Movies: Taiji Tonoyama

Saheji, a man-about-town, gets stuck at a high-class brothel when he can’t pay the bill. He makes the best of his situation by performing various tasks amidst the tumult of the end of the shogunate—but always by making sure to get a “commission” for ...

The film depicts carnivalesque atmosphere summed up by the cry "Ei ja nai ka" ("Why not?") in Japan in 1867 and 1868 in the days leading to the Meiji Restoration. It examines the effects of the political and social upheaval of the time, and culminate...

Based on a novel by Tsutomu Mizukami, this haunting melodrama focuses on a young bamboo worker who takes his father's prostitute as his wife....

Misawa Ihei (Nagato) is traveling with his wife Tae (Iwashita Shima) who abhors the practice of sword fighting for prize money. Tae is the daughter of the clan's chief counselor who married the low-ranking Ihei to avoid becoming the clan lord's mistr...

An ageing fishing boat, Dai-go Fukuryu Maru ("Lucky Dragon No. 5") sets out from the port of Yaizu in Shizuoka Prefecture. It travels around the Pacific line fishing. While the ship is near Bikini Atoll, the ship's navigator sees a flash. All the cre...

On the eve of the Russo-Japanese war at the beginning of the 20th century, small-town girl Okane has married an old wealthy man to escape a life of poverty....

Three students spend their holidays at the seaside where they are mistaken for Koreans, a minority which is looked down on in Japan. The action develops into a crime story....

Yoshida’s first big-budget production and colour film is a haunting tale of unrequited love and postwar disillusion. The story of the fatal attraction between a spineless intellectual and a strong woman is conventional, but its enactment is radically...

A college professor wants to bring the joys of sex to his frigid wife. He convinces his son in law to sleep with her because the idea arouses him, while also making him insanely jealous. The professor keeps a journal of his fantasies in a locked cupb...

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Ayame, a courtesan, attracts the attention of street vendor Kisuke and decides to run away with him to America. Unfortunately, a crazed tattoo artist is obsessed with Ayame's perfect skin as a potential canvas, so he kills Kisuke to keep Ayame in Jap...

Set in Kawaguchi in the early 60s, this simple story chronicles the lives of foundry families and one girl's dreams of higher education....

After a mine collapses and leaves her husband employed, Fumiko moves to Kyoto with her daughter Kimiko and becomes a hostess....

Two Jesuit priests encounter persecution when they travel to Japan in the 17th century to spread Christianity and search for their mentor....

The brief love story of an attentive young man and a beautiful woman who meet, fall in love and part during the course of a train ride....

Two boys, whose parents ply their trade by the mouth of a muddy river in Osaka, become close friends....

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To satisfy her lover's fetish for tattooed women, Akane agrees to have her body covered in eloborate tattoos by Kyogoro, an old craftsman. Kyogoro has developed a special technique, by which his assistant, Harutsune, keeps Katsuko's mind off the pain...

Oshima’s magisterial epic, centering on the ambivalent surviving heir of the Sakurada clan, uses ritual and the microcosm of the traditional family to trace the rise and fall of militaristic Japan across several decades....

Set in post-war Japan, a group of five, four men and one woman, gathers in the basement of a butcher shop to dig up a cache of morphine buried during the war. A grimly humorous tale of twisted relationships as one by one each of the group is eliminat...