Nihon Eiga Shinsha

In the Sengoku period, a woman and her daughter are raped and murdered by soldiers during a time of civil war. Afterwards, a series of samurai returning from the war through that area are found mysteriously dead with their throats torn out. The governor calls in a wild and fierce young hero to quell what is evidently an Onryō ghost. He encounters the two beautiful women in an eerie, beautiful scene. After spiritual purification, he meets the demon in a thrilling fight.

After a young boy captures a rare butterfly in Nagasaki, a caterpillar begins a relay-trip toward the northern tip of Hokkaido, serving as a silent witness to a series of vignettes featuring people struggling with the psychological and social scars of post-war Japan.

A drama film based on Ken Domon's photography of the children around the Chikuho coal mines.

A Man Vanishes examines the concept of Johatsu, tackling the phenomenon of people missing in Japan over the years. It picks one such person from the list, someone who had seemed to disappear from the face of the earth due to embezzlement from his company, and the filmmakers begin an investigative documentary into the reasons behind and attempt at tracking him down.

Documentary about Japanese pearl fishers.

Karakorumu documentary film

Postwar Japan as it is described by Etsuko, the manager of a bar catering to foreigners in Yokosuka. The way of life of a woman brimming with vitality, who skipped the countryside right after the war and, with her womanhood as a weapon, lived through atomic bombings, black markets, prostitution aimed at American soldiers and the Korean War. Inserting newsreels, Shohei Imamura depicts the history of twenty-five years in the Japanese postwar by way of the female body. (doclisboa)

Documentary on baseball player Shigeo Nagashima

A history of the Pacific War comprising of American combat footage with Japanese wartime newsreels

WW2 newsreel documentary film

Early experimental PR "cine-poem" by Toshio Matsumoto. Commissioned by Kansai Electricity, the film paints an abstract, near-wordless retelling of the development of power stations in Japan, through to the presumed oncoming advent of nuclear power.

Educational film commissioned by Kansai Electric Power Company

A documentary about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945.

Released in September 1942 by Nippon Eigasha, this 55-minute kokusaku (national policy) documentary follows Japanese paratroopers through every stage of their training—from gymnastics and parachute packing to tower drills and their first jumps from aircraft. Produced under the supervision of the Army Aviation Headquarters, the film embodied wartime ideology and propaganda aims. Widely popular at home and in occupied territories, it was accompanied by a theme song that helped brand its soldiers as “saviors from the sky.”

A 1954 documentary about Japanese fishermen aboard the "Lucky Dragon" who were irradiated by the American Castle Bravo nuclear test in the Pacific.