Time Traveler / Girl Who Leapt Through Time / Toki o kakeru shojo(2010)

Yasutaka Tsutsui's story of the Girl Who Leapt Through Time has been one of Japan's most popular teen stories of the post-war era, adapted to movies or TV at least ten times since it first appeared in 1965. The most famous of these is the much-acclaimed animated version of 2006, which altered the original story …

United Red Army / Jitsuroku Rengo Sekigun: Asama sanso e no michi(2007)

The Asama-Sanso Incident in 1972, covered live on national TV, essentially ended the student rebellions of the sixties. After a days long standoff involving several gunshot deaths, police stormed a mountain ski lodge, rescued the housekeeper, and arrested the last members of the United Red Army. The story had been told from the view of …

Casshern (2004)

Sometimes we come across a movie of such significance or uniqueness that, despite its many flaws, it should at least be mentioned in any look at Japanese film and culture. It was only a matter of time before the turn of the century nostalgia for old manga and anime, the spread of CGI, and the …

Choice of Hercules / Totsunyuseyo! Asama Sanso jiken (2002)

The Asama-Sanso Incident in 1972 was the most dramatic and shocking public event in Japan between the war and the Sarin gas attacks in the Tokyo subway in 1995. The remnants of a radical group calling themselves the United Red Army, one of many groups around the world at about the same time that helped …

Blue Christmas / Blue Blood / Buru Kurisumasu (1978)

The political conspiracy thriller was relatively rare in Japanese movies even during the seventies when the sense of dark forces at work inside governments that surfaced during the Nixon era was common in movies of other nations. Most Japanese movies on such themes had been, and continue to be, about the corruption of individual politicians …

Love Is in the Green Wind* / Koi wa midori no kaze no naka (1974)

Miyoji Ieki's last movie follows young Junichi through his last spring classes and summer vacation. He is roughly what Americans would call an eighth grader, so we are in the realm of sexual awakening and first love, still trapped in the mind of a childish boy. Junichi (Yusuke Sato) has had that incredible growth spurt …

Murders in the Dollhouse / Midare karakuri (1979)

From the first sounds of Midare karakuri's title music, we know that we are securely in the international movie-land of the seventies, even before we see Yusaku Matsuda's hair style. Coming off the success of three movies that made Matsuda Japan's top modern-dress action star, he again plays a detective, but with the action skills …

Hot Little Girl / Shibire kurage (1970)

The story of Shibire kurage is fairly simple – Midori is a young woman supporting herself as a model while saving for her marriage, who through a series of set backs that are not her fault will end up losing her fiancé, her job, and a second possible husband, and will break all ties with …

Owl / Fukuro (2003)

At the age of ninety, in Owl Kaneto Shindo wrote and directed one of the sprightliest sex comedies I have come across from Japan at any time. Comedy is hardly the first thing that comes to mind when we mention Shindo but it was not unknown in his movies, with the often ribald Edo Porn …

Empty Table / Family Without a Dinner Table / Shokutaku no nai ie (1985)

In his final movie, Kobayashi uses the Asama-Sanso Incident of 1972 to examine not the collapse of left-wing politics in Japan but rather to explore the effects of them on a family. Once again, he turns to Tatsuya Nakadai as his principal character Kidoji, the father of one of the young men eventually captured by …