Natto Wada

July, 1945: Japan's army is on the run. A platoon in Burma sings to keep its spirit up. Inspiration comes from their self-taught lute player... (imdb)

While performing in a touring kabuki troupe, leading female impersonator Yukinojo comes across the three men who drove his parents to suicide twenty years earlier (imdb)

Ichikawa's cameras follow the 1964 Summer Olympics from opening to closing ceremonies.

It is the Philipines, 1945. The Japanese Imperial Army has been reduced to a ragtag mob hiding in the jungles... (imdb)

Told in an intricate flashback structure, Enjo dramatizes the psychological collapse of Goichi (Raizo Ichikawa), a young Buddhist acolyte from a dysfunctional family who arrives at a Kyoto temple - the Golden Pavilion - for further study. (Wikipedia)

Tamio Moroi graduates from a prestigious university and obtains a job at the Camel Brewery in a distant town. He is keen to work hard, but is warned to take it easy and just appear as if he were working. He receives a letter from his father saying that his mother is going crazy. After hiring a psychiatric student from his university to investigate his mother, she comes to visit him to tell him that it is really his father that is going insane... (imdb)

On the tenth anniversary of Japan's WWII surrender, a motley group of five, four men and one woman, gathers in the basement of a butcher shop to dig up a cache of morphine buried during the war. A grimly humorous tale of twisted relationships as one by one each of the group is eliminated. This early gangster film foreshadows similar tangled relationships in Shohei Imamura's later films. (imdb)

The trials, tribulations, and joys of raising a child. The film follows the everyday events of a family with one boy, coming up to his second birthday, interspersed with occasional thoughts of the child. They initially live in an apartment building, and then move into the doting grandmother's house. (imdb)

A man getting on in years sets out to find a way to resurrect his flagging virility. (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)

Kaze is a philandering TV producer. His wife and nine of his mistresses conspire to kill him. However each woman would rather keep him alive, as long as she was the only woman in his life. (imdb)

A young teacher struggles to overcome prejudices in early 20th century Japan.

Ichikawa remake of his 1956 classic.

Set among the matrilineal merchant class of Osaka in the early 20th century, this 1960 family drama by Kon Ichikawa follows the son of a prosperous family (Raizo Ichikawa) as he fathers only boys with various wives and geishas, much to the chagrin of his manipulative grandmother and mother. Ichikawa wrote the script with his wife and frequent collaborator, Natto Wada, and despite its sharp satirical jabs, it carefully notates the hero's ambivalence and regret toward women. (Chicago Reader)

Okatsu is a widow raising five children - adults but still mama-dependent - in mid-eighteenth century Edo, Japan. Her frugality attracts unflattering comment even amid national tough times (the region is in famine) What Okatsu tells no one is that she saves so that a friend can start his own business once he's released from prison. (The crime: stealing food for his starving baby.) She doesn't blink when she finds herself facing a robber late one night. (Variety)

Eccentric film about female reporter fired for writing about police corruption. To make money she hides while a weekly magazine offers a prize for her discovery. A bank embezzler and his underlings take advantage of her disappearance to pin the theft on her, as well as the murder of the weak link in their gang. Meanwhile, the cop she got fired is now a private detective and he gets involved in the investigation. (East Asia Film Library)

A rebellious delinquent student puts sleeping powder in a girl's beer and rapes her. She falls in love with him, but he rejects her. Her irate family and other outraged students then punish the boy themselves. (Audie Bock)

Very fast-moving sketches of a corrupt politician, a jaded geisha, an impoverished family with 18 children and a boarder who works as a day-laborer and manufactures atomic bombs at night. (Audie Bock)

A teacher at a continuation school who is not getting ahead in the world goes to the Ginza and is hit by a car. A student he asks to help him demands money, and the girl he loves snubs him. (Audie Bock)

On the eve of a young woman's wedding day, a man she's known since childhood visits and spend the afternoon and evening with her.

A film adaptation of the autobiography of Aishinkakura Hiro, who lived a tumultuous life as the consort of Fuketsu, the younger brother of Emperor Puyi of Manchukuo. (imdb)

A fun little drama.

For his 1st color film, Ichikawa did an Edo era story of two geishas scheming against each other for control of the Nihonbashi bridge area, and vying for the affections of a young doctor. (imdb)