All Under the Moon / Where Is the Moon? / Tsuki wa dotchi ni dete iru (1993)

As Japan's prosperity boomed, it became a magnet for Asian immigrants. The most prominent of these were the Koreans, many of whom had come during the war years as slave labor, but who had since been joined by economic immigrants from both North and South. To these have been added in this movie Filipinos, Chinese, …

W’s Tragedy / Daburyu no higeki (1984)

Shizuko Natsuki's novel Daburyu no higeki, also known as Murder at Mt. Fuji, had been a best-seller, immediately adapted to TV in 1983. For the Kadokawa-produced movie version in 1984, director Shin'ichiro Sawai and former pinku screenwriter Haruhiko Arai moved the mystery itself into the background to build a vehicle for teen idol Hiroko Yakushimaru …

Roadside Stone / Pebble by the Wayside / Robo no ishi (1938)

The rock left by the side of the road is young Goichi, now approaching the end of fifth grade. Like Takeshi in Childhood Days, he is the smartest boy in his class but is poor and can not afford to go on to middle school. His father is away most of the time, supposedly selling …

Knockout / Dotsuitarunen (1989)

As a general rule, I avoid boxing movies, just as I do judo, karate, wrestling, or most other sports movies, not because I dislike the sports or games but because the movies are so predictable. After many trials and tribulations, Rocky or the Karate Kid or the prisoners in The Longest Yard always triumph in …

Warm Current / Danryu (1939)

Danryu, which only fairly recently appeared on YouTube, marks one of the turning points in pre-war Japanese movie-making. It is a movie in which questions of marriage turn completely on female love rather than social status or familial arrangements. As usual for Japanese films, it takes us a while to reach the real story. Hibiki …

Bumpkin Soup / Excitement of the Do-Re-Mi-Fa Girl / Blood of the Do-Re-Me-Fa Girl Roars / Do-re-mi-fa musume no chi wa sawagu (1985)

The country girl Akiko appears at a university campus in search of Yoshioka, the boy she has determined to marry (apparently because he took her virginity) and wanders into not a world of study but of continuously weird behavior. As she says, it's more like a constant festival or circus than a school. Yoshioka hasn't …

The Sea and Poison / Umi to dokuyaku (1986)

Never one to shy away from uncomfortable topics, Kei Kumai adapted Shusaku Endo's 1957 novel The Sea and Poison into one of the most complex studies on film of medical ethics. The movie (sometimes graphically) describes the use of eight downed American fliers as subjects of experimental surgical techniques at Kyushu University's medical school and …

Comic Magazine / No More Comics / Komikku zasshi nanka iranai! (1986)

By the eighties, the tabloid world of Scandal or Detective Bureau had shifted to television, where celebrity gossip has become the major subject matter. Kinameri is a “reporter” for his network’s morning show, where he tries to get  stories from people who generally try to avoid him and his camera crew. He is generally thought …

Funeral / Ososhiki (1984)

Wabisaki and his wife Chizuko are actors who make most of their living from TV commercials. One day Chizuko gets a phone call from her mother that her father has died, and the mother wants her and her husband to organize the funeral. Thus begins Juzo Itami’s quietly charming first movie The Funeral, as pure …

Typhoon Club / Taifu kurabu (1985)

Set in the days of a typhoon reaching shore, Typhoon Club uses the storm as a metaphor for the confusions and chaos of early teen life. The result, like a typhoon itself, is dramatic but also confused and confusing to the viewer. Much of this confusion results simply because we have eight principal characters, all …