Movies: Chōichirō Kawarasaki

A group of pirates led by the evil Gondaiyu and his wizard, Genkuro, capture the Golden Peacock Castle and massacre the peaceful clan that lives there. The few survivors that manage to escape plot their revenge and wait for the right timing for an at...

Michio Yamada, a recent school graduate, is sent to Tokyo to work as a fruit-packer in a department store as part of a government programme. He takes a gun from a house on an American base and uses it to kill several people. The scene changes to Yam...

Yumechiyo, a geisha house madam recently diagnosed with a terminal illness, yearns to do something constructive with the little time she has left. Though her responsibility lies in taking care of her girls, she finds purpose in helping a man wrongful...

Akira leaves for the Mt. Gassan foothills before winter's onset, visiting the local temple and interacting with the residents all while falling for fair Fumiko....

An injured Edo official is rescued by a vassal whose appearance is exactly like himself, and swears to sweep out the criminals from the town on his behalf....

A story of an orphan boy who wanted the love of parents so badly, another orphan sincerely pitied him to the point he gives his secret birthright as an illegitimate son to a Shogun as a "gift of hope" to the sad boy. As the orphan boy grew up, his lo...

In this gritty tale of gamblers battling in the samurai era, Okawa Hashizo gives perhaps his greatest performance as a gambler returning to his home town. Swearing allegiance to his fiancée’s father, a decent boss, he had taken to the road after a ga...

The story of a bus conductor who dedicates his life to the cherished Japanese symbol....

This is a story of a young heir to a powerful house, sent away to be raised by his nanny, so the young lord Genrokuro grew up bitter about his parents, hating his legacy and embracing everyone else from simple background. Only love can help him matur...

A parable about the inefficiency and anachronism of the Japanese educational system, which places an unusually large amount of importance on cramming for university entrance examinations, Panic High School is about the suicide of a high school studen...

A beautifully told story of a woman hardened by marriage to a man she doesn't love, after giving herself to another. She dedicates herself to her work, designing and creating plaited cords for kimono....

Mainly the story of Shinsuke and his stepmother, ranging from Shinsuke's infanthood to his mid-teens. Coal workers and the mines dominate nearly every aspect of the life of the characters. Shinsuke's father dies while bravely using dynamite to rescue...

Two semi-slackers with an ultra-intimate friendship work, slack and drink in a freezing Hokkaido town....

Fictionalized account of 20-year-old Noriko Tsuji, a real-life victim of a severe birth defect which afflicted 8,000 Japanese, children whose mothers took the sedative thalidomide during pregnancy. Tsuji has stunted flipper-like arms amputated at the...

A film adaptation of Masatsugu Nobuhiko's novel of the same name, directed by Tasaka Tomotaka and starring Nakamura Kinnosuke. This literary epic tells the story of how the protagonist, who has become mired in evil due to his poverty and low position...

Osaka in the early 1600s, aftermath of the historical Battle of Sekigahara; a group of orphan children are wandering through the battlefield scavenging for armour when they encounter a young boy named Sasuke with magical powers he says came from a me...

A Japanese soldier deserts his position and travels to a small town on the Sea of Japan to start over. When a young maid falls for him, he talks her into sleeping with an older man for money....

Romance story about the first female manager of the Nihon University Phoenix...

A carpenter, Shigetsugu, learns a lesson of love and humanity from five orphaned children and an affectionate woman named Oritsu. It's a winning combination of drama and humor. The warm friendship that grows between the carpenter, the woman and the ...

A survivor of the tragic mass suicides on Tokashiki Island in 1945 falls in love with a near-mute motorcycle engineer....