Buddies / A un (1989)

Sometimes it seems as if the more Japanese movies look and sound like Euro/American movies, the less comprehensible they become. Such, at least, is the case of Buddies, which in Yasuo Furuhata's best studio polished mainstream manner shows roughly nine months during 1937 in the relationship of two old friends, yet somehow all the key …

Spirit of Tattoo / Irezumi: Sekka tomuraizashi (1982)

Unrelated to the earlier Irezumi, Takabayashi’s Spirit of Tattoo is as its title suggests a meditation on the tattoo as both an art and a mystical experience. The situation is simple: Akane, now in her thirties, is the secretary and apparently long-time lover of Fujieda, a forty-ish librarian with a fetish about tattoos and women’s …

Demon / Yasha (1985)

Shuji is a fisherman, but he was once a yakuza in Osaka known as Yasha, or Demon, both for his violence and for the demon tattoo across his back. Thus, Yasha begins from a very typical premise of yakuza films, the yakuza who wants to go straight but who eventually gets drawn back into the …

Station / Eki (1981)

After the great Winter's Flower, Ken Takakura said farewell to the yakuza genre and, with movies like Yellow Handkerchief, Distant Cry from Spring, and Station, established his position not only as a great box-office star but also as one of the finest screen actors of his generation, a man of unchallengeable masculinity who still managed …

A Distant Cry from Spring / Haruka naru yama no yobigoe (1980)

A thunderstorm howls around a lonely farmhouse where a widow and her son are eating. A stranger knocks, claims to be lost, and asks for shelter. She puts him up in the barn but locks herself in and hides all the knives, just in case. In the morning he thanks her and walks away down …

Bullet Train / Shinkansen daibakuha (1975)

The “foreign” movies that attract critical attention or some popular following in America are almost always the movies that actually seem most “foreign” to us. This is especially true with Japanese movies where almost everything about the society and its history seemed utterly alien during the fifties and sixties when the world discovered Japanese cinema. …

Winter’s Flower / Fuyu no hana (1978)

Winter’s Flower is a lesson in how to make the familiar into something new and engrossing without tricks and gimmicks – simply take it seriously. By 1978, after nearly a decade of the jitsuroku yakuza movies, a sixties yakuza story we had seen hundreds of times before now seems fresh, fascinating, and emotionally powerful. The …

Homeless / Yadonashi (1974)

The Homeless follows a tried-and-true Euro/American formula of three unlikely people brought together at last in search of the Big Score. Shintaro Katsu is a petty criminal who meets Ken Takakura in prison, but they do not become friends. Released on the same day, Takakura rejects a partnership with Katsu to go his own way. …

Father of the Kamikaze / A kessen kokutai (1974)

To outsiders, the most foreign aspect of the Japanese war effort was the Kamikaze,* pilots who were sent out to ram American ships, dying in the process. Euro/American movies have often shown men on “suicide missions,” but the term has always meant only that the odds were against them. While many or most may die, …

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 …