Shin'ichi Himori

Kanji Watanabe is a longtime bureaucrat in a city office who, along with the rest of the office, spends his entire working life doing nothing... (imdb)

In 1923, in the province of Shinshu, the widow and simple worker of a silk factory Tsune Nonomiya (O-Tsune) decides to send her only son to Tokyo for having a better education. Thirteen years later, she visits her son Ryosuke Nonomiya (Shinichi Himori), and finds that he is a poor and frustrated night-school teacher with a wife, Sugiko (Yoshiko Tsubouchi), and a baby boy. (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)

Shuhei Horikawa, a poor schoolteacher, struggles to raise his son Ryohei by himself, despite neither money nor prospects. (imdb)

This movie takes place almost in the same environment with very little changes, students bedrooms, mountain resort, sky sloops and bedrooms again. The external scenes are unfortunately a little bit spoilt by the early cinema technology, but still there are some rather catching shoots, one worthy considering is the one where the directors shoots the young man and the wanted lady from behind while they are side by side enjoying the landscape. (imdb)

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

A follow-up to Children in the Wind, Four Seasons of Children is also based on a Tsubota Joji novel. The film is divided into two chapters, following the young protagonists' minor adventures and real-world awakenings over spring and summer, then autumn and winter.

On her way to meet her boyfriend, Sugiko is hit by a car and hospitalized. When she doesn't arrive at the meeting place, her boyfriend believes she has betrayed him, and he returns to his hometown. Yamauchi, the man who was driving the car that hit her, proposes to her. Sugiko marries Yamauchi, but is bored with his family's lifestyle. She leaves him and goes back to work as a waitress. (imdb)

Anma to Onna revolves around a pair of traveling blind masseurs who stop at an inn. One of the masseurs, Tokuichi (Saburi Shin), takes an interest in a woman (Takamine Meiko) from Tokyo who seems be hiding a mysterious past. The film peeks in and out of the lives and stories of the characters in unexpected ways that defy narrative conventions. (KG)

Uta, actress Mizutani Yaeko, a wandering actress tired of her life, is taken in by a generous and good natured tea merchant (until her troupe gets back with her) ostensibly to teach his daughter how to dance. He dies and leaves his family with a good deal of debt (there is also some social problem of having a wandering actress living with him and his family.) The merchant's son is left with the family business, which he is not experienced or learned enough to take care of, and dissolves it.... (imdb)

After Japan's loss in the war, the wealthy, cultured, liberal Anjo family have to give up their mansion and their way of life. They hold one last ball at the house before leaving. (imdb)

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

Renowned actress/singer Takamine Mieko stars as titular heroine Nobuko, a spirited young teacher working in a conservative school. Based on a novel by Shishi Bunroku, the film follows her experiences as she challenges the school with her liberal thinking and teaching methods. (youtube)

Ohara Shosuke-san lived about 200 years ago in Aizuwakamatsu. He loved sleeping late, hot springs baths and, of course, sake. He was gregarious, generous and famous for his extravagant merrymaking. Ohara Shosuke-san began his life rich. Yet he loved the simple joys of life such as taking a bath in the morning (Japanese normally bathe in the evening) that he soon spent his fortune. Despite the loss of his wealth he remained a kind and helpful friend and neighbour to all who knew him. (KG)

SOMEWHERE BENEATH THE WIDE SKY (1954, aka KONO HIROI SORA NO DOKOKA NI) came near the end of Masaki Kobayashi's formative period as a director -- scripted by the sister of his mentor Keisuke Kinoshita (and scored by Kinoshita's brother), this drama of middle-class life in postwar Japan tells the story lower-middle-class workers in the city of Kawasaki, and their troubles and travails. (KG)

The story deals with Fuji, nicknamed Waka-danna (Young Master), the star athlete on his university's rugby team. The son of a wealthy soy sauce manufacturer, Fuji basks in the glory of his athletic celebrity. Attracting the attention of admiring young women, Fuji resists family pressure to settle down and marry after college. Instead, he spends much of his time drinking and womanizing, behavior which eventually leads the college officials to expel him from the team.

The conflicting dreams of the members of a Japanese family are threatened by a continuing series of misfortunes. (imdb)

As World War II escalates, the tight-knit habitants of a street in Tokyo must relocate from their homes so that the government can use the space. Kinoshita's sensitive film-beautifully and resourcefully shot on a single set-traces the fears and desires of the evacuees. (imdb)

A naive stripper falls for an artist engaged to the daughter of a controversial female politician. (imdb)

Yoshimura brought satire back into the film in his 1947 The Fellows Who Ate the Elephant (Zo o Kutta Renchu), which was about five hungry men who, after eating a zoo's elephant, dead from natural causes, get into an enormous amount of difficulty with bureaucratic authorities. (Donald Richie)

Shigezumi is a young stock broker from Tokyo. He is in love with young Taiko who lives in Osaka. The marriage seems impossible as Shigezumi had a difficult relationship to Taiko' father who bankrupted and drove Shigezumi's father into suicide. And now Shigezumi seems to be the next target of Taiko's father's business wars... (KG)

A 1944 drama starring Chishû Ryû & Kinuyo Tanaka.

A hostile Chinese nurse (Yamaguchi) who works in an orphanage is won over by the care and commitment of the Japanese doctor (Sano) who treats her wards. Disease outbreaks and family obligations, however, threaten to torpedo their budding romance. (themoviedb)

A struggling painter who derives inspiration from European art, a veteran actor who contemplates retirement after being jeered onstage, a lonely arcade worker who longs to escape the tawdry lights of the district, a well-intentioned actor (Ken Uehara) whose off-stage samaritan deeds and insistence on fairness and righteousness rival the heroics of his on-stage persona, an older, world wise chorus girl who takes it upon herself to protect her young co-worker’s honor. (Acquarello)

Adaptation of Kishida Kunio’s novel. Set against the backdrop of a power struggle within a hospital, depicts the love lives of the director’s daughter, the administrative director, a doctor, and a nurse.

Chinese Yasumi Hara is ordered by his chief of Intelligence to go to Japan, use the attraction Japanese women feel for exotic aliens to get information from them, and disrupt Japanese morale.

It's 1863, and the politics of Japan have grown confused. Not only is there the continuing conflict between the Shogunate and the larger domains, but a growing movement for the restoration of power to the Emperor is at hand. The issue of the moment is how to deal with the foreigners who have been troubling the nation since Perry's fleet visited ten years before. The two sides argue over whether the foreigners should be expelled or welcomed.

Early Japanese sound film, a remake of Josef von Sternberg’s DOCKS OF NEW YORK set in Yokohama.

Tane, the lady proprietor of an inn for amorous couples, lives there with her three children. When her eldest daughter loses her fiancé due to the fact her mother is a mistress, her despair drives her to become a cabaret hostess.