Shitamachi: Tales of Downtown Tokyo

June 16–July 29, 2023

Take a cinematic tour of Tokyo’s gritty working-class district, Shitamachi, with classic and contemporary films by Yasujiro Ozu, Akira Kurosawa, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Kinuyo Tanaka, and others, including many compelling but lesser-known works.

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Japanese Grandmas
Tokyo Story
Humanity and Paper Balloons
Love Letter

Upcoming
Films
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Selected
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Past
Films
Past
Events

Past Films

Stray Dog
Akira Kurosawa
Japan, 1949
Friday, June 16 7 PM
Toshiro Mifune is a driven detective in Akira Kurosawa’s bravura Tokyo noir. “A bona fide masterpiece” (Time Out).
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Japanese Grandmas
Tadashi Imai
Japan, 1962
BAMPFA Collection Print
Sunday, June 18 5 PM
As two rebellious Japanese grandmas wander about Tokyo like down-market flaneurs, a portrait of a neighborhood caught between generations emerges.
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Tokyo Story
Yasujiro Ozu
Japan, 1953
New Digital Restoration
Saturday, June 24 7 PM
This simple, sad story of the gap between generations in a Japanese family revealed to Western viewers the poetic acuteness of Yasujiro Ozu’s style. “Wonderful . . . one of the manifest miracles of cinema” (New Yorker).
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Humanity and Paper Balloons
Sadao Yamanaka
Japan, 1937
Imported 35mm Print
Wednesday, June 28 7 PM
A poor ronin samurai and his gambling neighbor become involved in a desperate plan in this little-known gem from the 1930s, set in what would become downtown Tokyo during the Edo period.
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Suzaki Paradise: Red Light District
Yuzo Kawashima
Japan, 1956
Saturday, July 1 7 PM
A down-on-their-luck young couple settles on the edge of Tokyo’s red-light district in this major rediscovery, a “radiant masterwork of Japanese cinematic melodramas” (Tokyo Filmex).
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Record of a Tenement Gentleman
Yasujiro Ozu
Japan, 1947
Thursday, July 6 7 PM
An unsentimental and funny treatment of a sentimental subject: an abandoned boy in postwar Tokyo taken in by a widow who claims to dislike children.
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Nobody Knows
Hirokazu Kore-eda
Japan, 2004
Sunday, July 9 4 PM
Based on a true story that scandalized Japan in the mid-1980s, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 2004 drama follows four children left abandoned in a Tokyo apartment. “Absorbing, humane, and deeply moving,” Nobody Knows reveals the “director’s talent for extending a single moment with superbly poised artistry” (The Guardian).
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Love Letter
Kinuyo Tanaka
Japan, 1953
New 4K Restoration
Wednesday, July 12 7 PM
Set in Toyko just after the end of the American occupation of Japan, Kinuyo Tanaka’s impressive directorial debut provides “a much-needed female voice that offers a . . . nuanced reading of women’s lives in postwar Japan, and especially regarding sex work” (Natalie Ng, Filmed in Ether).
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Ikiru
Akira Kurosawa
Japan, 1952
BAMPFA Collection Print
Sunday, July 16 4 PM
In Akira Kurosawa’s humanist masterpiece, an ordinary civil servant discovers what it means to live. This Japanese Everyman was perhaps Takashi Shimura’s greatest role.
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Shitamachi Sunshine
Yoji Yamada
Japan, 1963
BAMPFA Collection Print
Wednesday, July 19 7 PM
Chieko Baisho shines as a Shitamachi factory worker in Yoji Yamada’s fascinating study of postwar Japanese social mobility and a woman’s choice in the paths she takes.
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Where Chimneys Are Seen
Heinosuke Gosho
Japan, 1953
Imported 35mm Print
Sunday, July 23 7 PM
Set against the backdrop of Tokyo’s growing industrialization during the 1950s, Ken Uehara and Kinuyo Tanaka portray a tabi salesman and his wife, whose lives are disrupted by the arrival of an abandoned baby on their tenement doorstep.
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Drunken Angel
Akira Kurosawa
Japan, 1948
Saturday, July 29 7:30 PM
Doctor meets tubercular gangster in the slums of postwar Japan in this noirish tale, the first film in the long collaboration between Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune.
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Shitamachi: Tales of Downtown Tokyo

June 16–July 29, 2023

Welcome to Shitamachi, downtown Tokyo, the literal “low part” of town—more a state of mind than a physical locale. The district’s boundaries have changed throughout the years—through wars, fires, famines, and economic booms—but its culture has always represented the city’s working-class, hard-edged roots. Its dense alleyways, rickety homes, claustrophobic bars, and pachinko parlors define the atmosphere of the films that take place there, as do glimpses of the Sumida and Arakawa Rivers, which flow along its borders.

Like any tour, this series spotlights some of the locale’s best-known landmarks, like Akira Kurosawa’s Stray Dog and Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story. It also helps you wander off the beaten path of Japanese film classics to discover works you’ve never had a chance to view or maybe never even heard of. Legendary but little-seen filmmakers like Heinosuke Gosho (“one of the greatest Japanese directors,” according to Georges Sadoul) or Sadao Yamanaka (“without him, there would be no Ugetsu, no Rashomon,” per Donald Richie) are represented, as are lesser-known titles by artists such as the Cannes-prizewinning Hirokazu Kore-eda and a reprise of Kinuyo Tanaka’s recently restored Love Letter.

“If some of the narratives around shitamachi [are] about the marginalized, about economic inequality, about tight-knit communities and festivities, can we not find these stories [everywhere]?” writes curator Aiko Masubuchi, referring to the shitamachi spirit as well as the Tokyo neighborhood. “Cannot the ethos and the narratives that shitamachi has birthed and continue[s] to put forth today of resistance and of community practice and of laughter and joy be activated into lived experience?”

—Jason Sanders, Film Notes Writer

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Shitamachi: Tales of Downtown Tokyo is guest curated by Aiko Masubuchi and coordinated at BAMPFA by Kathy Geritz; it was originally presented at Film Forum, New York. Copresented by The Japan Foundation. Special thanks to Bruce Goldstein and Elspeth Carroll, Film Forum, New York; Kenji Matsumoto, Koji Nozaki, and Ryo Takehara, The Japan Foundation; Tatiana Faris, IFC Films; Brian Belovarac, Janus Films; Mami Furukawa, Nikkatsu Corporation; and Aya Takagawa, Shochiku Co., Ltd.