Nightingale / Bush Warbler / Uguishu (1938)

Uguishu, Shiro Toyoda's most highly-regarded pre-war movie, has just appeared on YouTube and despite the occasionally murky print and less-than-idiomatic subtitles, it is a fascinating and humane look at pre-war Japanese society. Like Policeman's Diary, one of the first movies I posted about and based on a novel by the same writer, it is centered …

Express Train / Kigeki kyuko ressha (1967)

One of the relatively unique genres of Japanese movies is what I've elsewhere called the slice-of-life comedy. When dealing with the salaryman world, this is usually called the shomin-geki, but Americans can occasionally find DVDs of these kinds of comedies that lie slightly outside the shomin-geki world, of which Express Train is a thoroughly entertaining …

Policeman’s Diary/Keisatsu nikki (1955)

There is a type of movie the Japanese have regularly made that I have rarely found in any of the other major film cultures. It's not quite a comedy, though there are often many chuckles (rather than laughs). It's not quite a tragedy, though things often end badly for many of the characters. It's not …