This important work fills the need for a reasonably priced yet comprehensive volume on major directors in the history of Japanese film. With clear insight and without academic jargon, Jacoby examines the works of over 150 filmmakers to uncover what makes their films worth watching. Included are artistic profiles of everyone from Yutaka Abe to Isao Yukisada, including masters like Kinji Fukasaku, Juzo Itami, Akira Kurosawa, Takashi Miike, Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu, and Yoji Yamada. Each entry includes a critical summary and filmography, making this book an essential reference and guide. UK-based Alexander Jacoby is a writer and researcher on Japanese film.

A guide to programs currently available on video in the areas of movies/entertainment, general interest/education, sports/recreation, fine arts, health/science, business/industry, children/juvenile, how-to/instruction.

Since its inception in 1933, Toho Co., Ltd., Japan's most famous movie production company and distributor, has produced and/or distributed some of the most notable films ever to come out of Asia, including Seven Samurai, Godzilla, When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, Kwaidan, Woman in the Dunes, Ran, Shall We Dance?, Ringu, and Spirited Away. While the western world often defines Toho by its iconic classics, which include the Godzilla franchise and many of the greatest films of the legendary director Akira Kurosawa and actor Toshiro Mifune, these pictures represent but a tiny fraction of Toho's rich history. The Toho Studios Story: A History and Complete Filmography provides a complete picture of every Toho feature the Japanese studio produced and released—as well as foreign films that it distributed—during its first 75 years. Presented chronologically, each entry in the filmography includes, where applicable, the original Japanese title, a direct translation of that title, the film's international, U.S. release, and alternate titles; production credits, including each film's producers, director, screenwriters, cinematographers, art directors, and composers, among others; casts with character names; production companies, technical specs, running times, and release dates; U.S. release data including distributor, whether the film was released subtitled or dubbed, and alternate versions; domestic and international awards; and plot synopses.

Powers of the Real analyzes the cultural politics of cinema’s persuasive sensory realism in interwar Japan. Examining cultural criticism, art, news media, literature, and film, Diane Wei Lewis shows how representations of women and signifiers of femininity were used to characterize new forms of pleasure and fantasy enabled by consumer culture and technological media. Drawing on a rich variety of sources, she analyzes the role that images of women played in articulating the new expressions of identity, behavior, and affiliation produced by cinema and consumer capitalism. In the process, Lewis traces new discourses on the technological mediation of emotion to the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake and postquake mass media boom. The earthquake transformed the Japanese film industry and lent urgency to debates surrounding cinema’s ability to reach a mass audience and shape public sentiment, while the rise of consumer culture contributed to alarm over rampant materialism and “feminization.” Demonstrating how ideas about emotion and sexual difference played a crucial role in popular discourse on cinema’s reach and its sensory-affective powers, Powers of the Real offers new perspectives on media history, the commodification of intimacy and emotion, film realism, and gender politics in the “age of the mass society” in Japan.

In Praise of Film Studies brings together essays by scholars of Japanese cinema from around the world, all of whom have drawn on the collection of Makino Mamoru for their research. Makino Mamoru was a filmmaker and essayist who began assembling an enormous collection of film-related materials. While most collectors concentrate on image-centric items like posters and stills, Makino recognized the importance of books, magazines and other written texts for scholarship. His collection spans the entire history of Japanese cinema, and contains periodicals, books, pamphlets, posters, programs, scripts, diaries, studio records, fan zines, catalogs, textbooks, photographs, newspapers, clipping files, and the personal libraries of a number of film personalities. Makino opened the collection to a variety of film scholars, enabling them to write histories that were otherwise unimaginable. This volume brings together a number of these scholars to honor Makino Mamoru and his dedication to the study of Japanese cinema. (In English and Japanese.)