Movies: Akitake Kōno

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

Yoshitsune Minamoto, disguised with his retinue as monks, must make do with a comical porter as their guide through hostile territory en route to safety....

After handing in a report on the treatment of Chinese colonial labor, Kaji is offered the post of labor chief at a large mining operation in Manchuria, which also grants him exemption from military service. He accepts, and moves to Manchuria with his...

The story of Sanshiro, a strong stubborn youth, who travels into the city in order to learn Jujutsu. However, upon his arrival he discovers a new form of self-defence: Judo. The main character is based on Shiro Saigo, a legendary judoka....

Over more than a decade, the daughter of a Kyoto Imperial University professor comes of age as she witnesses her father fired for opposing the rise of fascism in Japan and becomes involved with two of his students....

In this government-suggested sequel, Sugata again grows as a judo master, and demonstrates his (and by extension, all Japanese) superiority to the foreign warrior....

The stories of several young women who work in a 'precision optical instruments' factory during the second World War. Despite illness, injury, and tremendous personal hardship, the women persevere in their tasks, devoted to their work and their count...

Japan, 1137. The Taira family, a samurai clan, becomes involved in the disputes between Emperor Toba and the monks of Mount Hiei....

Blind swordsman/masseuse Zatoichi befriends a young woman looking for her father, a village leader who has disappeared. As he helps her investigate the disappearance, Zatoichi also becomes involved with another young woman who is trying to help her b...

Kokubu, captain of his university's kendo team, is a mystery to those who know him: An ascetic dedicated to a point of obsession with the simplicity and beauty of the sword arts. Kagawa, a promising but arrogant kendo student, is attracted to Kokubu'...

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 Nojiri encounter a young woman and her father, as well as Honda, a mountaineer. The inn folk do not reali...

In Part I we see the young would-be swordsman setting out to achieve greatness in war, achieving nothing because fighting on the losing side, & then beginning his long period of wandering & training, with the goal always in mind of his duel with Koji...

Suehiro Katsuji, a prisoner of Abashiri, is sent to Shikoku to work at a dock where a fierce turf battle takes place between a local gang and the dock operator....

Famous for his coin tossing when capturing criminals, an Edo detective, Heiji, launches an investigation into the mysterious murder of his friend Seigoro....

Saheji, a man-about-town, gets stuck at a high-class brothel when he can’t pay the bill. He makes the best of his situation by performing various tasks amidst the tumult of the end of the shogunate—but always by making sure to get a “commission” for ...

In 1919, a group of Japanese immigrants arrives in Hawaii. Among them Yoshio Inoue and his wife Kishimo and Sumi, a young woman ready to get married soon. With the soil that is hard to work and the subtroipical climate, the immigrants have to cope wi...

...

In A Tale of Archery, young, timid bowmaster Kazuma (Akitake Kôno) seeks to beat the archery record set by Hoshino Kanzaemon, a mysterious figure who, it is rumored, drove the previous champion (Kazuma’s father) to suicide. Possessed of much raw tale...

This is the second installment of the trilogy based on Japan’s greatest novel “The Great Bodhisattva Pass”, following the life and times of bloodthirsty samurai, Tsukue Ryunosuke. Blinded in an explosion and further injured from a fall, the master sw...

Tadashi Imai 1946 movie...