Oh! the Nomugi Pass / Ah! Nomugi toge (1979)

Despite what we normally see in Japanese movies, most of the young girls “sold” by their families did not end up in brothels but  rather in other forms of work, mostly factories. Oh! the Nomugi Pass follows roughly seven years for a group of young girls sold to the silk factories at the beginning of …

Battle of Port Arthur / Hill 203 / 203 Kochi (1980)

The Russo-Japanese War is little known among Americans and famous among the Japanese primarily for the great naval victory that utterly destroyed the Russian Baltic Fleet which had sailed round the world to re-inforce the Pacific Fleet that had been severely mauled in earlier attacks. Hill 203 depicts the ground campaign that was a horrendous …

Mount Hakkoda / Hakkodasan (1977)

Mount Hakkoda in winter is one of the worst places to be on Japan’s main island, but in 1902, the Japanese army tried to cross it, leading to the most disastrous non-combat mission in Japanese history. Hakkodasan is a dramatic reconstruction of that mission, held together by the supposed friendship of the two captains placed …

Battle of the Sea of Japan / Nihonkai daikatsen (1969)

By the late sixties, a number of movies about WWII had appeared featuring heroic characters who had died early in the war – Yamamoto was an especially popular subject – and Toho Studio in particular was looking for ways to use its Godzilla trained special effects unit. After Storm Over the Pacific, they at last …

Seisaku’s Wife / Seisaku no tsuma (1965)

Seisaku's Wife is an extraordinary movie, the second of five stunning "women's pictures" that Masumura and Ayako Wakao would make together between 1964 and 1967, four of them like this one with a script by Kaneto Shindo.* At the same time, the movie is also a devastating attack on the militarism that permeated Japanese culture …

Advance Patrol/ 300 Miles Through Enemy Lines/ Nichiro senso shori no hishi (1957)

Most viewers would probably be interested in seeing this film today because it was written by Akira Kurosawa during WWII. It was not produced, of course; speculation is that it was not sufficiently patriotic in that the soldiers are in fact ordered to come back alive, but more likely was that it simply required more …