Kokuten Kōdō Movies

Three bank robbers, Eijima, Nojiri, and Takasugi, flee the police and escape into the mountains. At an inn high in the Japanese Alps, Eijima and...

A few years after his breakthrough, Sanshiro resumes his path to judo mastery—testing his discipline against an American prizefighter and later...

Three competing parties all race against time to track down an elusive creature known only as the Snowman.

A rare film which depicts the tragic fate of a Christian lord who fought for his fate in the Edo period. Of note is Utaemon Ichikawa's extraordinary...

A woman marries, gives birth to a stillborn child, and divorces, falls in love with a hotel-keeper, only to find herself subordinated to his drive...

A romantic melodrama about the shifting relationship between Ryosuke and Miki as their precarious employment and social circumstances shift around...

Jidai-geki by Kiyoshi Saeki

Following Flower Picking Diary (1939), Tamizo directed another film starring Hideko Takamine, based on a story by Nobuko Yoshiya. Takamine plays a...

The story of Yoshinaka during the tumultuous period of warring related to us in the Heike Monogatari. Close in setting to Kinugasa’s famous...

Ryuta and Mineo Komatsu are brothers, both yakuza (gangsters). Mineo, although complicit in crime, even murder, wants out of the gangster life,...

An attempt is made to suppress a journalist's investigation of collusion between a rural police chief and the local gangster bosses.

Soldiers Hayate and Yaheiji secretly escape from their besieged castle. Hayate has left behind his lover, Kano. On his way, Hayate is wounded and...

Yasube Nakayama left the clan and lives in Edo. One day, Yasubei visits his uncle Rokuroemon Kanno to borrow money from a moneylender in the amount...

The Blue Pearl depicts the interplay between a young man from Tokyo and two ama (pearl divers; literally “women of the sea”) in a...

Story about a poor Japanese woman living near an American army base who resorts to prostitution.

Mataemon Araki, a renowned swordsman, helps a young man find vengeance.

A married couple looking for an apartment move in with the husband's co-worker, a widower. The husband becomes jealous of the widower and his wife.

Jurobei, a kaisen tonya (wholesaler in port) in Awa, was wronged and killed on the day of the Dance Festival by the evil merchant & the chamberlin....

Japanese counterpart to Romeo and Juliet

A 1942 Jidaigeki by the veteran jidaigeki filmmaker Kunio Watanabe about the legendary warrior Musashibo Benkei with Hideko Takamine portraying...