Yasuzō Masumura

Suicide has long been used as a form of social protest in Japan. In this film, set in 1703, samurai culture is being transformed by the emergence of a new merchant class. Elements of the social contract are beginning to unravel, and some unscrupulous people took undue advantage of these changes before the social order was re-created. In this story, a rich merchant gives his clerk an I.O.U. instead of wages. When the impoverished clerk presents the paper to the merchant at the agreed upon time asking for payment, the man flies into a rage and pretends he never wrote it and claims the clerk is trying to defraud him. Then he sets his henchmen on the clerk to administer a beating.

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A track and field athlete falls in love with a cop. After being paralyzed by a bullet from a detective investigating her father's crimes, a high school sprinter finds unexpected love and navigates a web of family secrets and forbidden love.

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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 deceptiveness of the outside world when her grandmother dies.

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Akiyama is an intern, disgusted with the noise pollution caused by the bullet trains and the heart attacks that noise has been causing in older hospital patients, plots to disrupt and, in ten days, destroy a unit of the operation. He warns the Japan National Railway, that, if nothing is done to reduce the noise, he will derail a bullet train. Takigawa is the police detective sent to stop him.

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About small-time gangster Asakichi's chaotic life in the 1930s. His gambling addiction means that he must not continue working in the family business. Instead he supports himself by arranging cockfights. He becomes ex-geisha Okinu's patron and lover, and falls directly into disfavor with the yakuza.

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Against the backdrop of the Edo treasury devaluing currency and driving many into poverty, Hanzo Itami enforces the law without regard to status. He shows inadequate respect to the treasurer, who wants him dead.

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A young woman undergoes psychiatric treatment after she no longer hears music and develops sexual hang-ups.

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The story is presented as a voiced-over narrative by Arita (Takahiro Tamura), speaking long after the events of the film. In a remote army base in Manchuria, near the Soviet border, long-serving corporal Arita hates the military and looks forward to the day he may leave. Although a university graduate, he has several times deliberately failed the exam for promotion and thus remains a corporal after four years' service.

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A 16-year-old girl works in a factory to pay her late father’s debt. When she makes up her mind to become a hostess, a boy approaches her with kind and gentle manners...(Also occasionally known in English as “Play”)

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A model gets involved with some gangsters trying to pull a big deal.

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Tatematsu Minoru, a yakuza belonging to the Ishikawa group that runs the Shinjuku area, has a beautiful sister named Akane. He dreams of sending her to college and turning her into a perfect young lady. He's extremely fond of Akane. His fondness for her goes beyond how he feels about his mistress, Kanae. And yet, Akane feels alone. Now, a new tutor comes into her life that seems to have taken a liking to her...

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This Japanese melodrama chronicles the exploits of a geisha's beautiful daughter. The daughter is the geisha's pride and she spares nothing to insure that she has a bright future. But the hard-working young woman's dreams of becoming a dressmaker are shattered.... She then becomes a nightclub hostess who plays cards with male patrons using her body as the prize.

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Michi's first encounter with Nobuyuki Ishida, secretary to the chairman of a private school, takes place in the drawing room, when she attempts to swindle him out of two million yen for alleged rape by his son. Akie, Ishida's wife and the chairman's daughter, offers her a million, but he gives her what she demands. Now Michi is not only satisfied, but she has a mad desire for Ishida and calls him every day asking for a date. His sympathy for her gradually evolves into love, and he soon allows her insatiable passion to strip him of his decency.

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The entangled relations between the son of a seductive tea-ceremony teacher and the women in his father's life. Based on the novel by Kawabata Yasunari.

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A blind sculptor kidnaps an artists' model and imprisons her in his warehouse studio – a shadowland of perverse monuments to the female form. Here a deranged passion play of sensual and sexual obsession is acted out in world where sight is replaced by touch.

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A Yasuzō Masumura film about a love affair starring Ayako Wakao. The literal title is The Two Who Got Wet.

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On his return from school, young Ichiro finds his father in bed with his adopted sister, Namie. Enraged, he decides to outdo his father in terms of immoral behaviour.

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Ken Ogata plays Shiro Miyagi, a sprinter with Olympic aspirations whose dreams were shattered by WWII. A broken man, he leads the dissolute life of a gigolo until a chance meeting with a fiery young athlete named Hiroko (Michiyo Yasuda). Realizing that she has talent as a sprinter, Miyagi sees a second chance at Olympic glory in becoming her coach. Following Miyagi’s unconventional, military-style training, Hiroko sets a record for the 100-meter dash, but her greatest hurdle proves to be a “sex check” which all professional athletes must pass.

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Psychological noir drama involving the tangled web of a disgraced yakuza, an innocent school girl, a blackmailed singer, and a corrupt lawyer.

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The disturbing story of a physician who conducted the first operation with general anaesthetic, and the women in his life who are both so determined to win his love that they volunteer as subjects for his experiments

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A middle-aged factory engineer trains, marries, and ultimately loses a teenage bride after she enslaves him to her whims.

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After a random encounter at a bar, two couples collide. Two men, two women, embroiled in a love-and-hate drama that threatens to engulf them. The sexual anxiety between the interwoven couples tautens right up to the nearly unbearable tension of the climax...

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In 1939, Sakura Nishi is a young army nurse who is sent to the field hospitals in China during the Sino-Japanese war. She has to assist the surgeon Dr. Okabe with an incredible number of amputations. In the crowded wards, she gives sympathy to some of the soldiers, including sexually servicing one who has lost both arms and has no hope of returning home. She falls in love with Dr. Okabe, and follows him to the front, even though he is impotent from his morphine addiction.

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Nakano Institution is the so-called ‘Spy School’ where many young men are trained to be excellent spies. They erase their names, families, even lovers to bury themselves in training. Jiro, one of the cadets, successfully seize the secret code of English army to pass the final exam. However, he reaches the crossroad when his fiancee Yukiko turns out to be a spy of the enemy.

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Otsuya, the daughter of a rich merchant, elopes with her lover Shinsuke, an employee of her father's. During their flight, Otsuya's beauty attracts the gaze of Seikichi, a mysterious master tattooist who sees her pristine white skin as the perfect canvas for his art. The image of the large demonic spider that he emblazons across Otsuya's back marks her as the property of another man, radically altering her relationships with all around her as her personality seems to transform under its influence.

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On the eve of the Russo-Japanese war at the beginning of the 20th century, small-town girl Okane has married an old wealthy man to escape a life of poverty.

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A young intellectual conscientious objector is forced to serve with the Japanese army in Manchuria. He joins with a dim-witted former gangster in an effort to desert by stealing a train.

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A man operates a small real estate business near Osaka. A man from Tokyo asks for help in buying a large tract of land in order, he says, to build an automobile factory. But by accident the realtor learns that the Tokaido Railway Line is going to be built directly across the land just acquired. Also known as Black Super Express

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The four principals in a love affair collide when jealousy, blackmail and suicide enter the picture.

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Namiko is married, but has an infatuation with Ishizuka who runs a nightclub. The businessman is also planning on wrecking the company of Namiko's husband. As personal lives and professional careers intertwine and cross one another including a love triangle dangerously, the affair is taken up a notch following a murder.

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A comedy directed by Yasuzo Masumura starring Yunosuke Ito.

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