Movies: Kenzō Tanaka

Down-on-his-luck veteran Tsugumo Hanshirō enters the courtyard of the prosperous House of Iyi. Unemployed, and with no family, he hopes to find a place to commit seppuku—and a worthy second to deliver the coup de grâce in his suicide ritual. The seni...

Taking its title from an archaic Japanese word meaning "ghost story," this anthology adapts four folk tales. A penniless samurai marries for money with tragic results. A man stranded in a blizzard is saved by Yuki the Snow Maiden, but his rescue come...

Shiba, a wandering ronin, encounters a band of peasants who have kidnapped the daughter of their dictatorial magistrate, in hopes of coercing from him a reduction in taxes. Shiba takes up their fight, joined by two renegades from the magistrate's gua...

In Osaka's slum, youths without futures engage in pilfering, assault and robbery, prostitution, and the buying and selling of identity cards and of blood. Alliances constantly shift. Tatsu and Takeshi, friends since boyhood, reluctantly join Shin's g...

The stage director Shimamura, who is bringing western theatre to Japan, falls in love with the outspoken actress Sumako Matsui, and leaves his family to be with her, while trying to keep his Art Theatre solvent....

Assassination begins with the events of 1853 when "four black ships" anchored at Edo Bay, sparking civil unrest and the major political manoeuvring that saw the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate. At a time when assassination had become a disturbing polit...

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...

On March 11 in the seventh year of Tenpo (1836), a monk named Bennō, who fell in love with a geisha named Oshima, was publicly exposed at Nihonbashi for committing an illicit act with a woman. While this was happening, an extravagant procession led b...

First "Pfc. Story" sequel and eighth overall sequel to "Story of Second Class Private"....

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Shinzō, the heir of the prominent Edo lumber dealer Yamashiroya, left home when his stubborn father, Chōzaemon, dismissed his lover, the maid Oyasu. Shinzō and Oyasu set up a household near a soba shop in Fukagawa, but Shinzō struggled financially, t...

The plot is based on the novel "Akechi Samanosuke no Koi," the final work in a trilogy by Hiroshi Kato about the forced suicide of Oda Nobunaga at the temple Honnoji. Historically, the general Akechi Mitsuhide is credited with causing Nobunaga's down...

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A resolute young man searching for his mother, whom he was separated from as a child, defies a family who mistreat the poor and homeless....

1950 Japanese movie...

Watanabe Kazuma and Kawai Matagorō from the Bizen Okayama Ikeda clan were close friends, but they inevitably became enemies after Matagorō killed Kazuma's younger brother, Gentayū, and fled. Seeking assistance, Kazuma asked his brother-in-law, Araki ...

Based on the famous novel by Yamagami Itaro, this is the story of a group of ronin living in abject poverty in the latter days of the Edo period. Starring the great Konoe Jushiro, Ronin Gai is populated by an ensemble of colorful characters, social o...

Part 2 starts where the first film ended, with Iemon disposing of the bodies of his wife and Kohei, marrying upward, and being blackmailed by the evil Naosuke....

A provincial bus driver plans to marry his conductress, but one night he glimpses the woman he once loved, which throws him into turmoil....

One night in Edo, a mysterious woman in a palanquin appeared at the moneylender Yamashiroya, revealing herself to a beautiful woman. She told the owner, Shigebē, that she had come to collect a life he owed from twenty years ago and then left. The sam...