Strange Tale of Oyuki / Bokuto kitan (1992)

A middle-aged man with an umbrella walks down a crowded alley in the Tamanoi area during the thirties. As rain begins, a young woman asks for shelter under his umbrella. She invites him into her place to dry his clothes and offers him tea and then herself, for she is, like the other women in …

Hope and Pain / Downtown Heroes / Dauntaun hirozu (1988)

Following the maxim “write about what you know,” writers and film-makers tend to produce their most autobiographical work in their twenties and then again around the age of sixty, when their youth begins to be seen with nostalgia rather than immediacy. Thus it should be no surprise that there were a spate of  books and …

Memories of You / Kaisha monogatari: Memories of You (1988)

Memories of You, like 24 Hour Playboy, has jazz at its heart, but the two movies could not be more different. The Japanese title is Company Story and most of the movie revolves around the office of the symbolically named Tokyo Co., where Hanaoka is about to retire on his birthday, which is also Christmas …

Black Rain / Kuroi ame (1989)

Rather naturally, Japanese movies have been far more interested in Hiroshima and Nagasaki than have Americans, but it is remarkable how little anger the films express toward the US. Only the 1953 Hiroshima, financed outside the studio system by the teacher's unions, really works up any fury about the use of the Bomb itself. Black …

Children of Nagasaki / Kono ko wo nokoshite (1983)

Nagasaki is often the ignored city in the atomic bomb history, with most attention still given to Hiroshima. Kinoshita's Children of Nagasaki looks at the effects of that bombing, and as such its subject matter rather overwhelms any urge to criticize the film as a whole. However, because it is placed in Nagasaki, it is …

MacArthur’s Children / Setouchi shonen yakyu dan (1984)

Most of the movies made about the Occupation after the Occupation officially ended in 1952 have looked back through the eyes of the yakuza. MacArthur’s Children, however, views the early years of the Occupation through the experience of three fifth-graders on a tiny island in the Inland Sea. It is a view in which the …

Gate of Youth / Seishun no mon (1981)

Hiroyuki Itsuki’s eight-volume novel collectively known as Gate of Youth was thought to be so important and so popular when it was written that it was filmed twice before it was even finished in 1994. The first, a six hour and two movie version, appeared in 1975 and 1977. Apparently, producers thought the interest was …

Flower and Snake / Hana to hebi (1974)

If we can say there are national signatures in porn, either soft or hard-core, then the international signature for Japan is surely bondage, women tied in increasingly imaginative and implausible ways while being tortured or sexually assaulted. If we were to try to pinpoint the beginning of that image, it probably would be 1974’s Flower …

Proof of the Man / Ningen no shomei (1977)

When Mariko Okada’s wastrel son confesses to having killed a woman in a hit-and-run and thrown her body into the sea, she tells him that nothing can be solved by asking the police to punish him. The real proof of a man, she tells him, is to suffer for your sins and live with them …

True Story of the Secret Ginza Police / Jitsuroku: Shisetsu Ginza keisatsu (1973)

Jitsuroku is usually translated as “true story,” which in the yakuza movies of the seventies meant not so much historical accuracy as it did fights and blood of a new kind. The most famous of the jitsuroku yakuza movies are Kinji Fukasaku’s 5-part Battles Without Honor or Humanity, whose title neatly summarizes the change. The …