Home Diary / Family Diary / Katei nikki (1938)

In general, Japanese movies looked at the contrast between the traditional arranged marriage and the marriage for love through the story of a woman. Though based on a novel by a woman, Shimizu’s Home Diary approaches the issue through the lives of two male college friends. Shuzo (Shin Saburi) is first seen saying farewell to …

Poem / Uta (1972)

The post-Shogunate end of the “Old Japan” has been overtly treated in many ways in many different movies and might even be seen as a running theme under the surface of almost every movie made in the country. Seldom has the topic been treated so openly and yet so obliquely as in Poem, which spends …

Burst City / Bakuretsu toshi (1982)

Opening with a great sequence, Burst City soon degenerates into the total chaos it appears to depict. Though this ultimately makes it a movie that today is almost unwatchable, it marked something new in Japan in the eighties and seems to have had an enduring impact on a major part of Japanese youth sub-culture into …

Sailor Suit and Machine Gun / Sera-fuku to kikanju (1981)

The yakuza movie template developed in the 1960s is so rigid that it paradoxically becomes extremely flexible, as the American Western did in the 50s and 60s. This makes it almost impossible to satirize it. Yakuza themselves can be satirized, as Juzo Itami later found to his physical danger, but not the yakuza movie, which …

Eijanaika (1981)

Many movies have been made about the chaotic Bakumatsu period when the Shogunate was beginning to reach its end, almost all featuring the samurai and ronin in that era such as the Shinsengumi or Ryoma Sakamoto. Imamura’s Eijanaika depicts that chaos from the bottom up in a movie that begins with a carnival, ends with …

Hana-kago no uta (1937)

The idea of marriage for love became a significant feature of post-war Japanese movies, but was not seen very often before the war. Gosho’s Hana-kago no uta gives us an interesting look at that issue, while taking some strange turns. Kinuyo Tanaka as Yoko is the principal attraction of her father’s tonkatsu cafe, her looks …

At This Late Date, the Charleston / Chikagoro naze ka Charusuton (1981)

Even by the eighties, the war had not faded from Japanese consciousness and there was still a great deal of survivor’s guilt, which Okamoto manages to turn into the often hilarious At This Late Date, the Charleston. After an attempted rape, Jiro, the second son of a wealthy family, is thrown into a jail cell …

Muddy River / Doro no kawa (1981)

The Japanese have a long tradition of movies with children actually acting like children rather than child actors, and Muddy River is one of the great examples. Based on a presumably autobiographical novel by Teru Miyamoto, it depicts a few weeks in the life of nine-year-old Nobuo. His parents run a noodle shop at the …

Marching Song / Shingun no uta (1937)

Rather by accident, just as I was finishing my comments on movies of the seventies, I stumbled onto several movies about WWII that I did not know existed when I initially wrote about the movies of the period. Some of these turned out to be interesting movies in their own right, as well as interesting …

Battle of Port Arthur / Hill 203 / 203 Kochi (1980)

The Russo-Japanese War is little known among Americans and famous among the Japanese primarily for the great naval victory that utterly destroyed the Russian Baltic Fleet which had sailed round the world to re-inforce the Pacific Fleet that had been severely mauled in earlier attacks. Hill 203 depicts the ground campaign that was a horrendous …