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 …

Crazy Family / Gyakufunsha kazoku (1984)

In Family Game, Yoshimitsu Morita took a scalpel to the modern Japanese middle-class family; in Crazy Family, Sogo Ishii takes a sledgehammer to the same subject, but expands his target to the whole of contemporary Japanese society. We meet the Kobayashi family on that magical day known to so many American families in the fifties …

Play It, Boogie-Woogie / Slow na boogie ni shitekure (1981)

A young girl picks up a kitten on a street; a man in a Mustang picks up the girl*; he makes a pass at her, but they can’t agree on a price; he stops suddenly and throws the kitten out the car window off a bridge then throws her out of the car and drives …

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 …

Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983)

When Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence first was released, most of its critical and public attention focused on the casting of David Bowie, or in Japan the equally famous pop music star Ryuichi Sakamoto. Now, looking back from forty years of film history, its most significant aspect quite well may be the first screen appearance of …

Imperial Japanese Empire / Great War / Dai Nippon teikoku (1982)

Having seen great success with 203 Kochi, Toshio Masuda and screenwriter Kazuo Kasahara tried to do the impossible in Dai Nippon teikoku – compress the entire Japanese experience of the war with the US into one three-hour feature. Though there are plenty of explosions and scenes of soldiers charging, with documentary footage interspersed, they actually …

Burst City / Bakuretsu toshi (1982)

Opening with a great sequence, Burst City soon degenerates into the total chaos it appears to depict. Though this ultimately makes it a movie that today is almost unwatchable, it marked something new in Japan in the eighties and seems to have had an enduring impact on a major part of Japanese youth sub-culture into …

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 …

Woman with Red Hair / Akai kami no onna (1979)

Woman with Red Hair is one of the most highly regarded of all pinku films, #4 on Kinema Junpo’s list in 1979. Why that is so is not particularly clear. Like In the Realm of the Senses, it chronicles an intense affair built almost completely around sex but without Oshima’s graphic sexual scenes or deadly …

Secret Chronicle : Sex Beast Market / (Secret) Lust female market / Confidential Secret Market / (Maruhi) shikijô mesu ichiba (1974)

Japaneses studios, particularly Nikkatsu and Toei, had a taste for especially lurid titles that often misled the audience. We can only wonder what the reaction must have been when a typical roman porno audience dropped in on (Secret) Lust Female Market, which suggests something like a story of women abducted and sold as sex slaves. …