Chôichirô Kawarasaki

With the same visual flair used in his distinctive yakuza films, director Kinji Fukasaku (The Yakuza Papers) tells the riveting story of five kids who come to Tokyo for work in If You Were Young: Rage.

In the 1960s, Japanese teens were often sent from rural areas to Tokyo and other major cities, helping to fuel Japan’s rapid economic development. Fukasaku shows the shocking consequences for idealistic youths whose dreams are soon torn apart in a chaos of class turmoil and youthful indiscretion.Read More »

Tsutomu Yoshioka, a Tokyo office worker, is enaged to Mariko, the niece of his company’s president. But Yoshioka has a crisis of consence when he remembers his former love Mitsu, a rural girl whom he met and later left while in college. Shimako, a former friend, persuades Yoshioka to meet with Mitsu while she plots to blackmail Yoshioka by photographing the meeting to break up Mariko and Yoshioka.Read More »

In the year 1729 an unusual tale of intrigue unfolds around the succession of 8th shogun Yoshimune. When a young master swordsman shows up in Edo claiming to be Shogun Yoshimune’s illegitimate son it creates a crisis that reaches all the way up to the highest levels of the central government. While two opposing factions get ready to fight it out, what will become of the young man at the center of the controversy?Read More »

Synopsis:
Yoshida returned to feature filmmaking after a hiatus of thirteen years with this brave and moving film about the struggle to maintain dignity in the face of old age and approaching death. The Human Promise reaffirms Yoshida’s ability to deal with difficult and even taboo topics by exploring the question of euthanasia with a profound sensitivity and subtlety. The film’s unusually frank meditation on death is anchored by the restrained performances by its veteran actors, including Rentaro Mikni, who starred in several of Yoshida’s earlier works, including A Story Written on Water. The Human Promise’s use of water imagery enriches a motif central to the rich ambiguity at the heart of Yoshida’s cinema.Read More »

Quote:
The culmination of Shôhei Imamura’s extraordinary examinations of the fringes of Japanese society throughout the 1960s, Profound Desires of the Gods [Kamigami no fukaki yokubô] was an 18-month super-production which failed to make an impression at the time of its release, but has since risen in stature to become one of the most legendary — albeit least seen — Japanese films of recent decades.Read More »