Movies: Junya Satō

Ten years before the outbreak of the Second World War in Asia, a Japanese Go master and his Chinese rival meet in China to play a game of Go (loosely described as an Asian version of chess). It soon becomes evident that the Chinese master's son is th...

This biopic of notorious yakuza-turned-actor Noboru Ando focuses on the days leading to his arrest after the shooting of businessman Hideki Yokoi....

Sumptuous filming of the journey of a shipwrecked Japanese expedition from the Pacific Ocean across Siberia to the court of Catherine the Great of Russia. A Russo-Japanese co-production of a unique event in history which was the hit of Cannes and oth...

An honorable yakuza syndicate deeply rooted in Kyoto fights for survival when a new breed of gangsters threaten their very existence....

The life and times of Kûkai, a Japanese monk who studies Esoteric Buddhism in the far reaches of India, China and Tibet, then uses their combined influence to establish the Shingon school during the Heian period in early 9th Century AD....

An Osaka gangster Shimamura just got married. His new bride, Mineko is also involved in drug trafficking. When she goes to China to make a deal, things get botched pretty badly. Shimamura must travel to save her and recoup his employers’ losses....

Ken, son of a former samurai settles with his family in the west from Japan. Soon his family is killed in front of him by stagecoach robbers, making him aim to get revenge. Marvin an experienced gunman befriends Ken and becomes his mentor....

Violent Gang Re-Arms is a rousing tale of friction in yakuza and labor interactions with Koji Tsurata as a yakuza supervising a dockworker's union. He finds himself between a rock and a hard place, at odds with both the dockworkers' leader (Tomisabur...

After the war, Kijima (Bunta Sugawara) returns to Tokyo where he meets Ôba (Noboru Andô), an Ex-Kamikaze pilot, and the two ruffians gather hooligans to join their group. In Ginza, the Togawa gang have taken over Sakurada's territory. After several f...

Set loose in a postwar world with no rules, an ex-juvenile delinquent begins building the most powerful gang in Tokyo's glittering Shibuya ward....

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The film takes place at the junction of the two eras of Meiji and Taisho. Sakata Sankichi, an uneducated zori sandal maker, becomes a professional shogi player through his genius shogi skills and lives a fanatically devoted shogi game supported by th...

In the spring of 1945, Murakami, an apprentice officer, was ordered by the General Staff Headquarters to be assigned to the secret 33rd Eastern Unit, known only to the upper ranks of the General Staff. This is where secret warriors, spies and guerril...

About Soviet and Japanese volley-ball players who are both rivals and friends. The events cover the period from the 1976 Montreal Olympics to the eve of XXII Olympics in Moscow....

Aiba is a gang boss who has just got out of jail, and finds everything has changed. His old gang has broken up, and only a few people still respect him. So he becomes a consultant to another gang who are about to be clobbered by a much larger gang mo...

In the gaudy world of 1930s Shinjuku, a violent youth known as Bakudan Match tangles explosively with prostitutes, politicians and the police....

A war breaks out on the streets between rivaling Yakuza clans....

Set in the pleasure district of Kyoto, Tamiko (Yoshiko Mita, in her first lead role) is a young girl attending high school by day and training as a geisha at night She sees her future as an entertainer, not a prostitute, & she expects a happy marria...

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Adaptation of novel....