1930s Japanese Movies

Episode in the life of a composer of a popular Japanese song.

Japanese silent film directed by Yasujirô Shimazu, originally released as a two-part movie on December 11, 1931.

In late 19th-century Tokyo, Kikunosuke Onoue, the adopted son of a legendary actor, himself an actor specializing in female roles, discovers that the praise he receives is only due to his status as his father's heir. Devastated, he turns to Otoku, a servant of his family, for comfort, and they fall in love. Kikunosuke becomes determined to leave home and develop as an actor on his own merits, and Otoku faithfully joins him.

When a civil war threatens to break out, two geishas flee from their village with aristocrats. During the long journey, the socially inferior women prove to be morally superior to their betters.

A businessman’s daughter falls in love with one of her father’s employees.

Brothers Keiji and Ryoichi move to a new neighborhood in the Tokyo suburbs after their father, an office clerk, is promoted. The boys join the local gang as lowly new kids and emerge as natural leaders after defeating a bully. While visiting the home of their father's boss, the brothers witness the ridicule their father endures to please his superior. Angry and embarrassed, the boys find their naive ideas about power being challenged.

Bored in his marriage, a dentist flirts with a young woman on a train. However he soon finds himself embroiled in a series of misunderstandings with his wife, the young woman and her husband. Considered to be a lost film.

Two people are fascinated by a sculptor's statue. The film is lost.

In a slum in Edo Japan, a ronin hopes that his deceased father's former master will hire him while a disgraced hairdresser attempts to regain his pride by kidnapping the daughter of a wealthy pawnbroker, who is set to be married.

A Japanese film.

One spring day, little birds are singing and frogs are dancing. A mother bear in the cave tells her children to play outside, but also reminds the two brothers to be careful of the terrible humans. While they are sumo wrestling and eating honey, a hunter tries to shoot the bears. The two brothers see a human for the first time. They manage to find their way to the cave where the mother bear awaits them. They are amazed that the human walks upright. The mother bear teaches her two boys how to do it. Swallows and cranes fly away, summer goes by, and fall deepens. As a result of their efforts, the mother bear and her children master how to walk upright.

The story deas with the experiences of an exceptionally strong-willed, middle class Tokyo "ojōsan" who comes to teach in a middle school in the countryside.

A geisha in the Gion district of Kyoto feels obliged to help her lover when he asks to stay with her after going bankrupt and leaving his wife. However, her younger sister opposes this, thinking that they should both find wealthy patrons to support them.

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 mother. Jyuta tries to correct him…

An aging actor returns to a small town with his troupe and reunites with his former lover and illegitimate son, a scenario that enrages his current mistress and results in heartbreak for all.

While returning by boat to Japan, Yoshie Fujiwara meets a rich woman who suggests him to become a singer thanks to an impresario friend of hers.

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.

Mikio Naruse’s final silent film is a gloriously rich portrait of a waitress, Sugiko, whose life, despite a host of male admirers and even some intrigued movie talent scouts, ends up taking a suffocatingly domestic turn after a wealthy businessman accidentally hits her with his car.

A rural widow sends her only son to Tokyo to receive a better education. Years later, she visits him and finds he has become a night school teacher struggling to support his wife and son.

Wealthy young Toyomi and Shintaro are in love. However, Shintaro’s father is arranging for him to marry Yurie, the scion of an even wealthier family. The two lovers flee to Tokyo, but when Shintaro returns to proclaim his intent to marry Toyomi, his father browbeats him into attending the marriage meeting with Yurie. Part one of a two-part romance based on a story by noted author Kikuchi Kan.

In Depression-era Japan, a courteous bus driver carries an eclectic group of passengers from the mountainous Izu to Tokyo.

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 away to Kyoto, but her child suddenly became sick and she just missed the train and Kozo. She makes it to Kyoto finally, but is unable to meet him. Plus she isn't accepted into Kyoto society. She goes back to her hometown and tries to forget him. She quits the hospital to concentrate on her singing. She makes her professional debut with the hit "Aizen Katsura". Kozo is in the audience.

In Depression-era Tokyo, a struggling middle-aged single father with a young son comes across a homeless young lady and convinces a bar owner to take her in.

The study of a one-year marriage that begins to crumble. A married man is torn between the love of his wife, and the attraction to a cousin of his wife.

Fujio is beautiful, talented, well-heeled, and engaged to up-and-coming diplomat Munechika. She has promised him a gold watch, a family heirloom, as an emblem of their engagement. However, she becomes enamoured with Ono, a student employed to tutor her in English, who is attracted by her beauty and wealth. Ono himself is bound by an engagement to Sayoko, daughter of his mentor, Professor Inoue.

Ayako becomes the mistress of her boss in order to pay her father's debt and prevent him from going to prison for embezzlement.

In Depression-era Japan, a man commits a robbery to save his critically ill daughter and escapes with the funds, but complications arise.

One of Uchida’s early sound films, Unending Advance is based on a curious story by Yasujiro Ozu, in which an examination of the quotidian problems of a middle-aged salaryman and his family segues into an idyllic dream of an implausible future. The surviving print, although incomplete, offers an essential glimpse into Uchida’s prewar period, when he was associated more with realist dramas than with the period films that dominated his work after the war.

A boy steals a knife from an old samurai, unaware of its value, setting off a strange chain of events.

During the 20s in Japan, a romantic student at Tokyo's Waseda University is filled with noble sentiments absorbed from literature but his naive illusions will be shattered by the ruthless realities of money and power.

An unemployed Japanese man and his two sons wander the industrial flatlands of Depression-era Tokyo, until he chances upon an old friend and befriends a woman and her daughter, who are in a similar predicament.

Japanese film from 1934, based on a novel by Itsuma Maki (real name Kaitarō Hasegawa).

Tsuburaya served both as director and cinematographer of this feature-length national policy documentary, supported by the naval ministry, which creates a sketch of life among cadets aboard a naval training vessel on a voyage around Indochina, Malaya, Hawaii and the South Pacific islands. The film clearly outlines the economic motives behind Japan’s southward expansion, but also presents the music and dance traditions of various regions, in what has been termed “folklore through sound”.

After the plans of a group of college students to cheat on their final exams goes awry, they're left to reassess their lives and educations and get back on track.

Japanese silent film from 1931.

Graduate Okajima finds his old-fashioned beard makes life difficult in a comedy exploring the tension between tradition and modernity.

The second in a trilogy of Kunisada Chuji films by Hiroshi Inagaki.

Based on an original story by Yojiro Ishizaka, this well-made drama is set in a Christian school in a beautiful northern harbor town. Teacher Masaki (Obinata) speaks up for Keiko, one of the girls at the school, every time she causes problems because he feels sorry for her, a child born out of wedlock. Sumi (Natsukawa), one of Masaki’s colleagues and who is secretly in love with him, strongly disagrees with him about Keiko. Then Sumi hears a rumor that Keiko is pregnant with Masaki's child . . . .

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

On vacation's eve, a boy is sent to the countryside to live with his uncle after his father is imprisoned and accused of embezzlement.