Chōko Iida

In postwar Tokyo, a blunt, alcohol-soaked doctor diagnoses a swaggering young yakuza with tuberculosis, forging an uneasy bond that’s tested when the gangster’s ruthless former boss returns and drags him back toward the swampy underworld he can’t escape.

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 criminal’s lives become more intertwined and the investigation becomes an examination of Murakami’s own dark side.

A hard-hearted old woman in a bombed-out Tokyo neighborhood reluctantly takes in an abandoned boy, leading to a heartwarming bond between them.

Fumiko, mother of two and wife to 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 her final stages, Fumiko meets a young journalist from Tokyo who wants to write a story on her experiences.

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

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, the professor calls Okada, one of his students, to take her home. The wife becomes suspicious of Setsuko when she sees Okada bringing her home.

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.

A rural widow sends her only son to Tokyo to receive a better education. Years later, she visits him and finds he has become a night school teacher struggling to support his wife and son.

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.

A young man discovers that the woman who raised him is his stepmother. His stepbrother, who is unaware of the revelation, resents his mother for always punishing him more severely than his stepsibling.

Based on the life and career of novelist Fumiko Hayashi, she bitterly struggles for literary recognition in the first half of the 20th-century – her affairs with feckless men, the jobs she took to survive (peddler, waitress, bar maid), and her arduous, often humiliating attempts to get published in a male-dominated culture.

The Crazy Cats, a Japanese musical-comedy group, were showcased a series of comic adventures throughout the 1960s. Las Vegas Free-For-All, one of their most popular movies, featured scenes filmed on location in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and Hawaii. Appearing with the seven Cats were the lovely Mie Hama and such Japanese musical artists as The Peanuts, The Johnnys, The Drifters, and Jackie Yoshikawa & the Blue Comets.

In Depression-era Tokyo, the life of a single mother and her young son are disrupted by the return of her ex-husband, who fathered the child and walked out on her years earlier.

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.

At Shizumoto, a geisha shop not far from Ginza, a group of geisha are going about their day, putting up a modest resistance to the tragedies of life. The proprietress, Ikuyo, is a ridiculously good-natured woman who gives money to a poor but brilliant young man, Eisaku Yanoguchi, to attend college on the condition that he will take care of her in the future.

A group of teenagers grow up in Okinawa amid the protests and resistance against the presence of the American base in the island.

Tetsuo Nomoto, a young college graduate tries to find a decent job by himself. Later on, he will marry his girlfriend, Machiko, whom he hides the fact that he has no job. Hardships come quickly, which forces Machiko to find a job in a bar.

Ichiro Yoshida, the father of the boy Kiyoshi, who has been repatriated from China, returns home after a ten-year separation. The father, who has been estranged from his son for many years, pays no attention to the boy, often punishes him unfairly, and gives all his tenderness to his little daughter, who was born after his return. The boy sees all the injustice of his father and, offended, leaves home. The father realized that he was wrong, that he was guilty before his son. The mother finds the boy and brings him home. The father and the son become friends from that day on.

A young woman, who must support her father as a middle-aged man's mistress, finds herself falling in love with a student closer to her age.

In a military family, an illegitimate son is brutalized by his brothers. A patriarchal, feudalistic household where dissent is forbidden is used to reveal the whole imperialist system that afflicted Japan between 1921 and 1946.

Police beat a murder confession out of four innocent men who are then sentenced to death. Based on a true story.

Iemon Tamiya is an impoverished masterless samurai who craves a better life, which he cannot have because of his marriage to Oiwa, who is completely devoted to her husband.

Japanese home drama starring Kinuyo Tanaka.