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Rough Sketch of a Spiral

The first gay Japanese documentary, Rough Sketch of a Spiral, takes an intimate look at the personal lives of gay men in Osaka. The star is 25-year-old Yoshiichi Yano who has written a play he hopes will open the public’s eyes to the status of gays in contemporary Japan, a society with deep-rooted prejudices against homosexuality. With abundant humor and nonchalant candor, director Yasufumi Kojima follows the day-to-day efforts of Yano to produce his play while introducing us to Yano’s friends and actors in the play, including a stunning drag queen and a charming 60-year-old man who claims to be gay but a virgin.

Rough Sketch of a Spiral

3.7 1991
Nyanko the Movie 2

Fuji TV's hit program Mezamashi Doyobi ("Wake Up Saturday") presents Nyanko the Movie 2. Like the previous entry in the series, this cute and fuzzy title places the feline center stage. The film is divided into three segments, with music provided by popular indie artist S.E.N.S. In addition to the lead kitten featured in the first film, viewers will get to see even more cats, an island full of them to be exact. On a fishing island where felines outnumber people, the cats live like gods, as dogs are forbidden entry and the residents lavish love on them. Little do the cats know, a storm is about to come sweeping in.

Nyanko the Movie 2

6.0 2007
One Day We Arrived in Japan

Spanning 10 years and 10,000 miles, One Day We Arrived in Japan shows the stories of three Brazilian families who set off to Japan in search of a better future – a mother and daughter, a young couple, and a family of four with a small child. The film captures the passage of time, forming layers of memory and revealing how the families’ dreams and expectations stand up to a grueling new reality on the other side of the world. Since 1990, hundreds of thousands of Brazilians of Japanese descent have gone to Japan to work. This unique documentary brings to light the gripping personal stories behind a major transnational phenomenon.

One Day We Arrived in Japan

NR 2018
Shanghai Landing Party

This film attempts to reconstruct the tension of the Battle of Shanghai through an episode in an understated way, introducting its story in a documentary mode. In the film story, Japan's marine regiment protects Japanese residents and Chinese refugees-women and young children-from rampant street fighting, Shanhai Rikusentai unsparingly uses its first eight minutes for an official-mannered self-justification of the war. From the viewpoint of explaining Japan's military operation,the narration refers to the city s spatial division in sync with maps on screen.

Shanghai Landing Party

5.0 1939
The Shocking History of the Death Penalty

Do humans have the right to judge and kill other humans? This program includes a history of capital punishment around the world through documentary footage and commentary. The electric chair, firing squad, hanging, poison gas, beating to death, slow execution, crotch-splitting, iron maiden, guillotine, execution by running, and beheading... It features a military execution in a South American country, obtained from a former prison officer. It also includes footage of the reality of life in Japanese prisons, death row inmates facing death, the parents of death row inmates, the families of their victims, and the gallows.

The Shocking History of the Death Penalty

2.0 1977
Toro Axe Part 3: All Things Change

Matsumoto's last video was produced by Sano Gallery. Matsumoto set the common theme as “Seeing” in 2009, six co-writers participated to directing the omnibus film, "Seeing". Initially, there were no plans to expand it into trilogy, and Matsumoto was also limitedly involved in the work. Later, Matsumoto envisioneds works that pursued the omnibus format, and sets up a common theme of "memory.” Afterwards, Matsumoto begun the production of Pilgrimage into the Memory, a reconstruction of works produced by five participating artists. However, the Great East Japan Earthquake occurred while producing the work. Matsumoto shocked by the earthquake and Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident, he decided to produce a new work, All Things Change, and titled it's trilogy, Toro no Ono Daisambu. The third part, All Things Change, consists of videos produced by Tanotaiga, Kanako Inaki, Hiroyuki Oki, Okuno Kunito, and Tanako Tanaka.

Toro Axe Part 3: All Things Change

NR 2012
Ikigai

In Boulogne, Buenos Aires, a 200-plus-year-old Japanese Minka (民家; literally translated as “house of the people”) stands as the oldest dwelling in Argentina. La Casa de Japón, a residence which also functions as a museum, contains one of the largest historical Japanese craft collections outside Japan. The Minka itself was dismantled and transported 20,000 km from the mountains of Fukui in Japan, via Nagoya, to Buenos Aires in the 1980s. More than two decades later, after years of careful planning, research and restoration, the museum opened its doors to the public in 2006.

Ikigai

NR 2024
Listen

Documentary without audio produced by deaf people. Music is depicted visually with the complete absence of musical instruments or voices. Directed by Makihara Eri and choreographer Dakei. With a diverse lineup including ordinary deaf people with zero acting experience and a choreographer who performs in Japan and abroad, this film pulls out all the tops to give visual expression to music through the physical body. An aging man uses multiple sign language poems to convey the four seasons, and a girl expresses the wind amidst the rustling trees.

Listen

NR 2016
The Tokugawa Treasure: Final Excavation

Between 1990 and 1993, Japan's TBS network spent ¥350 million digging into the side of Mount Akagi, searching for the legendary shogunate gold that vanished during the Meiji Restoration. This 1994 TV movie compiles the four-year excavation into a single 95-minute documentary: copywriter Shigesato Itoi as the unlikely captain, the Mizuno family's three-generation obsession, American psychics consulted in earnest, and contractor Mochizuki running heavy machinery deeper into the mountain than anyone had gone before.

The Tokugawa Treasure: Final Excavation

NR 1994
Basic Tsukamoto

Interview with world renown cult director Shinya Tsukamoto. This interview will tell you how and when he started creating his own world of cinema exactly the way he thought it should look. Also he is an accomplished actor appearing in many films directed by other directors like Takashi Miike (Ichi the Killer). The interview includes very rare footage of never released films like "10000 Channels" his TV commercials and rare footage of live shows at the Kaijyu Theater in Tokyo System.

Basic Tsukamoto

6.0 2003
Japans Schneeaffen Hautnah

The image of “snow monkeys” submerged in a hot spring as snow falls around them is iconic. These are Japanese macaques, the northernmost population of monkeys in the world. Highly adaptable, they are the only primates to inhabit environments that range from low coastal plains to mountainous areas 3,000 meters above sea level, with temperatures that can drop to -30 degrees Celsius. How is this single species of macaque able to thrive in such widely diverse habitats? Shot in beautiful 4K UHD, the cameras travel through Japan to capture unique monkey groups displaying different localized food habits, including a world-first footage of monkeys catching live fish as well as how such new behaviors spread among individuals in the pack.

Japans Schneeaffen Hautnah

8.0 2025