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Chikage Awashima
was a Japanese film and stage actress. Life A graduate from Takarazuka Music and Dance School and member of the Takarazuka Revue, Chikage Awashima entered the Shochiku film studios and made her film debut in 1950. She appeared in films of numerous prominent directors like Yasujirō Ozu, Mikio Naruse, Keisuke Kinoshita, Tadashi Imai and Heinosuke Gosho. She received twice the Blue Ribbon Award and twice the Mainichi Film Award for her performances. Awashima retired from stage in 2009. She died on 16 February 2012, aged 87, from cancer. Selected filmography Film Television Honours * 1950: Blue Ribbon Award for Best Actress for ''Ten'ya wan'ya'' and ''Okusama ni goyojin'' * 1955: Blue Ribbon Award for Best Actress for ''Marital Relations'' * 1958: Mainichi Film Award for Best Actress for ''Summer Clouds'' and ''Hotarubi'' * 1988: Medal with Purple Ribbon * 1995: Order of the Precious Crown The is a Japanese order, established on January 4, 1888 by Emperor Meiji of Ja ...
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Tokyo
Tokyo (; ja, 東京, , ), officially the Tokyo Metropolis ( ja, 東京都, label=none, ), is the capital and largest city of Japan. Formerly known as Edo, its metropolitan area () is the most populous in the world, with an estimated 37.468 million residents ; the city proper has a population of 13.99 million people. Located at the head of Tokyo Bay, the prefecture forms part of the Kantō region on the central coast of Honshu, Japan's largest island. Tokyo serves as Japan's economic center and is the seat of both the Japanese government and the Emperor of Japan. Originally a fishing village named Edo, the city became politically prominent in 1603, when it became the seat of the Tokugawa shogunate. By the mid-18th century, Edo was one of the most populous cities in the world with a population of over one million people. Following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the imperial capital in Kyoto was moved to Edo, which was renamed "Tokyo" (). Tokyo was devastate ...
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The Flavor Of Green Tea Over Rice
is a 1952 Japanese film directed by Yasujirō Ozu. The screenplay concerns a wealthy middle-aged couple (played by Shin Saburi and Michiyo Kogure) who have marital difficulties, and their niece who uses the couple's troubles as her excuse for not attending arranged marriage interviews. Plot Taeko and Mokichi Satake are a childless married couple living in Tokyo. The husband, whom the wife thinks dull, is an executive at an engineering company. Taeko's friend Aya persuades Taeko to falsely claim to her husband that Taeko's brother's daughter, Setsuko, is ill, so that she can go to a spa with a couple of friends. The plan goes wrong when Setsuko visits her house unexpectedly, but Taeko substitutes the invalid with another friend and obtains consent from her husband to go for a break. At the spa, the four women drink sake and look at the koi in the pond, comparing a slow moving black one to Taeko's husband. A few days later, Taeko, Aya, and another friend attend a baseball game. T ...
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Shirabyōshi
were Japanese female entertainers in the Heian and Kamakura periods who sang songs and performed dances. They danced dressed as men. The profession of became popular in the 12th century. They would perform for the nobility, and at celebrations. The word can also refer to the songs they sang and the dances they performed. They are sometimes referred to as courtesans in the English language, but by nature they were performers. Some did sometimes sleep with their patrons and give birth to nobles' children, but this was not their intended purpose as entertainers. The best known were Shizuka Gozen, Giō and Hotoke, who were featured in ''The Tale of the Heike''. History The name may be interpreted as "white beat" or "simple rhythm"; it may refer to the white robe they wore, or alternatively the rhythm of the songs that they sang and danced to, which were also performed by . means "white", although scholars believe that it should be interpreted as ; in this interpretation ...
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A Man Of Many Miracles
A, or a, is the first letter and the first vowel of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''a'' (pronounced ), plural ''aes''. It is similar in shape to the Ancient Greek letter alpha, from which it derives. The uppercase version consists of the two slanting sides of a triangle, crossed in the middle by a horizontal bar. The lowercase version can be written in two forms: the double-storey a and single-storey ɑ. The latter is commonly used in handwriting and fonts based on it, especially fonts intended to be read by children, and is also found in italic type. In English grammar, " a", and its variant " an", are indefinite articles. History The earliest certain ancestor of "A" is aleph (also written 'aleph), the first letter of the Phoenician alphabet, which consisted entirely of consonants (for that reason, it is also called an abjad to distinguish it fro ...
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Summer Clouds
is a 1958 Japanese drama film directed by Mikio Naruse. It was Naruse's first film in colour and in widescreen format. Plot Journalist Okawa interviews farming woman Yae for his article on the present situation of farmers under the new constitution and after the agrarian reform. Yae tells of her hard labour life, financial worries, and her low status as a daughter-in-law and widow, which equals to "nothing" as long as her son is not married. At the same time, her older brother Wasuke, married already for the third time, tries to find a wife for his eldest son Hatsuji. When Yae tells Okawa of her brother's search for a daughter-in-law, he suggests a young woman who won a prize in an agricultural contest. During their travels to meet the young woman and her mother, Yae and the married Okawa start an affair. Hatsuji's marriage prospect, Michiko, turns out to be the stepchild of Wasuke's first wife Toyo, who had been thrown out by Wasuke's and Yae's patriarchal father for not showing ...
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The Loyal 47 Ronin (1958 Film)
is a 1958 color jidaigeki (period drama) Japanese film directed by Kunio Watanabe. With box office earnings of ¥410 million, it was the most successful film of 1958 in Japan. Furthermore, it was the second-highest-grossing film of the 1950s in Japan. Plot The Loyal 47 Ronin tells the true tale of a group of samurai who became rōnin (leaderless samurai) after their daimyō (feudal lord) Asano Naganori was compelled to commit seppuku (ritual suicide) for assaulting a court official, Kira Yoshinaka, who had insulted him. After carefully planning for over a year, they execute a daring assault on their sworn enemy's estate, and exact their revenge, knowing that they themselves would be forced to share their Lord's fate to atone for their crime. Cast * Kazuo Hasegawa as Ōishi Kuranosuke (Ōishi Yoshio) * Shintaro Katsu as Genzō Akagaki * Kōji Tsuruta as Kin'emon Okano * Raizō Ichikawa as Takuminokami Asano * Machiko Kyō as Orui * Fujiko Yamamoto as Yōsen'in * Michiyo ...
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Yellow Crow
is a 1957 Japanese drama film directed by Heinosuke Gosho. Plot Kiyoshi Yoshida is a 9 years old boy. The boy loves to draw and he has some talent, but his teacher is worried because he draws only in black and yellow (that's where the title is from), which can mean according to color psychology that the child has no parents or is unhappy in his family. Then we learn that he has both parents but his father - Ichiro - came back from China just the previous year after 8 years in prisoner-of-war camp. Action moves back in time to show us first the happy time when Kiyoshi was living with his mother, and awaiting father's return. And then a harsh reality after that when his father has issues to adapt to society, finding work with his skills being obsolete. He also has issues with accepting his son's hobbies that include love for animals (and father hates rats after the prison) and art, as the father thinks he should focus on more scientific subjects, that can give him better job in the f ...
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Kon Ichikawa
was a Japanese film director and screenwriter. His work displays a vast range in genre and style, from the anti-war films '' The Burmese Harp'' (1956) and '' Fires on the Plain'' (1959), to the documentary ''Tokyo Olympiad'' (1965), which won two BAFTA Film Awards, and the 19th-century revenge drama ''An Actor's Revenge'' (1963). His film ''Odd Obsession'' (1959) won the Jury Prize at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival. Early life and career Ichikawa was born in Ise, Mie Prefecture as Giichi Ichikawa (市川儀一). His father died when he was four years old, and the family kimono shop went bankrupt, so he went to live with his sister. He was given the name "Kon" by an uncle who thought the characters in the kanji 崑 signified good luck, because the two halves of the Chinese character look the same when it is split in half vertically. As a child he loved drawing and his ambition was to become an artist. He also loved films and was a fan of "chambara" or samurai films. In his teens ...
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Koji Shima
was a Japanese film director, actor, and screenwriter. Career Born as Takehiko Kagoshima in Nagasaki, Shima left for Tokyo after graduating from high school. He was in the first class of the Nihon Eiga Haiyū Gakkō and joined the Nikkatsu studio as an actor in 1925. Playing mostly romantic leads, he appeared in films directed by such masters as Tomu Uchida and Kenji Mizoguchi. He turned to directing in 1939, and quickly came to prominence with films such as ''Kaze no Matasaburo (1940 film), Kaze no Matasaburō'', an adaption of a Kenji Miyazawa story, and ''Jirō Monogatari''. After the war, he directed such films as ''Ginza Kankan Musume'' and ''Jūdai no Seiten'' at Shintoho and Daiei Studios. He won a prize at the 1st Moscow International Film Festival for ''Unforgettable Trail''. Some of his last films were made in Hong Kong for Shaw Brothers. He directed over 90 films as a director and appeared in over 90 films as an actor. He was once married to the actress Yukiko Todoro ...
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Zangiku Monogatari (1956 Film)
is a 1956 black-and-white Japanese film directed by Koji Shima. Cast * Kazuo Hasegawa * Chikage Awashima * Tamao Nakamura * Mitsuko Yoshikawa See also * ''The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum , also titled ''The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum'' and ''The Story of the Late Chrysanthemums'', is a 1939 Japanese drama film directed by Kenji Mizoguchi. Based on a short story by Shōfu Muramatsu, it follows an onnagata (male actor speciali ...'' (残菊物語 Zangiku monogatari) (1939) by Kenji Mizoguchi References External links * * http://search.varietyjapan.com/moviedb/cinema_24799.html * http://www.allcinema.net/prog/show_c.php?num_c=137212 Japanese black-and-white films 1956 films Films directed by Koji Shima Daiei Film films Films produced by Masaichi Nagata 1950s Japanese films Japanese romantic drama films 1950s romantic drama films {{1950s-Japan-film-stub ja:残菊物語#1956年版 ...
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Early Spring (1956 Film)
is a 1956 film by Yasujirō Ozu about a married salaryman (Ryō Ikebe) who escapes the monotony of married life and his work at a fire brick manufacturing company by beginning an affair with a fellow office worker (Keiko Kishi). The film also deals with the hardships of the salaryman lifestyle. "I wanted," Ozu said, "to portray what you might call the pathos of the white-collar life." With a runtime of 144 minutes, ''Early Spring'' is Ozu's longest surviving film, and his penultimate shot in black and white. Plot Office worker Shoji Sugiyama (Ryō Ikebe) wakes and goes about his morning routine, attended by his wife, Masako (Chikage Awashima), before commuting to his job in the Tokyo office of a fire brick manufacturing company. During a hiking trip with office friends, Shoji spends time alone with a fellow worker, a typist nicknamed "Goldfish" for her large eyes (Keiko Kishi). After the trip Goldfish makes advances to Shoji and the two begin an affair. Masako suspects somethi ...
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Shirō Toyoda
was a Japanese film director and screenwriter who directed over 60 films during his career spanning 50 years. Career Born in Kyoto, Toyoda moved to Tokyo after finishing high school and studied scriptwriting under the pioneering film director Eizō Tanaka. He joined the Kamata section of the Shōchiku film studios and worked as an assistant director under Yasujirō Shimazu, before giving his directorial debut in 1929. After his move to the independent Tokyo Hassei Eiga Shisaku studio (later Toho), he directed the successful ''Young People'' (1937) and gained a reputation for directing literary adaptations with a humanistic touch, in particular ''Uguisu'' (1938) and '' Spring on Leper's Island'' (1940). After World War II, he achieved fame for his adaptations of writers like Yasunari Kawabata, Kafū Nagai, Naoya Shiga, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, Masuji Ibuse, and Ango Sakaguchi, distinguished by their visual imagination and superb acting. Noted works of this era include ''The Wild Gee ...
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