pay the scriptwriter a little visit.

In this fifth episode of the "Wataridori" series, Taki Shinji (Kobayashi Akira) drifts north to Hokkaido, where he helps protect an Ainu village from unscrupulous land developers.

Rambler Shinji arrives in town armed with nothing but a guitar. With assistance from an old gun-for-hire friend, he sets about to stop the mob from turning an honest ranch into a gambling resort.

The 224-minute compilation edition of Battles Without Honor and Humanity compiles these four movies: Battles Without Honor and Humanity, Deadly Fight in Hiroshima, Proxy War, Police Tactics.

Vice Admiral Takajiro Ohnishi could see that Japan's defeat in WWII was inevitable. He came to realize that the only way to force a negotiated solution was to convince the Americans that invading Japan would cause massive casualties on both sides. The cold logic of suicide attacks, where one man and one plane could kill hundreds, seemed the only solution. In one of the cruel ironies of fate, Ohnishi actually succeeded; he convinced the Americans that invading Japan would be too costly in lives. But what he could not foresee was that America had another way of ending the war.

It is the end of the Taisho era (1912-1926), and at the Hanazuki-tei theatre in Asakusa, the famous performance of storyteller Koiso Kikuji and performer Kataoka Koshin is reaching its climax when the Tawaraya family interferes... This is an entertaining action film bursting with righteousness and humanity, centred on men who try to live righteously against a corrupt boss who preys on the performers.

Worried about the state under heaven and lamenting the decadence of Bushido, the shogunate daimetsuke Inuijuzaemon (Shogo Shimada) decides that the only way to reform the shogunate is to cure it by force. Led by the leader Gennosuke Inui (Asahi Kobayashi), four men and women are summoned from the national government to organize a secret investigation agency. The four of them base themselves at Azamiya, a cooking tea house in Fukagawa, and take root in a corner of the city to expose the great evil that pervades the dark side of civil society. [TV series] (C) International Broadcasting

The series tells The story of the 1609 invasion of Ryûkyû by forces from the Japanese domain of Satsuma, an event which changed the course of Ryukyuan history dramatically.