Nobuko Otowa

After enlisting as a volunteer in a war in 14th century Japan, his wife and mother remain living in a swamp... (imdb)

Impersonating an Imperial Army officer by wearing a "red lion's mane", a poor servant returns to his... (imdb)

The autobiographical story of a family struggling to come to grips with their memmories and affection of a lost mother. Filmed entirely in black and white. (CDJapan)

Deals with the intolerably hard life of a family of four, the only inhabitants of a very small Japanese island in the Setonaikai archipelago. (imdb)

A woman and her daughter are raped and murdered by soldiers during a time of civil war. Afterwards, a series of samurai returning from the war through that area are found mysteriously dead with their throats torn out. The governor calls in a wild and fierce young hero, to quell what is evidently a ghost. He encounters the two beautiful women, in an eery, beautiful scene. After spiritual purification, he meets the demon in a thrilling fight. (imdb)

Oshima's most overtly political film, The Ceremony uses the backdrop of Japanese rituals (several weddings and more than one funeral) to mount a scathing attack on Japanese politics. Depicting the story of one family over 30 years, its promotion of a more tolerant society and the freedom that comes with it occasionally makes way for some genuinely moving depiction of everyday family life... (Channel 4)

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)

Post war Hiroshima: It's been four years since the last time she visited her hometown. Takako faces the after effects of the A-bomb when she travels around the city to call on old friends. (imdb)

Yoko is a famous actress who goes to a mountain chalet for a few days rest. There, she learns a secret from her companion Toyoko. (imdb)

The world-famous woodblock artist Hokusai is a widower who lacks the ability to earn money, and he lives with his daughter Oei at the house of his friend, Bakin. Hokusai meets a woman called Onao and finds himself uncontrollably attracted to her, but she disappears all of a sudden. One day, an excited Oei brings home a young girl who looks exactly like Onao. Immediately, Hokusai starts to paint, using the young girl as a model.

Farmer Abare Goemon is confronted by brigand-like samurai. He raises an army of farmers to fight them and does so brilliantly. When Lord Asakura sees the success Goemon has achieved, he attempts to recruit him to fight in a conflict between Asakura and another clan. Goemon refuses, and Lord Asakura sets out to destroy him. (imdb)

A child, living with relatives after his mother left him, experiences a series difficulties.

Upon the outbreak of a wide scale nuclear war, Japan and its people are caught in the middle.

The year is 1932, and a woman, whose tenant-farmer fiancé is fighting in China, is raped by the landowners son(Nakadai), who has returned from the war with a crippling injury, and then forced into marriage with him. In four more chapters presented over three decades, their children undertake their own searches for love, while the parents try to make each other as miserable as possible. (imdb)

A retired yakuza Shuji (Ken Takakura), now turned fisherman, gets dragged into his past by the arrival of a woman from Osaka Keiko (Yûko Tanaka) who sets up a bar in the small fishing village, bringing her boyfriend Yajima (Takeshi Kitano) and his troubles along. Shuji seeing the bad influence Yajima has on the other fishermen, tries to sort things out the only way he knows.

n the Tokugawa Era, the clan of Lord Yagyu has hidden away three scrolls containing clan secrets which, if revealed, would cause revolution and disaster for the clan. The information is divided among the three scrolls, all of which must be possessed for the secrets to be understood. When Princess Yuhime steals the scrolls, Tasaburo, a samurai with magical powers, and his brother Senshiro are sent to retrieve them. In Part II, the search for the scrolls continues. (imdb)

An Inn at Osaka, rarely seen outside Japan, follows the story of an insurance company executive from Tokyo, Mr. Mito, who is demoted to the Osaka office. He takes a room at a small inn and tries to rebuild his life. Notable for its exquisite framing and cinematography, An Inn at Osaka allows its complicated plotlines to disappear behind the minutiae of penury and humiliation that Mito and others suffer during the post-war economic and social reconstruction. (mubi.com)

It is the story of the ship Kaijin Maru, that is left adrift after losing all means of navigation in a storm, and the four people on it, becoming increasingly desperate as food and water run out.

Early Kaneto Shindô post-war drama starring Nobuko Otowa and featuring stunning black and white cinematography with Shindô's beautiful use of deep focus to bring depth to the imagery. (KG)

An ageing fishing boat, Dai-go Fukuryū Maru ("Lucky Dragon No. 5") sets out from the port of Yaizu in Shizuoka Prefecture. It travels around the Pacific, line fishing. While the ship is near Bikini Atoll, the ship's navigator sees a flash. All the crew come up to watch. They realize it is an atomic explosion, but take the time to clear their fishing gear. A short time later, grey ash starts to fall on the ship. By the time the ship returns to port, the sailors have been burned brown.

A mother leaves her husband and small village and travels to Kyoto with her teenage daughter.

Hama-chan and Michiko's son, Koitaro, is now one year old. When Michiko leaves home to attend a school reunion and Michiko's mother is unable to care for the infant, Hama-chan is forced to take Koitaro to work and the baby soon gets lost, creating all manner of havoc at the construction firm.

Former playmates both long ago abandoned by their parents, recall their youth and fall in love. A young man, deserted as a child by his mother, and a young woman, deserted in childhood by her father, meet and recall their days as playmates. When a romance develops between them, the man's foster parents express their disapproval and the woman's teacher claims they are too young for marriage; and the two lovers part. (The Toho Studios Story: A History and Complete Filmography)

"The Dancing Girl of Izu" tells the story of the interactions between a young male student from Tokyo, and a small group of travelling performers that he meets while touring the Izu Peninsula. (Wikipedia)

Based on the classic novel by Murasaki Shikibu, written over 1000 years ago. Genji, the son of the emperor, has gained renown among the nobility of Kyoto for his charm and good looks, yet he cannot stop himself from pursuing the one object of desire he must never obtain: his father's young and beautiful bride. Following the tragic onsequences of his obsession, Genji wanders from one affair to another, always seeking some sort of resolution to his life. (KG)

K is a young student who rents a room in a Tokyo quiet place to deliver the studies. K is attracted by the daughter of the lady of the house, while not openly declare to her. After calling a friend to live in the same house, his feelings for the girl and the friend put him in a complex situation of personal dilemmas. Based on one of the greatest classics of Japanese literature Natsume Soseki writer.

Story of a woman, Saiko, who divorces her doctor husband when she is given a baby by a stranger who claims it is the husband's child. Saiko embarks on an affair with her cousin's husband, but a crisis threatens when she discovers that her ex-husband is about to remarry. (BFI)

A bio-pic of Japanese adventurer Uemura Naomi, this movie traces his professional life and his exploits. Uemura is an interesting character. He's soft spoken on the outside, but inside he has this lion's courage and dogged determination to push the boundaries of physical and mental limitations.

Tells the story of Oshin, a poor little girl who would someday become the owner of a big supermarket chain in Japan. (imdb)

A film inspired by the life of Japanese actor Taiji Tonoyama, with whom Kaneto Shindo had worked on many occasions, with the help of archive images and fragments of the director's most famous films. The actress Nobuko Otowa adds dialogue facing the camera, as if she was talking to Tonoyama and remembering together old episodes of the interpreter, a past marked by alcoholism and a hectic sex life.

When her husband leaves her for a younger woman, a woman plots revenge against him. (imdb)

A blind samisen player wanders across Japan for 50 years and becomes a musical sensation.

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

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

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. (KG)

After leaving high school, Michio Yamada (Norio Nagayama in the real life incidents) becomes involved in the shudan shushoku, a post-war Japanese government work program which involves taking almost an entire high school graduating class from the countryside to Tokyo to work for a fruit company. Some terrible things happened to his family in the past and that explains why Michio came later to have perpetrated so many killings. (imdb)

Time; a few years after the surrender of Japan in the Second World War. The country is in ruins, economy devastated, and the vulnerable masses deprived of work; let alone the basic amenities of life. A new order, led by voratius opportunists is in the make where the weak are easy prey to the hydraheaded mountebanks. Betrayed and exploited by their employer, a group of five trainee insurance brokers face the challenge of commuting suicide, or taking the path of felony. (imdb)

Postwar Tokyo. Pin (Jukichi Uno) and Toku (Taiji Tonoyama) live in the squatter area of Kappanuma. Pin and Toku are avid gamblers. They take in Tsuru (Nobuko Otowa), a slightly demented woman who has run away from a geisha house. (imdb)

Shusei Tokuda's starkly realistic novel about a poor girl pressed into becoming a sex worker/entertainer forcefully adapted by Kaneto Shindo (Onibaba). Ginko (Nobuko Otowa, Shindo's wife) born into a dirt poor family is sold to a brothel when her father falls ill as she is the only item of worth the family has. Follows her progress from brothel to brothel & personal change as she is blown about by circumstance, all the time trying to earn enough to keep her family together (imdb)

Following the breakout of the Pacific War, the Japanese film industry was forcibly downsized. Numazaki, a mediocre screenwriter, faces imminent dismissal. His wife Takako encourages him to seek work in Kyoto. Numazaki fails his aptitude test, which is to write a script for the famous but demanding director Sakaguchi (a veiled reference for Kenji Mizoguchi). Takako offers to support his husband for a year, so that he can hone his craft from scratch. (imdb)

In 1936 Japan, a married man begins a relationship with a prostitute who is working to support her ailing mother.

Ten years before the outbreak of the Second World War in Asia, a Japanese Go master and his Chinese rival meet in China to play a game of Go (loosely described as an Asian version of chess). It soon becomes evident that the Chinese master's son is the most talented player that the Japanese master has ever encountered, and he convinces the boy's father to let him bring the child back to Japan to train him as a professional Go player... (Simon Levy)

A bored warlord becomes obsessed with a married woman.

The story tells of the adoration of Sasuke for his mistress, the blind samisen-teacher Shunkin, who treats him imperiously and subjects him to cruel beatings. (mubi.com)

Tradition and modernity clash when a young woman inherits a sweet-making firm in Kyoto. (letterboxd)