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Although his last feature “Zegen” was not quite the success production company Toei had hoped for, they, nevertheless, wanted to continue their collaboration with renowned director Shohei Imamura and gave him the opportunity to tell a story he had been thinking about for quite some time. Based on Masuji Ibuse’s novel of the same name, the project “Black Rain” was set in Japan in the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is a work which cinephiles, critics and film scholars alike often regard as an exception to Imamura’s work in the 1980s, as it bears more similarities to the features he directed in the 1960s given its radical imagery, tone and themes. At the same time, “Black Rain” follows Imamura’s concept of the period piece as a tale set in the past but which has a striking significance for the present, and even for the future,...

'The Beginning or the End' 1947 with Robert Walker and Tom Drake. Hiroshima bombing 70th anniversary: Six movies dealing with the A-bomb terror Seventy years ago, on Aug. 6, 1945, the U.S. dropped the first atomic bomb over the city of Hiroshima. Ultimately, anywhere between 70,000 and 140,000 people died – in addition to dogs, cats, horses, chickens, and most other living beings in that part of the world. Three days later, America dropped a second atomic bomb, this time over Nagasaki. Human deaths in this other city totaled anywhere between 40,000-80,000. For obvious reasons, the evisceration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been a quasi-taboo in American films. After all, in the last 75 years Hollywood's World War II movies, from John Farrow's Wake Island (1942) and Mervyn LeRoy's Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944) to Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan (1998) and Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor (2001), almost invariably have presented a clear-cut vision...

Kuroi ame / Black Rain (1989) Direction: Shohei Imamura Screenplay: Shohei Imamura and Toshirô Ishidô; from Masuji Ibuse’s novel Cast: Yoshiko Tanaka, Kazuo Kitamura, Etsuko Ichihara, Shoichi Ozawa Animego’s DVD release of Shohei Imamura’s Black Rain includes as a bonus feature a selection of World War II-era anti-Japanese propaganda films. Sponsored by various U.S. government bureaucracies, most of these shorts traffic in the usual sort of wartime racism and paranoia which, depending on your sensibility, you will find either disturbing or amusing. The most egregious of these is something called My Japan, which features an actor in yellow-face hectoring the American audience into buying more war bonds by boasting that Japan won’t be defeated [...]...

TOKYO -- Japan lost two stalwarts of its movie and television industry Sunday with the deaths of actor Kazuo Kitamura and Shoichiro Ikemiya, a veteran screenwriter who also wrote the book that was adapted for the big screen as "47 Ronin" in 1994.

Kitamura suffered a mild stroke last month and died of pneumonia at a Tokyo hospital at the age of 80, his family said. His final movie project, "Beauty", is in post-production and his scenes were completed earlier this year.

Initially a stage actor with the Bungakuza stage troupe, Kitamura gravitated to TV and movies in the early 1960s. He starred in Akira Kurosawa's "Tengoku to Jigoku" (Heaven and Hell) in 1963 and "Nippon Konchuki" (The Insect Woman), which was directed by his longtime collaborator Shohei Imamura that same year.

Kitamura played the role of Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu in the 2003 television miniseries "Musashi" and appeared in last year's "The Sinking of Japan".

Ikemiya, who was 83, died of cancer at his home in Tokyo on Sunday.