The Balloon

Starring Akira Takarada as a lightweight boxing champion.

A drummer falls for a pawnbroker's daughter.

Follows six male friends from elementary school whose career paths diverge—newspaper reporter, engineer, boxer, sushi restaurant owner—but whose romantic lives intersect. (MoMA)

It chronicles the experiences of a neighbourhood doctor, whose taste for tonkatsu (a popular Japanese dish, similar to a pork schnitzel) earns him the nickname ‘the pork cutlet prince’ (‘Tonkatsu Taisho’, the film’s Japanese title) from the affectionate residents of the tenement in which he lives. When a local hospital, run by a female doctor, plans to expand, the future of the tenement is called into question.

The lives of a family of kelp (kombu) merchants in Osaka across three generations, spanning from the Meiji era through the aftermath of World War II.

A young girl is rigorously trained in the feminine arts so that she can become a geisha. As she struggles through life, she learns to live not just as a woman but as a complete person.

A greedy, materialistic family attempts to cover-up the embezzlement committed by the son while keeping their other schemes active. They discover there are other, equally conniving players involved.

The female members of the family of the Minister of Health and Welfare, who has just proposed a program of birth control, become pregnant one after the other. - Nikkatsu

Set in the postwar turmoil, Akasaka no shimai paints a vivit portrait of the life of three sisters who struggle to live in Tokyo.

A jobless young couple, Yoshigi and Tsutue, wind up at the outskirts of the Suzaki red-light district in Tokyo. Tsutue talks her way into a job pouring sake for male customers at a small bar run by a sympathetic older woman, while Yoshigi is shunted off into a nearby noodle shop, where he gets a job delivering noodles. Tsutue charms and runs off with one of her clients. Yoshigi, ignoring the attentions of a sweet co-worker, pursues Tsutue.

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.

Comedy of manners set on the "Kodama" train between Tokyo and Osaka, before the opening of the Shinkansen. In the leading role, Frankie Sakai plays a straightforward but indecisive hero. The passengers also include the bubbly Dan Reiko, and Ozawa Eitaro as a dour company president. Based on the novel "Seven and a half hours", by Shishi Bunroku.

Comedy about three soldiers, two female reporters, six prostitutes, and the wife of an officer, all stranded on a South Seas island at the end of World War II.

In the thriving Tokyo neighborhood of Ginza, a woman in the process of selling her estranged husband’s art collection attempts to identify the man who painted her own portrait fifteen years prior.

When Yumiko Tsuyama, a potter by profession, comes inquiring about a room for rent in an old mansion overlooking Osaka, she finds a bizarre collection of characters already living there. The unlikely leader of this menagerie is Yoda Goro, who speaks four languages fluently, is an expert in cabbage rolls, and has written how-to books encompassing every aspect of human existence.