Movies: Sadao Maruyama

The main focus is on the 5 member band of a small circus as it runs into problems while touring rural Japan. It also pays lots of attention to the two daughters of the aging and irascible ringmaster-circus owner. The high points are the sound (and sc...

Song of the White Orchid was a co-production of Toho and Mantetsu, the railway that served the colonial region of Manchuria, and the first film in the Kazuo Hasegawa/Shirley Yamaguchi (Ri Koran) “Continental Trilogy.” Handsome Hasegawa (representing ...

Ine Onoda, the eldest daughter of a poor family of farmers, raises a colt from birth and comes to love the horse dearly. When the horse is grown, the government orders it auctioned and sold to the army. Ine struggles to prevent the sale....

Kimiko, a Tokyo white-collar working girl, lives with her serious, intellectual, haiku-writing mother. Kimiko seeks to marry her boyfriend but needs her absent father to act as the go-between and negotiate the marriage. Kimiko travels and finds her f...

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Part 2 of a 2-part romance (fist part - Kafuku zempen) based on a story by noted author Kikuchi Kan. In the second half, we discover that Toyomi is pregnant -- and while Shintaro and Yurie are on their extended honeymoon, she bears his child, a girl ...

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Part two of two....

1935 P.C.L. adaptation of Natsume's novel....

The Opium War is a 1943 black-and-white Japanese film directed by Masahiro Makino. "Ahen senso" in Japan refers to the First Opium War. The story of the film concerns this war....

"Karayuki-san offers a no-holds-barred depiction of the discrimination faced by a former prostitute who returns to Japan from Singapore with her mixed-race son." - Alexander Jacoby (Oxford Brookes University)...

The study of a one-year marriage that begins to crumble. A married man is torn between the love of his wife, and the attraction to a cousin of his wife....

This epic depicts the battle between Uesugi Kenshin and Takeda Shingen. The focus of the story is the struggle by the unit leader in charge of the main supply wagons and the supply troops to transport materiel to the Uesugi army. To this are added ep...

This film attempts to reconstruct the tension of the Battle of Shanghai through an episode in an understated way, introducting its story in a documentary mode. In the film story, Japan's marine regiment protects Japanese residents and Chinese refugee...

Japanese adaptation of LES MISERABLES. The last film of director Itami took inspiration from Les Miserables. Transpiring during the Southwestern War of 1877 in Japan, which was the last civil war in the country, a criminal escapes prison only to be ...

Part 1 of a 2-part romance based on a story by noted author Kikuchi Kan. The central character here is Toyomi (played by Takako IRIE, star of Mizoguchi’s "Water Magician), a rich young woman in love with Shintaro (Minoru TAKADA), a rich young man. U...

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1936 P.C.L. adaptation of Natsume's novel....

Adaptation of Fumiko Hayashi's novel....

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