Movies: Taiji Tonoyama

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...

The men who surround and torment the young protagonist (demanding teacher, owner of the company that rapes his own daughter, despotic and uncompromising father) are opposed to women (victims of men) as embodiment of salvation....

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...

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

When his pistol is stolen, police detective Murakami is humiliated, especially when the gun is later implicated in a crime. Working with his superior, Chief Detective Sato, Murakami works feverishly to trace the location of his pistol, ultimately cla...

After a businessman is murdered, an investigation identifies a suspect who is then put on trial for that crime....

Natsuko is so good at using that super-strong vagina of hers that she can fuck guys to death. In the end, she’s pitted against a sexual superman and a showdown ensues. There’s also a subplot about a mad scientist type who needs vaginal juices to crea...

A woman takes revenge on her husband after he leaves her for a younger woman by harassing the couple with unwanted phone calls at night....

The melodramatic story of a pink crew’s tragi-comedic adventures on location. A fictionalized adaptation of set photographer Ichiro Tsuda's 1980 book The Location (Za Rokēshon), an illustrated 229-page document about the cameraman’s experiences with...

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

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The ship Kaijin Maru is left adrift after losing all means of navigation in a storm. The four people on the ship are becoming increasingly desperate as food and water run out....

Ichiro’s family used to be a large landowner, but now he is living in poverty with his mother. His mother works hard to get her son through school. Under such circumstances, Ichiro meets Wakako, the daughter of a wealthy man, and they fall in love wi...

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...

In 1906, after finishing a tough migrant job in the Philippines, Takichi has returned to Japan. He starts to work as a rickshaw driver, but his lover had died of an illness, leaving a baby girl, Hatsue. Hatsue grows up beautifully and falls in love w...

A well-respected drama teacher confesses to his housekeeper that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima has left him impotent. With the coming of spring, the sympathetic housekeeper suggests that the Master observe the Yobai , a custom in which the young me...

A group of Okinawan high school girls are drafted as nurses during the American invasion of the island. As the enemy army advances further, the situation for the girls becomes increasingly desperate as food and shelter run out and the number of injur...

Nobuo is a hot-headed hoodlum fresh out of reform school who struggles to make a clean break with his tearaway past....

Based on a true story, an elderly woman resiliently spends nine months attempting to retrieve her husband's dead body, fighting government bureaucracy and indifference all along the way....

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....