Japanese Films to see

Two brothers compete for the amorous favors of a young woman during a seaside summer of gambling, boating, and drinking.

In the dying months of the Meiji era, a sympathetic student befriends a married couple, but soon realizes they share a curiously strained relationship stemming from an unknown incident in their past.

Jiro Sone sacrifices all comfort to devote himself to research. Young housewife Yachiyo is disappointed with her husband Kappei, who is more attracted to mountain climbing and another girl. When Yachiyo’s father is introduced to Jiro, all of their lives become intertwined...

Saheita, the final heir of a once rich and respectable family, can't refuse the many villagers that come to him for favours and money, even though he is on the brink of bankruptcy. Around town he is better known by his nickname Mr. Shosuke Ohara.

A group of war orphans initially seen scratching out an existence through black market work, as they are taken under the wing of a nameless soldier, just repatriated after the war.

Three bank robbers, Eijima, Nojiri, and Takasugi, flee the police and escape into the mountains. At an inn high in the Japanese Alps, Eijima and Nojiri encounter a young woman and her father, as well as Honda, a mountaineer. The inn folk do not realize their guests are wanted criminals and the visitors are treated with great kindness. Honda volunteers to lead them over the mountains, but Eijima's paranoia endangers all of them as they make the perilous trip.

Though plagued by ill health all his life, a young Japanese man is obligated to fulfill his family's longstanding military tradition.

1943 film by Hiroshi Inagaki

Set against the backdrop of an imperial victory in the civil war leading up to the Meiji Restoration, Fallen Blossoms tells the story of the sorrows of women in a geisha house in Kyoto by recounting the relationships of its inhabitants.
Alexander Jacoby & Johan Nordström wrote:
Ishida’s original and brilliant film tells history as ‘her story’. Against the backdrop of a victory for the imperial forces in the civil war leading up to the Meiji Restoration, Ishida recounts the relationships among the inhabitants of a Kyoto geisha house, producing what has been described by Noël Burch as “one of the most remarkable community portraits ever filmed”. The film is set completely inside the house, with only female characters ever seen on screen.
For Burch, “the exclusion from the scene of men, patrons or soldiers, is a meaningful corollary of the exclusion of Japanese women from the history of the country”. Ishida narrates his story using an imaginative cinematic style in which shots are almost never repeated. The narrative, Burch notes, evokes Chekhov, but he judges its “combination of a restricted, unified setting and continual renewal of the imagery” to be unparalleled in conventional narrative cinema.

A period piece about the love of a wealthy blind woman, a teacher of koto and shamisen, and her devoted manservant. Based on a novella by Tanizaki Junichiro.

Sumiko's father sends her to live with her alcoholic uncle. He sells her to a circus, which is the start of a downward spiral in an unforgiving world.

After falling in love with a courtesan, Rikiya is blinded by ash during a fight in a brothel. Believing the blindness permanent and his opponent dead, Rikiya goes back home to his sister. Okiku, desperate to protect her brother who thinks himself a murderer, wants to sacrifice herself for him and become a prostitute to pay for Rikiya's treatment.

The Japanese equivalent of penny dreadfuls glorifying Jesse James, A Diary of Chuji’s Travels gives a unique gloss to the tale of Chuji Kunisada, the legendary bakuto (or gambler, the precursors to modern-day yakuza). One of the two remaining segments of Ito’s original four-hour trilogy, it depicts Chuji’s attempt to save the geisha Oshina, a rebellion against the rigid social structure of Edo Japan. With socialist overtones, it’s a passionate artifact of early Japanese film.

A Diary of Chuji's Travels is a silent Japanese jidaigeki made in 1927 starring Denjirō Ōkōchi and directed by Daisuke Itō. It was originally released in three parts, all of which were long thought to be lost until portions of the second part and much of the third part were discovered and restored in 1991. Since the film had once been voted in a 1959 Kinema Junpō poll as the best Japanese film of all time, its discovery was significant. At the time of its release, Itō was the leader of a new style of samurai films that featured outlaw heroes and fast-cut sword fighting scenes.

A small town boy dreams of being a famous fiddler; Meanwhile, two convicts escape from prison and hide in the woods.