Murderer! / Hitogoroshi (1976)

The Japanese swordplay movie usually followed a basic pattern, whether it involved samurai, ronin, or pre-Meiji era yakuza. Someone insults a person's, family's, clan's, or yakuza gang’s honor and that insult must ultimately be avenged, leading to a final one-to-one duel. Hitogoroshi is the most unusual take on this formula I’ve ever come across, and …

Thus the Kamikaze Blew / Kakute Kamikaze wa fuku (1944)

Kakute Kamikaze wa fuku is perhaps the ultimate Japanese wartime propaganda movie, certainly the most substantial to survive the war itself. Made at about the same time as the Kamikaze pilot program began, it reminded Japanese how the gods had saved Japan from a previous invasion by a far superior power, the second armada of …

Kinuyo’s First Love / Kinuyo no hatsukoi (1940)

I wish I had found Kinuyo’s First Love two years ago when I was writing primarily about movies made in the thirties, for it provides so much cultural information that would have been helpful as I wrote about other movies. It also provides a bittersweet story told without melodramatics of the type that came to …

Hunter in the Dark / Yami no karyudo (1979)

(Updated and corrected 12/26/21, with thanks to an e-mail from Merlindavid, who did the original American subtitles.) Where has this movie been? Technically, it has been available on European DVD, but it just seems inconceivable that it never had a US theatrical release or until very recently a US DVD. Set very specifically in 1783, …

World of Love: Tomi the Wildcat / Ai no sekai: Yamaneko Tomi no hanashi (1943)

Though it verges on the sentimental, Tomi the Wildcat gives us a somewhat different insight into the women on the home front in 1943 while also revealing the full maturation of the phenomenon that was Hideko Takamine. Now sixteen, Tomi has been living mostly on her own since her mother died when she was seven. …

Woman with Red Hair / Akai kami no onna (1979)

Woman with Red Hair is one of the most highly regarded of all pinku films, #4 on Kinema Junpo’s list in 1979. Why that is so is not particularly clear. Like In the Realm of the Senses, it chronicles an intense affair built almost completely around sex but without Oshima’s graphic sexual scenes or deadly …

Battle of Kawanakajima / Kawanakajima kassen (1941)

One difficulty of finding Japanese movies on YouTube is that you have to know they actually exist in order to search for them. Thus, I am extremely grateful to one of my readers who suggested I look for the “Cinema Japan Retrospective” channel, which has offered a wealth of movies I had thought lost or …

Flower and Snake / Hana to hebi (1974)

If we can say there are national signatures in porn, either soft or hard-core, then the international signature for Japan is surely bondage, women tied in increasingly imaginative and implausible ways while being tortured or sexually assaulted. If we were to try to pinpoint the beginning of that image, it probably would be 1974’s Flower …

Double Suicide at Sonezaki / Sonezaki shinju (1978)

The love suicide has permeated Japanese popular culture, almost as significant a subject as seppuku itself.* Chikamatsu’s Double Suicide at Sonezaki was one of the major drivers in the subject's popularity, as it was the first play (initially for bunraku then later Kabuki) in which both lovers were commoners. Given its immense popularity on stage …

Secret Sword / Hiken (1963)

For many samurai, the sudden and apparently permanent peace that settled over the country after 1615 was a disappointment rather than a relief. The ending of more than a century of war meant the end of any opportunity for advancement through battle deeds and, for the young men, it also meant the end of excitement. …