Movies: Kinuyo Tanaka

In 16th century Japan, peasants Genjuro and Tobei sell their earthenware pots to a group of soldiers in a nearby village, in defiance of a local sage's warning against seeking to profit from warfare. Genjuro's pursuit of both riches and the mysteriou...

Aspiring to an easy job as personal physician to a wealthy family, Noboru Yasumoto is disappointed when his first post after medical school takes him to a small country clinic under the gruff doctor Red Beard. Yasumoto rebels in numerous ways, but Re...

In medieval Japan, a woman and her children journey to find the family's patriarch, who was exiled years before....

In Edo Period Japan, a noblewoman's banishment for her love affair with a lowly page signals the beginning of her inexorable fall....

In Kabuki style, the film tells the story of a remote mountain village where the scarcity of food leads to a voluntary but socially-enforced policy in which relatives carry 70-year-old family members up Narayama mountain to die. Granny Orin is approa...

Shinnosuke is introduced to Shizu as a prospective marriage partner, but he falls in love with her widowed sister Oyu. Convention forbids Oyu to marry because she has to raise her son as the head of her husband's family. Oyu convinces Shinnosuke and ...

A young journalist interviews an elderly woman about being forced into prostitution in Borneo at a brothel called Sandakan No. 8....

Wataru Hirayama's outwardly liberal views on marriage are severely tested when his daughter declares that she is in love with a musician and is adamant to live life her own way, instead of agreeing to an arranged marriage. Outwitted by his female rel...

Set in post-war Japan, The Lady of Musashino tells the story of Michiko, a disillusioned young woman trapped in a loveless marriage. She confides in her younger cousin, Tsutomo, and the two become close, but decide not to consummate their affair. He ...

Tokiko is a mother patiently waiting for her husband's return from the war when her 4-year old son becomes ill. She takes him to the doctor for treatment but has no way of paying. She resorts to prostitution. One month later her husband returns from ...

Otsuta is running the geisha house Tsuta in Tokyo. Her business is heavily in debt. Her daughter Katsuyo doesn't see any future in her mother's trade in the late days of Geisha. But Otsuta will not give up. This film portraits the day time life of ge...

Ryoichi and Chikako, brother and sister, live together. Chikako toils during the day and, at night, prostitutes herself to fund his college tuition....

Setsuko is unhappily married to Mimura, an engineer with no job and a bad drinking habit. She had always been in love with Hiroshi but both of them failed to propose when Hiroshi left for France a few years ago. Now he is back and Mariko tries to reu...

Utamaro, a great artist, lives to create portraits of beautiful women, and the brothels of Tokyo provide his models. A world of passion swirls around him, as the women in his life vie for lovers. And, occasionally, his art gets him into trouble....

Yukiko's fiance learns her mother runs a geisha house and ends their engagement. She despises what her mother does until one of her clients shows interest and starts to woo her....

A Japanese mountain inn patron's foot is cut by an ornamental hairpin accidentally left behind by a former patron, leading to much curiosity among the other patrons regarding her identity....

After her mother runs away from home, Tomoko is raised to be a geisha. One day Tomoko meets her mother in a red-light district in Tokyo and her life deeply gets in trouble....

Fumiko, mother of two children and wife of an unfaithful man, shares her family life with her budding vocation as a poet. The beginning of her successful literary career coincides with her divorce and her breast cancer diagnosis. In the last stage of...

Set in 1926 when Japanese tradition was much stronger, this drama looks at the inner workings of a small family, especially the relationship between a sister and brother....

A gangster tries to find redemption with the inadvertent help of an innocent shop girl and his jealous girlfriend will do anything to keep him....