Jun Hamamura

The local yôkai (Japanese spirits) interfere to avenge a murder and thwart the plans of corrupt officials.

Zatoichi encounters a dying man, who asks the itinerant masseur to deliver a bag of money to his young son; he agrees to fulfill the request, finding the boy in a village terrorized by criminals. This is the first entry to scrutinize the swordsman’s methods, as a blind monk confronts Zatoichi about his violent approach to problem solving and Zatoichi finds the child turning to the same bloodstained path.

An Imperial Japanese Army regiment surrenders to British forces in Burma at the close of World War II and finds harmony through song. A private, thought to be dead, disguises himself as a Buddhist monk and stumbles upon spiritual enlightenment. THE BURMESE HARP is an eloquent meditation on beauty coexisting with death and remains one of Japanese cinema’s most overwhelming antiwar statements, both tender and brutal in its grappling with Japan’s wartime legacy.

The initial entry in the Gamera series was Daiei Studios' first successful attempt at making a massive scale kaiju movie. Hibernating under the Arctic, the turtle monster Gamera is awakened by an atomic bomb test. The behemoth creates chaos when it arrives in Japan and an ambitious plan must be hatched to try and stop the rampage.