Yōtarō Katsumi

An early film by Kon Ichikawa

The few residents left on the streets in Tokyo share their individual stories and come to understand the melancholy of saying goodbye.

Okoma, a witty young woman working as a conductor in an old, rickety bus in Kōfu, Yamanashi (rural Japan), has a creative idea that could avert the dwindling number of passengers when her job and the bus company itself are at stake.

A young man who is unable to tell his childhood friend how he feels makes a pledge with her to reveal all of their secrets during the upcoming festival.

A moving episode in which a war criminal in the Philippines, having faced death, pleads earnestly while trembling with fear.

A romantic melodrama about the shifting relationship between Ryosuke and Miki as their precarious employment and social circumstances shift around them.

A female doctor's story of her life in an isolated leper colony.

An episodic film about life in and around a rural police station and the people it serves.

A novice city-based teacher's first assignment is to a fishing village's grade school. The young teacher's first week with her new students is enjoyable, but she gradually notices that many of the students are skipping school. Visiting her students after class, she realizes that many of them are charged with work and tasks like making money, toiling on the farm, doing housework or tending to their younger siblings. Many of them live in unhygienic homes due to poverty or overwork. She not only reports and explains the situation to the school's principal, but also attempts to improve the conditions by making textbooks, teaching cleanliness, and making her classes relevant.

Film can be viewed on the National Film Archive of Japan YouTube channel under the title "【全篇】『小羊』1923年｜「はじまりの日本劇映画 映画 meets 新派・新劇・新国劇」より." In English, that would roughly translate to: "[Full length] "The Lamb" 1923 | From "The Beginnings of Japanese Feature Film: Film meets Shinpa, Shingeki, and Shinkokugeki"."