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 …

Million Yen Girl / Hyakuman-en to nigamushi onna (2008)

No matter where you go, there you are. This is certainly the problem faced by Suzuko, the Million Yen Girl of the title. Quiet, shy, unassuming, she keeps finding herself in situations that might draw her out of her shell and then withdrawing into it and running away again. This cycle begins when another waitress …

Tokyo Sonata (2008)

Though it was widely seen and written about on its initial release, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Tokyo Sonata is so full of forgotten detail that it is more than worth a second or a third look. While it is the story of a salaryman who loses his job and almost loses his family, it is far more …

Gentle Breeze in the Village / Tennen kokekko (2007)

Soyo is the oldest girl in her tiny village whom we follow in A Gentle Breeze in the Village for about two years until she enters high school. A new boy arrives from far-away Tokyo, and everyone assumes a romance will develop, but it is very tentative and awkward, as we would hope to see …

Pacchigi! (2004)

It's 1968 in Kyoto and girls are fainting at rock band concerts. Three friends in high school decide to get “mushroom” haircuts to impress the girls and at last achieve “penetration,” but the girls just laugh at them. It looks like we're in for a trip down nostalgia lane. Then two girls from the North …

Blue Light / Ai no hono-o (2003)

I'm not sure how Blue Light ended up in my movie list, but I am certainly glad that it did. The first of only four movies directed by fabled Japanese stage director Yukio Ninagawa, it follows the senior year of a high school boy who while trying to protect his mother and sister finds himself …

Who’s Camus Anyway? / Kamyu nante shiranai (2006)

In a single opening take of about seven minutes, a crane and dolly shot takes us back and forth across the grounds of a college campus, introducing the principal characters involved in making a student movie project, even as some of them discuss other similar long crane shots in movies such as The Player or …

Ping Pong / Pinpon (2002)

Japan hadn't had a sports movie as successful as Ping Pong since Sumo Do, Sumo Don't, and I was expecting a similar movie about an underdog team that eventually triumphs. Instead, I found a movie about friendships and character development, told in the flamboyantly entertaining manner of Hong Kong's better known but later Shaolin Soccer. …

Blue Spring / Aoi haru (2001)

Blue Spring takes us inside a boys' high school in the last weeks before graduation, and it is unlike any Japanese school we have seen on film. The first thing we see is an adult desperately running away across the school playing field, with a gang of boys chasing after. The hallways, toilets, and stairways …

Shinsetsu* (1942)

When Shinsetsu appeared on YouTube, it seemed like an opportunity to fill in a big hole in our knowledge about both Japan after Pearl Harbor and movies made by Gosho, whose tuberculosis prevented him from working for most of the forties. Many of the social aspects of the movie are still clear, but since the …