Movies: Taizō Fukami

Kanji Watanabe is a middle-aged man who has worked in the same monotonous bureaucratic position for decades. Learning he has cancer, he starts to look for the meaning of his life....

Over more than a decade, the daughter of a Kyoto Imperial University professor comes of age as she witnesses her father fired for opposing the rise of fascism in Japan and becomes involved with two of his students....

Umekichi, a geisha in the Gion district of Kyoto, feels obliged to help her lover Furusawa when he asks to stay with her after becoming bankrupt and leaving his wife. However her younger sister Omocha tells her she is wasting her time and money on a ...

Two brothers compete for the amorous favors of a young woman during a seaside summer of gambling, boating, and drinking....

Three bank robbers, Eijima, Nojiri, and Takasugi, flee the police and escape into the mountains. At an inn high in the Japanese Alps, Eijima and Nojiri encounter a young woman and her father, as well as Honda, a mountaineer. The inn folk do not reali...

A bus making its precarious way across a winding mountain road picks up some unwelcome passengers....

Set in post-war Japan, The Lady of Musashino tells the story of Michiko, a disillusioned young woman trapped in a loveless marriage. She confides in her younger cousin, Tsutomo, and the two become close, but decide not to consummate their affair. He ...

The critical establishment was clearly not prepared to accept a woman's prison film featuring former prostitutes recovering from venereal diseases, unwanted pregnancies, and estranged lovers. With its cat fights, hysterical tantrums, film noir lighti...

A Fond Face from the Past is also set in a rural community, specifically a village outside Kameoka, near Kyoto. In some ways this short, thirty-six-minute film is Naruse's most moving negotiation of the militarist restrictions of the time, perhaps be...

This film depicts a troupe of wandering kabuki players traveling through rural Japan....

Plans to build a touristic hot spring on the island of Izu Oshima run afoul of the Kobe yakuza group, which intends to use the island as a relay base for drug smuggling....

In A Tale of Archery, young, timid bowmaster Kazuma (Akitake Kôno) seeks to beat the archery record set by Hoshino Kanzaemon, a mysterious figure who, it is rumored, drove the previous champion (Kazuma’s father) to suicide. Possessed of much raw tale...

The premature death of a young mother serves as inspiration for her husband and son....

Shokichi, the owner of the clothing store, lives with his daughter Hideko and plans to open an art gallery. One day, Hideko led a handsome art student, Shohei and a poor painter, Sohei. Sohei’s painting was praised by a great printer at the completio...

Shortly after arriving in Kobe, "Jiro the Lefty", a killer with a natural talent, witnesses a man die in a crane accident which turns out to be a cover-up for a murder. Jiro soon finds himself on the run, tailed by a determined cop....

The Fencing Master tells the story of a man trying to survive as the only world he knows is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Danpei Ichikawa lives for swordfighting – he was once a renowned kabuki swordfight choreographer, and as the Chairman of the...

Mikami, a Japanese soldier, is captured by Chinese forces. Although able to escape, he is treated with contempt by his peers. After falling in love with a prostitute named Harumi, she convinces him to desert the army and live with her....

A story about a wealthy family and the greed and selfishness of three daughters and relatives, after the passing of their old father...

An attempt is made to suppress a journalist's investigation of collusion between a rural police chief and the local gangster bosses....

Five women classmates from a college in Tokyo are on the first stretch of a walking tour when one of them, Masako, falls ill at a railway station. Osen, a middle-aged maid from a nearby inn, takes her in and nurses her, assisted by Dr. Minami, a youn...