Love and Honor (2006)

Since it is also based on a story by Shuhei Fujisawa, Love and Honor is naturally compared to Twilight Samurai and Hidden Blade, Yoji Yamada's two previous films adapted from the same author. Though like those other two movies it includes a sword duel, it is really about a husband and wife and the world …

Yellow Handkerchief / Shiawase no kiiroi hankachi (1977)

Kin’ya gets dumped by his girlfriend and so he buys himself a car and takes off driving, Arriving off the ferry in Hokkaido, and not wishing to look like a “hick,” he buys himself a cowboy hat and hangs around the train station offering rides to any young women passing by. Eventually, Akemi takes him …

Home from the Sea / Hometown / Furusato (1972)

Home from the Sea ends with a family leaving their home village to seek a new life, exactly the moment when Where Spring Comes Late begins. It is easy to think of this as a prequel, for it has the same husband (Hisashi Igawa), the same wife (Chieko Baisho), two young children, the same Grandpa …

Sunshine in the Old Neighborhood / Sunshine Girl / Shitamachi no taiyo (1963)

Shitamachi is an industrial neighborhood just across the river from the rest of Tokyo where Machiko lives with her father and two brothers, one studying constantly, the other in middle school and utterly uninterested in anything but trains. Machiko is in one of those engagements with Michio in which nothing is formalized but they have …

Where Spring Comes Late / Family / Kazoku (1970)

Spring comes late in Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan, and it comes late for the family of So and Tami, who left their home on an island south of Nagasaki to make the long rail journey north to find a job for the husband. The story of their trip is one of the warmest, …

It’s Tough Being a Man* / Tora-san – Our Lovable Tramp / Otoko wa tsurai yo (1969)

Most Americans who become interested in Japanese movies are first attracted to the exoticism of the jidai-geki or the energy and violence of the yakuza movies, so it is easy to forget that there was a large world of movies about modern life being made at the same time. The shomin-geki did not die in …

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 …

Gambler’s Luck / Un ga yokerya (1966)

One of the earliest available films of Yoji Yamada, Gambler's Luck provides a rare look at Japanese film comedy. Like so many films the world over featuring a famous comedian, its plot verges on the non-existent. We see the lives of a small tenement over the course of a year, during which the tenants are …

Elegant Life of Mr. Everyman / Eburi manshi no yuga-na seikatsu (1963)

Keiju Kobayashi as Eburi-man on his day off In Elegant Life, the Japanese shomin-geki reaches some kind of landmark, satirical yet sympathetic, sad yet wildly funny, in a film of such wit and visual imagination that it is inexplicable how it has been all but unknown outside Japan for so long. Eburi works in an …

Drunken Sword / Yoi-dore musoken (1962)

Of the great pre-war chanbara stars, the least well-known outside of Japan is Utaemon Ichikawa because almost all his movies were star vehicles that were dependably entertaining but never wandered into unusual territories that might draw the attention of Euro/American distributors. He was a giant in his field, rather like Randolph Scott in the Western …