Kinuyo Tanaka

A Swiss nun falls in love with a Japanese engineer.

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

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...

Kempeitai fights American spies in Japan

A teenaged girl witnesses her widowed mother's attempt to sustain her family.

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

The stage director Shimamura, who is bringing western theatre to Japan, falls in love with the outspoken actress Sumako Matsui, and leaves his family...

Shinnosuke is introduced to Shizu as a prospective marriage partner, but he falls in love with her widowed sister Oyu. Convention forbids Oyu to...

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...

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...

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...

1939 Japanese movie

Kenichi Horie is determined to challenge his family, the law and the nature crossing the Pacific to America in a small sailboat. Despite his careful...

In early post-war Osaka, three women, war widow Fusako, her sister Natsuko, an expatriate from Korea, and Kumiko, Fusako's sister-in-law, descend...

The first of five Musashi series, Shinobu and her brother Genichiro plead with the famous swordsman Musashi Miyamoto to teach them swordsmanship to...

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...

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 woman's struggle for equality in Japan in the 1880s. Eiko Hirayama leaves Okayama for Tokyo, where she helps the fledgling Liberal Party and falls...

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

A Japanese war widow recalls her love affair with her deceased husband.

On the day of college graduation, Mieko (Sayuri Yoshinaga) stood on stage as the valedictorian for the Department of English. During her university...

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...

A young student falls into a hopeless romantic attraction to a sick girl, whom he can only see from afar.

In A Tale of Archery, young, timid bowmaster Kazuma (Akitake Kôno) seeks to beat the archery record set by Hoshino Kanzaemon, a mysterious...

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...

Considered one of the finest late Naruses and a model of film biography, A Wanderer’s Notebook features remarkable performances by Hideko...

A playwright moves to a rural neighborhood to avoid the distractions of the city, but he discovers there are plenty of ways to get sidetracked in his...

"The Dancing Girl of Izu" tells of the story between a young male student who is touring the Izu Peninsula and a family of traveling dancers he meets...

A Tokyo family escaping the war relocates to a Hokkaido village; their daughter is set to marry the local leader's son, but her siblings disapprove.

Family drama. A middle-aged father has just married off his third daughter, but still has his nine year old son to raise whom he resents as he was...

Though plagued by ill health all his life, a young Japanese man is obligated to fulfill his family's longstanding military tradition.

A modern girl suddenly intrudes into a widower's family home.

The legend of the birth of Shintoism. In Fourth Century Japan, the Emperor's son Ouso expects to succeed his father on the throne, but Otomo, the...

Two men at an ironworks encounter roadblocks: the first does not have the grades to get a job, while the other finds himself falling for a co-worker.

short film about Banchō Sarayashiki.

The three-hour Ai yo jinrui to tomo ni are / Love, Be with Humanity (1931) starts as a satire of alienation in the world of money, develops into a...

A jewelry store president begins to fall for the doctor treating her husband's illness.

Iemon Tamiya is an impoverished masterless samurai who craves a better life, which he cannot have because of his marriage to Oiwa, who is completely...

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...

Sabu Toshinobu is an archaeologist who has taken a liking to Kinuyo Tanaka, the daughter of an archaeologist at an inn in Izu, where he is visiting...

Sabu Toshinobu is an archaeologist who has taken a liking to Kinuyo Tanaka, the daughter of an archaeologist at an inn in Izu, where he is visiting...

Most of the students studying Ikebana with Kozoe Iemoto are daughters of rich Tokyo families. Kozoe meets and grows close to a doctor who proposes...

Pretty Oshige is deceived by her first love. After this, she lives a hard lifestyle, working at a number of jobs. Her only pleasure is her nephew,...

Compilation of film footage documenting Japanese film star Kinuyo Tanaka's goodwill tour of the U.S. in 1949.

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...

Mokichi is the widowed father of three daughters, with whom he lives on the premises of a temple since the war. All three daughters become involved...

A group of female doctors travel to a remote village during their summer holiday to offer free medical care to villagers. There they must battle...

A period piece about the love of a wealthy blind woman, a teacher of koto and shamisen, and her devoted manservant. Based on a novella by Tanizaki...

This film stars Tanaka Kinuyo as the mother of the heir to the Hosho name, a famous lineage of Noh actors. The heir, Hosho Yagoro, is played by...

Representing a destitute mother in an infanticide trial, a female lawyer attempts to convince a conservative prosecutor of the benefits of Japan's...

The story of five sisters.

In this Golden Globe winner for Best Foreign-Language Film, director Heinosuke Gosho -- a master chronicler of Japanese middle-class life -- presents...

Tetsuo Nomoto, a young graduated student tries to find a decent job by himself. Later on, he will marry his girlfriend, Machiko, whom he hides the...

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...

Directed by Yasujirô Shimazu.

The eldest daughter of a noble family is in love with an aviator while being courted by a fellow aristocrat she thinks is a dullard. This part is...

A Hiromichi Horikawa movie

Based on the Nobu Koito story

A widowed high-school teacher tries to raise his four children alone.

Where Chimneys Are Seen focuses primarily on the interconnected lives of two couples in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in Senju, a poor industrial...

This documentary composed of numerous testimonies and archives, filmed in Japan highlights the extraordinary career of the actress-director Kinuyo...

A farmer’s boy, obsessed with his balsa-and-paper flying models and with dreams of real aircraft, develops a friendship with the daughter of...

This bittersweet comedy tells the tale of a group of college roommates attempting to cheat their way through their exams. As the title goes, things...

When a young man inherits his father's lucrative business, he cheats the system to set up three of his college friends with jobs.

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.

A young student of traditional dance falls in love with a handsome young man who visits the dance school in order to take photographs.

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...

After finishing the course of junior high school, Kazuo comes up to Tokyo, leaving his mother alone in the unproductive northern district. He finds a...

Yoshida Denkichi does loses sight of his wife Chiyoko and daughter Toyoko during the war, and is taken in by a familiar woman, Oshige, and becomes...

The poor novelist Yamamoto is writing his novel, determined and with a headband around his head. With him, the novelist who is always in trouble...

This pair of gentle yet witty and inventive comedies from the director of The Neighbour's Wife and Mine typify both the formal experimentation of...

The story of an orphan girl, brought up in naive, rustic innocence by an elderly relative, who is suddenly exposed to the brutality, greed and...

This 1932 adaptation is the earliest sound version of the ever-popular and much-filmed Chushingura story of the loyal 47 retainers who avenged their...

A luckless geisha struggles to make a living for herself and her young son.

A period mystery in which an unconventional priest exposes the truth behind the bizarre death of a maid in the shogun's harem. Kinuyo Tanaka...

A young doctor, Kozo Tsumura, falls for young nurse Katsue Takaishi. But she's got a secret: she's a widow with a son. Kozo and Katsue decide to run...

Housewives from four neighboring households casually gather at an old well at Kaneko's house in a residential area on the outskirts of Tokyo. If two...

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...

In postwar Japan a young woman is unable to marry her sweetheart because her family's in difficult circumstances and needs her income to keep afloat.

Directed by Mikio Naruse. It is presumed to be lost.

Directed by Hiroshi Inagaki, the drama, set in the brothels of Shimabara in post-war Kyoto, is a moving look at the lives of women of tenacity and...

A sad and troubled man finds a new job five years after the end of WWII, where he writes love letters for other people.

The story of a novelist whose wife is confined in a mental hospital. His love for her drives him to write about her, though he runs into trouble when...

Soichi Ataka is the eldest son of Ataka family. Although mentally challenged, he's a person with a gentle heart. Soichi's wife, Kuniko is devoted to...

The Fencing Master tells the story of a man trying to survive as the only world he knows is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Danpei Ichikawa lives...

A melodrama by noted auteur and father of director Yoshitaro Nomura, Hotei Nomura. This is apparently the first adaptation of Izumi Kyoka's The...

The adopted son of an Osaka courier falls in love with a prostitute and, discovering that she is about to be purchased by a client, steals money from...

A young man torn between love and friendship.

Hisshoka is a 1945 Drama film directed by four Japanese directors.

Jyuta, an honest owner of a taxi company, has a younger half-brother who is involved in the yakuza world and doesn’t get along well with his...

1957 drama from director Kôzaburô Yoshimura

Kinuyo is a daughter of doctor of Chinese medicine, and Yasuo is a son of surgeon. Their families always fight like cat and dog. This relationship is...

Three men fall in love with the same young girl who works in a tonkatsu restaurant in the Shitamachi district of Tokyo.

In 39 interviews with actors and actresses, writers, producers and staff members, interspersed with film excerpts and stills, Shindō recounts the...

A musical film made for the inauguration of Shochiku's Ofuna Studio, with an all-star cast of the era.

A family of Kyoto textile workers struggles after tragedy.

A story about being scared of getting old.

In a military family, an illegitimate son is brutalized by his brothers. A patriarchal, feudalistic household where dissent is forbidden is used to...

In a back alley of the Shitamachi district of Tokyo, Kihachi bears witness to a series of romantic complications involving the inhabitants of the...

Two reporters find that they are repeatedly beaten to the scoop by a new female journaist, 'young miss'. They decide to team up with her to...

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...

The woman prison has a cast all with a story of their own and with no dull or routine day. There is an employee who is divorced after her husband had...

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...

The beauty of the Japanese family system is portrayed through the women who greet a woman who went to America thirty years ago to visit her grave.

When Tora-san returns to visit his family, he is surprised to find an arrogant professor occupying his room. The professor and Tora-san become rivals...

Japanese war movie.

Eiko is an innocent young lady born into a wealthy family with nothing to offer. She was good at singing, and lived her life playing around with her...

The eldest daughter of a noble family is in love with an aviator while being courted by a fellow aristocrat she thinks is a dullard. Told from the...

In the movies of those times, you can see young boys in the company scene often. Those boys were called kyuji (給仕), which means...

Let's Go, Grandma! plays like an exuberant, goofy update to Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story. Kinuyo Tanaka plays the titular Grandma, who, after selling...

The movie follows a young woman (Kinuyo Tanaka), a daughter of a high-ranking businessman and his neglected mistress, as she struggles to ease her...

Kinuyo is a daughter of rice cracker shop in downtown. She fell in love with her sister's boyfriend. It is a story whose theme is warm human...

Followup film to Osaka Elegy - Osaka Woman

Weed with Flowers

A story of a store that makes Tabi socks.

That Night's Woman

Gensaburo Funaki and Oyuki were childhood friends, but Gensaburo misunderstood that Oyuki was hesitant to get married because he had to feed his...