Kinuyo Tanaka

In mediaeval Japan a compassionate governor is sent into exile. His wife and children try to join him... (imdb)

The tale of a 17th century samurai's daughter. (imdb)

In the civil wars of 16th century Japan, two ambitious peasants want to make their fortunes. The potter Genjuro intends to sell his wares for vast profits in the local city, while his brother-in-law Tobei wishes to become a samurai (imdb)

A documentary film on the life and works of director Kenji Mizoguchi.

Utamaro, a great artist, lives to create portraits of beautiful women, and the brothels of Tokyo provide his models... (imdb)

Otsuta is running the geisha house Tsuta in Tokyo. Her business is heavily in debt. Her daughter Katsuyo doesn't see any future in her mothers trade in the late days of Geisha. But Otsuta will not give up. This film portraits the day time life of geisha when not entertaining customers. (imdb)

A young Japanese mother must prostitute herself while her husband is away. When he returnns, her shocking secret changes both of their lives for ever.

A business man is often approached by friends for advice and help regarding marriage as well as family and romantic relationships. He is always very calmly and objectively able to give great insight and assistance to these particular situations. However, when it comes time for him to be objective regarding his oldest daughter, he finds it very difficult... (imdb)

Shinnosuke is introduced to Shizu as a prospective marriage partner, but he falls in love with her widowed sister Oyu. Convention forbids Oyu to marry because she has to raise her son as the head of her husband's family. Oyu convinces Shinnosuke and Shizu to marry so that she can remain close to Shinnosuke. (imdb)

After an attempted suicide attempt, Yukiko (Kuga) spends some time recovering at Kyoto with her mother, Hatsuko (Tanaka). However, their familial home is in fact a geisha house, and Hatsuko is the strong-willed Madame of this institute. Through this mother-daughter relationship, and the romantic entanglements that arise when both find themselves in love with Dr. Matoba (Otani), Mizoguchi explores generational conflicts and social mores whilst paying an effective tribute to the resilience of femininity in contemporary Japan.

The stage director Shimamura, who is bringing western theater to Japan, falls in love with the outspoken actress Sumako Matsui, and leaves his family to be with her, while trying to keep his Art Theatre solvent. (imdb)

Emi (Kinuyo Tanaka) inadvertently loses her ornamental hairpin in the spring waters and is "found" by a soldier in recuperation from a war injury (Chishu Ryu) who cuts his foot on the object. Attempting to downplay the incident, the soldier calls the episode as almost "poetic", a sentiment that the professor (Tatsuo Saito) then misconstrues as the soldier's implicit romanticism for the owner of the hairpin. (Strictly Film School)

Ryoichi and Chikako are brother and sister. They live together. Chikako works during the day in a office and at night she prostitutes herself to fund her brother's studies in university. (imdb)

About a woman trapped into upholding the family tradition and moral values just after the end of WW2.

This is a story about a gangster and his girl friend who used to be a good girl.

Fusako Owada, a young woman in postwar Japan, is the mistress of a notorious drug dealer. Fusako's tenuous grasp on meaningful life is shaken when she learns that her lover is having an affair with her sister. (imdb)

Ozu's follow-up to I GRADUATED, BUT... actually plays somewhat like a prequel: a student fails when the shirt on which he wrote his exam cheat sheet gets mistakenly sent to the laundry. The student contemplates his outcast fate as his graduating dorm-mates all face the working world. (imdb)

A college graduate is unable to find a job but tries to hide his unemployment from his wife and fiancee. (imdb)

Ozu revisits the dichotomy between schoolboy idealism and working world realities, this time focusing on four college friends, one of whom (Tatsuo Saito) happens to be the son of a corporate executive; the son takes over upon his father's death, and his friends come seeking employment. Their friendship clearly isn't the same under this new working relationship, the subordinates become yes-men to the point that one of them says nothing when Saito casts an eye on his fiance. (imdb)

A Wanderer's Notebook, also known as Her Lonely Lane, is director Mikio Naruse's hollow biopic of authoress Fumiko Hayashi, whose work the director often adapted for the screen. (Slant Magazine)

A bar hostess approaching middle age has a young child to support and an ex-husband who frequently needs money. She believes in marriage but is cynical about men. She seeks a rich patron for the faltering bar she works in but must then contend with unwelcome sexual advances. Meanwhile, she must manage her active young boy. When an attractive and kind young man enters the picture, introduced by a flirty friend, she thinks she may have found her way out of Ginza bar life. However, it is not to be. (imdb)

A teenaged girl witnesses her widowed mother's attempt to sustain her family. (imdb)

A woman's struggle for equality in Japan in the 1880s. Eiko Hirayama leaves Okayama for Tokyo, where she helps the fledgling Liberal Party and falls in love with its leader Kentaro Omoi, just as the party is being disbanded by the government. (imdb)

The story of a young woman forced into prostitution on a poor Japanese island.

In Kabuki style, the film tells the story of a remote mountain village where the scarcity of food leads to a voluntary but socially-enforced policy in which relatives carry 70-year-old family members up Narayama mountain to die. (imdb)

A story told through the eyes of an elder sister of her childhood with her younger brother.

One of Japan's first sound pictures,it examines the home lives of white-collar workers.

Setsuko is unhappily to Mimura, an engineer with no job and a bad drinking habit. She had always been in love with Hiroshi but both of them failed to propose when Hiroshi left for France a few years ago. Now he is back and Mariko (Setsuko's sister) tries to reunite them. She too is secretly in love with Hiroshi. (imdb)

Shinobu and her brother Genichiro plead with the famous swordsman Musashi Miyamoto to teach them swordsmanship to avenge their father's death. The killers of their father see the sister and brother practicing with Miyamoto, and so enlist the help of another powerful swordsman, Kojiro Sasaki, which gives Sasaki an excuse to battle Miyamoto. (imdb)

The true story of an ordinary twenty-three year old who crossed the Pacific in a small yacht, a feat which no Japanese had ever accomplished. (imdb)

Character study revolving around four characters: a sock salesman, his wife and their two young lodgers.

A psychological take on the classic myth.

The legend of the birth of Shintoism. In Fourth Century Japan, the Emperor Keikoh's son Ouso expects to succeed his father on the throne, but Otomo, the Emperor's vassal, prefers Ouso's stepbrother Waka, and conspires to have Ouso die on a dangerous mission he has contrived. (imdb)

Another period piece, with legendary characters and vaguely martial overtones. The script has some wit, and the screenwriter makes a small effort to give the characters dimension, but there's really not much that Naruse can do with this material, other that create beautiful deep-space compositions for the exterior shots. (Dan Sallitt)

A socially committed film about the feudal state of many Japanese women in 1946. Hiroko Hosokawa, a female lawyer, defends Mrs. Asakura, who suffocated her child in her grief after her husband died penniless following an industrial accident. The prosecutor is Hiroko's sister's husband Kono, who also sent Hiroko's fiance, Yamaoka, to jail for his liberal views during the war. Yamaoka has just been freed, but is seriously ill from his time in prison. (imdb)

Family drama. 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. (British Film Institute)

At a dormitory for an ironworks in Kitakyushu, a young man is frustrated in his attempts to get a job in the foundry because of his poor school record, while an iron worker pines for a woman who works there. (Shochiku)

SINCERE HEART (1953, aka MAGOKORO) was Masaki Kobayashi's second film as a director -- but as with his first, YOUTH OF THE SON, it is something of a hybrid work, influenced heavily by his longtime mentor Keisuke Kinoshita, who wrote the screenplay. The resulting film is a deeply passionate and sentimental drama about a young student (Akira Inshihama) who falls into a hopeless romantic attraction to an invalid girl (Keiko Awaji) whom he can only see from afar. (Hulu)

A young woman fends off a series of agressive marriage proposals from a man who comitted atrocities during World War II (Hulu)

Chikamatsu's Love in Osaka (1959) places Chikamatsu, the author of the original play, as a character in the drama. Relatively classical at first, the film grows increasingly self-conscious as it proceeds. Chikamatsu, initially an observer taking inspiration for his writing from the events he views, begins eventually to intervene in events, saving the heroine from suicide, substituting a gentler ending for the tragedy which seems likely. (Sense of Cinema)

"The Dancing Girl of Izu" tells of the story between a young male student who is touring the Izu Peninsula and a family of traveling dancers he meets there, including their youngest girl. The student finds the naïve girl attractive even though he eventually has to part with the family after spending memorable time together.

Keisuke Kinoshita's wartime film, Army is anything but the rousing call to arms and reinforcement of patriotism that the authorities had envisioned the film would be. Known for his Ofuna-flavored shomin-geki "women's pictures", Kinoshita subverts the official themes of duty, allegiance to the emperor, and national glory. (Strictly Film School)

In this Golden Globe winner for Best Foreign-Language Film, director Heinosuke Gosho -- a master chronicler of Japanese middle-class life -- presents the story of Kiyoshi Yoshida (Koji Shitara), who feels estranged from both parents after his father returns from war. How the boy adapts to life with the virtual stranger his father has become is the film's focus. (Netflix)

When Tora-san returns to visit his family, he is surprised to find an arrogant professor occupying his room. The professor and Tora-san become rivals for the affection of Chiyo.

A father living in Nara has three daughters who become involved in complicated marriage arrangements. One couple communicate by cabling love poems to each other (bfi.org.uk)

Based on a screenplay by Keinosuke Kinoshita, "Koibumi" explores the wounds of war, the limits of love and the need to forgive. (imdb)

Fumiko, mother of two children and wife of an unfaithful man who shows a low self esteem, shares her family life with her asleep vocation as a poetess. The beginning of her successful literary career coincides with her divorce and the development of a serious illness: a breast cancer, which leads her to lose her breasts. In the last stage of her life she meets a young journalist arrived from Tokyo, an admirer of her work, who want to write a story on her life. Both live a secret love history. (imdb)

A farmer's boy, obsessed with his balsa-and-paper flying models and with dreams of real aircraft, develops a friendship with the daughter of the local squire, who introduces the lad to her pilot brother and his flying officer friends; through hard work, and despite the handicap of a lowly class status, he eventually succeeds in qualifying as a pilot and joining the air force.

A silent movie by Yasujirô Shimazu.

Based on a Tanizaki Junichiro tale of male devotion passing into love and masochism. Okoto is blind, but her family can afford to pamper her. She takes up the koto and the family's young servant Sasuke faithfully escorts her to her music lessons. She often treats him disdainfully, but she insists on his company, and so gossip grows up around them. Sasuke's loyalty is tested when Okoto is wooed by a vacuous but persistent suitor.

The Fencing Master tells the story of a man trying to survive as the only world he knows is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Danpei Ichikawa lives for swordfighting - he was once a renowned kabuki swordfight choreographer, and as the Chairman of the New National Theatre Company, he wants nothing more than to choreograph the swordfights for the modern plays put on by the company. (heroic-cinema.com)

A young war widow remembers her short time with her husband. (imdb)

The story of HANAKAGO NO UTA revolves around a pork-cutlet diner along a cluttered back street of Ginza, Tokyo. Keizo (Reikichi Kawamura), the owner and the master of the diner, and his daughter Yoko (Kinuyo Tanaka) are running a small but successful business. The Chinese chef, Mr. Lee (Shin Tokudaiji), cooks the best pork-cutlet, as they say. Two of the most frequent customers are Ono (Shuji Sano) and Hotta (Chishu Ryu), a pair of rather lazy collage students. (vermillion and one nights)

A young doctor, Kozo Tsumura (Uehara), falls for young nurse Katsue Takaishi (Tanaka). But she's got a secret: she's a widow with a son. Kozo and Katsue decide to run away to Kyoto, but her child suddenly became sick and she just missed the train and Kozo. She makes it to Kyoto finally, but is unable to meet him. Plus she isn't accepted into Kyoto society. She goes back to her hometown and tries to forget him. She quits the hospital to concentrate on her singing. (imdb)

This 1932 adaptation is the earliest sound version of the ever-popular and much-filmed Chushingura story of the loyal 47 retainers who avenged their feudal lord after he was obliged to commit hara-kiri due to the machinations of a villainous courtier. As the first sound version of the classic narrative, the film was something of an event, and employed a stellar cast, who give a roster of memorable performances. (The Movie Database)

Five friends make a pact to stick together through school, agreeing to graduate at the same time and to marry at the same time...

The eldest daughter of a noble family is in love with an aviator while being courted by a fellow aristocrat she thinks is a dullard. (letterboxd)

Second part of Heinosuke Gosho's "New Road" film. (letterboxd)

In postwar Japan a young woman is unable to marry her sweetheart because her family's in difficult circumstances and needs her income to keep afloat. (imdb)

While he struggles with his feelings of guilt and sees his dead wife, Oiwa, everywhere the people around him begin noticing his strange behavior and his new wife decides to distance herself from him. (mydramalist.info)

An early drama from Hiroshi Shimizu

The humanistic story of conflict ranging from a nun's chaste commitment to god and her love for a man from Japan, the contrast between the rich and poor and the differences between the developed and Third World. Watch it unfold aboard a ship making a Transatlantic voyage. (imdb)

Six siblings are quarreling over who will take Grandma and get her money, when the black sheep of the family returns home. (worldcat.org)

In this Japanese romance, made in Western style and set in Europe, a college skier travels to the Swiss Alps with his professor. En route, he falls for a flight attendant. Unfortunately the romance is nipped in the bud by a visit from the skier's French girlfriend. (Sandra Brennan)

After her mother runs away from home, Tomoko is raised to be a geisha. One day Tomoko meets her mother in a red-light district in Tokyo and her life deeply gets in trouble. (themoviedb)

A story about being scared of getting old. (themoviedb)

1957 drama from director Kôzaburô Yoshimura. (themoviedb)

A 1957 drama starring Kinuyo Tanaka based on a story by Hideji Hôjô

1957 film directed by Miyoji Ieki. Winner of the Crystal Globe at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival. (themoviedb)

With one of the busiest film industries in the world, Japan was able to submit several films into competition at the 1957 Berlin Film Festival. One of the best of these was Arashi, directed by Hiroshi Inagaki of Rickshaw Man fame. Anticipating Hollywood's Table for Five by nearly a quarter of a century, the film concerns the efforts by a recently widowed high-school teacher to raise his four children alone. Chihu Ryu is terrific as the central character, while Izumi Yukimura is... (themoviedb)

The woman-only prison has a cast all with a story of their own and with no dull or routine day. There is an employee who is divorced after her husband had an affair. She loves the jailed criminals and almost sees them as family. One day at a workshop someone faints while working hard to make money because she has a poor boyfriend. Another inmate is knocked up Another is a mother and has her child with her. (imdb)

The story of a novelist whose wife is confined in a mental hospital. His love for her drives him to write about her, though he runs into trouble when her parents accuse him of cashing in on her misfortune. (themoviedb)

A film based on the works of Nagai S?kichi.

A Daisuke Itô drama starring Kinuyo Tanaka.

A romantic drama starring Jô Shishido & Kinuyo Tanaka.

A family of weavers deals with an uncertain future after the father commits suicide. (imdb)

A jewelry store president begins to fall for the doctor treating her husband's illness (via Hulu).

A 1949 drama starring Kinuyo Tanaka.

An all star cast.

A 1944 drama starring Chishû Ryû & Kinuyo Tanaka.

A group of female doctors travel to a remote village during their summer holiday to offer free medical care to villagers. There they must battle prejudice and superstition as much as disease. (KG)

This is the story of a young daughter, her businessman father and his mistress. (filmaffinity)

A 1937 Japanese film.

A musical film made for the inauguration of Shochiku's Ofuna Studio, with an all-star cast of the era. (themoviedb)

A gangster tries to find redemption with the inadvertent help of an innocent shop girl and his jealous girlfriend will do anything to keep him. The family of an older man who runs a small sake brewery become concerned with his finances and his health after they discover him visiting an old mistress ... (imdb)

The film was made in 2009 and compiles film footage taken during Ms. Tanaka's goodwill tour of the U.S. in 1949.

Kinuyo is a daughter of rice cracker shop in downtown. She fell in love with her sister's boyfriend. It is a story whose theme is warm human relationships in a town of customs and manners.

A story of a store that makes Tabi socks.

In the movies of those times, you can see young boys in the company scene often. Those boys were called kyuji (給仕), which means “waiter” literally. They are doing odd jobs in the company including serving tea, ushering visitors, buying tobacco, etc. Ordering lunch for the individual requests was also an important job. Those boys were hired often as soon as they graduated from elementary school.

Jyuta, an honest owner of a taxi company, has a younger half-brother who is involved in the yakuza world and doesn’t get along well with his mother. Jyuta tries to correct him…

Japanese war movie.