For My Daughter’s 7th Birthday / Kono ko no nanatsu no oiwai ni (1984)

A major life event for a Japanese girl is the seventh birthday,* when she first puts on an obi and begins to be treated not as a child but as a woman-to-be. On young Kaya’s seventh birthday, her mother (Kyoko Kishida) returns to their poverty-stricken home bearing the obi and other presents including candy (since …

Amagi Pass / Amagi goe (1983)

A 14-year-old boy climbs to Amagi pass in 1940 and an old man forty years later painfully climbs five floors of stairs to hire a printer for his memoirs. Their lives come together in the story of a murder of a wandering laborer at the tunnel at the top of the trail over Amagi. The …

Season of Terror / Gendai koshoku-den: Teroru no kisetsu (1969)

While little discussed by critics, Season of Terror is one of Wakamatsu’s most interesting movies. The date is 1969, and it is a movie immersed in the last gasp of left-wing political rebellion during 1969-70. Two men try to be inconspicuous as they follow another through a large apartment complex. They turn out to be …

Demon / Kichiku (1978)

Ken Ogata had been a major star on TV since the mid-sixties, usually playing samurai heroes. His occasional big-screen appearances had been in supporting roles, some fairly large but for the most part not particularly memorable. Then suddenly, in 1978-79 he catapulted to the position of one of Japanese film’s most highly regarded actors by …

Three Undelivered Letters / Haitatsu sarenai santsu no tegami (1978)

For me, as I assume for most people, the seventies in Japanese movie making were for a long time little more than a dark hole. Aside from Battles Without Honor, Lone Wolf and Cub, and some cult movies in the pinku violence sub-genre, not much was known outside Japan, and that was mostly known about …

Village of Eight Gravestones / Yatsuhaka-mura (1977)

The detective Kindaichi movie revival begun by Ichikawa’s Inugami Family was quickly followed up by movies at several other studios, the most popular of which was Shochiku’s Village of Eight Gravestones. Tatsuya is called to a lawyer’s office where he is grilled to determine his true identity and then meets his long lost grandfather (on …

Beast in the Shadows / Edogawa Rampo no injû (1977)

One of the most unexpected and generally unknown aspects of Japanese movies in the seventies was the revival of the murder mystery as a top of the bill feature. That examples of this genre are all but unseen in Europe or America is no surprise, of course, since every nation produced plenty of those in …

Castle of Sand / Suna no utsuwa (1974)

As in most countries, movies in Japan had often depicted police and criminals. However, the modern police procedural was still a very new idea in the seventies, with Castle of Sand possibly the first Japanese movie to follow a case from the police point of view in a step-by-step investigation process such as might actually …

Shadow of Deception / Naikai no wa (1971)

Like so many of the movies adapted from other mystery novels by Seicho Matsumoto, Shadow of Deception observes and reports in detail but leaves us wondering exactly what happened, even after we see it happen. Minako (Shima Iwashita) is in the middle of an affair with Shuzo (Akira Nakao). He is an archeologist preparing his …

Shadow Within / Kage no kuruma (1970)

A man (Go Kato) sees a beautiful woman (Shima Iwashita) on a crowded bus, and she reminds him of a girl he knew in high school. He speaks to her and she recognizes him. She is a now a widow, selling insurance for a living, but he is married to a woman who is as …