Mount Hakkoda / Hakkodasan (1977)

Mount Hakkoda in winter is one of the worst places to be on Japan’s main island, but in 1902, the Japanese army tried to cross it, leading to the most disastrous non-combat mission in Japanese history. Hakkodasan is a dramatic reconstruction of that mission, held together by the supposed friendship of the two captains placed …

The Incident / Jiken (1978)

The Incident, as it is continually referred to, is the killing of a young woman whose body was found in the woods several days after her death. Although based on an award-winning mystery novel by Shohei Ooka, there isn’t much apparent mystery. Hiroshi is soon arrested and at his arraignment in court admits he killed …

Double Suicide at Nishijin / Nishijin Shinju (1977)

Two decades after River of Night, we return to the narrow world of the Kyoto hand-weavers where we also meet one of the most enigmatic Japanese women I have yet come across in movies. Without any particular intention on her part, Yumi seems to leave death in her wake, both as a prostitute and as …

Yellow Handkerchief / Shiawase no kiiroi hankachi (1977)

Kin’ya gets dumped by his girlfriend and so he buys himself a car and takes off driving, Arriving off the ferry in Hokkaido, and not wishing to look like a “hick,” he buys himself a cowboy hat and hangs around the train station offering rides to any young women passing by. Eventually, Akemi takes him …

Ballad of Orin / Banished Orin / Hanare goze Orin (1977)

Shinoda’s Ballad of Orin is a visually beautiful reconstruction of a vanished way of life in rural Japan, told through the story of a traveling singer Orin and of Tsurukawa, the man who becomes her companion and true love. This places us solidly in Mizoguchi territory with a heroine with a thwarted romance trapped by …

Village of Eight Gravestones / Yatsuhaka-mura (1977)

The detective Kindaichi movie revival begun by Ichikawa’s Inugami Family was quickly followed up by movies at several other studios, the most popular of which was Shochiku’s Village of Eight Gravestones. Tatsuya is called to a lawyer’s office where he is grilled to determine his true identity and then meets his long lost grandfather (on …

Manhunt / Dangerous Chase / Kimi yo fundo no kawa wo watare (1976)

The man who is wrongly accused of a crime and sets out to find the real criminal has been a common plot in Euro/American movies almost since the beginning of film history, where the police were commonly portrayed as incompetent, corrupt, or both. Japan, with its great social respect for order, has seen the story …

Tale of Sorrow / Hishu monogatari (1977)

It took almost twenty years after Giants and Toys in 1958 for Japan to come up with such a jaundiced look at the interweaving of celebrity, advertising, and TV and the personal damage left in their wake as seen in  Tale of Sorrow. Along the way, the movie also throws in a sports guru training …

Youth Killer / Seisun no satsujinsha (1976)

After a pause when the “New Wave” of the early sixties faded, Japanese movies saw a major revival in the early seventies of movies about confused or tormented youth, though most were released by ATG rather than the major studios. Of these, Youth Killer, which chronicles the complete collapse of a young man’s life in …

Village / Harakara (1975)

The Village was Yoji Yamada’s poem to rural Japan, expressed in a most unusual way. Miss Kono, a stranger, arrives one day during the late snow in a farming village armed only with the name of Takashi. She is the “advanceman” for a troupe of performers who want the Youth Organization, of which he is …