Japanese coming-of-age movies

Taking place during the full-moon night of traditional dances in August and set on the Japanese island of Amami-Oshima, the drama centers on a 14-year-old boy who finds a dead body floating in the sea. The young man enlists the help of his girlfriend to solve the mystery. The pair will learn to become adults by experiencing the interwoven cycles of life, death and love.

Three different stories of youth set in different cities of China. 1 Shanghai Love. 2 Sunny Breakfast. 3 Small Fashion Show. Directed by Zhenxing Yi, the plot revolves around a young man working in Beijing. He used to live with his grandma in his less developed hometown Hunan. While he is drown in his childhood reminiscence, he receives an unexpected call – Grandma is in critical condition.

The year is 1991 and 6th grader Yaguchi Haruo only has video games to live for. He's not popular in school and he's neither handsome, funny, nice nor even friendly. The only thing he has going for him is that he is good at video games. One day at the local arcade, he plays Oono Akira, a fellow classmate but who's popular, smart, pretty and a rich girl that absolutely destroys him at Street Fighter II. Not only does he lose to her 30 times in a row, he can’t beat her at any game. Haruo can’t seem to shake Akira off as she follows him from arcade to arcade everyday after school and beats him every time. As weird as it sounds, the odd couple begins a strange bond and friendship.

After failing his university entrance exam, Yuki Hirano sets his eyes on the role of a forestry trainee. Setting off for training he doubts his decision many times, but eventually after passing the training course, he is sent to Kamusari Village for a year of work experience - where he becomes assimilated with the beauty of nature and the warm-hearted people of the village.

Spring time in April and the last of the cherry blossoms are still in bloom. The usually aloof bookworm with no interest in others comes across a book in a hospital waiting room. Handwritten on the cover are the words: "Living with Dying." He soon discovers that it is a diary kept by his very popular and genuinely cheerful classmate, Sakura Yamauchi, who reveals to him that she is secretly suffering from a pancreatic illness and only has a limited time left. It is at this moment that she gains just one more person to share her secret. Trying to maintain a normal life as much as possible, Sakura is determined to live her life to the fullest until the very last day. As her free spirit and unpredictable actions throw him for a loop, his heart begins to gradually change.

Takao, who is training to become a shoemaker, skipped school and is sketching shoes in a Japanese-style garden. He meets a mysterious woman, Yukino, who is older than him. Then, without arranging the times, the two start to see each other again and again, but only on rainy days. They deepen their relationship and open up to each other. But the end of the rainy season soon approaches...

A 21-year-old girl is released from prison, only to deal with the neighborhood gossip about her and family conflicts. She decides to save one million yen, move to where no one knows her and keep repeating the process.

Yukito Kunisaki is on a journey in search of the Winged Maiden who was bound to the sky centuries ago, after hearing an old childhood tale from his mother. As Yukito shows his puppet show to people in an attempt to make some money, he finds himself in a small town in which he did not expect to stay very long. However, when he meets an unusual girl named Misuzu, things take a drastic turn as he is invited to stay with her. By staying in the quaint town, Yukito soon becomes friends with the locals. As he gets to know them better, he learns of their problems and decides to help, putting his search for the Winged Maiden on hold. With his search on hold, and his growing attachment to Misuzu and the small town, will Yukito ever find the Winged Maiden, or is she closer than he thought? [Written by MAL Rewrite]

Kyuta, a boy living in Shibuya, and Kumatetsu, a lonesome beast from Jutengai, an imaginary world. One day, Kyuta forays into the imaginary world and, as he's looking for his way back, meets Kumatetsu who becomes his spirit guide. That encounter leads them to many adventures.

Shouya Ishida starts bullying the new girl in class, Shouko Nishimiya, because she is deaf. But as the teasing continues, the rest of the class starts to turn on Shouya for his lack of compassion. When they leave elementary school, Shouko and Shouya do not speak to each other again... until an older, wiser Shouya, tormented by his past behaviour, decides he must see Shouko once more. He wants to atone for his sins, but is it already too late...?

It's a new school year at the local Junior High School i Kamakura. The school year starts off with a new transfer student Ryoichi Kyogoku who joins the 8th grade class. He has been ordered to join the school, and use his special gift of telepathy and take over their school. This boy who happens to be handsome, and be a charismatic person, gains popularity, and using his powers takes over the entire school, except for Seki. This begins a war to regain their freedom for their school and themselves.

Rihito Sajo, an honor student with a perfect score on the entrance exam and Hikaru Kusakabe, in a band and popular among girls, would have never crossed paths. Until one day they started talking at the practice for their school’s upcoming chorus festival. After school, the two meet regularly, as Hikaru helps Rihito to improve his singing skills. While they listen to each other’s voice and harmonize, their hearts start to beat together.

Set in the mid 1990s in Singapore, ILOILO chronicles the relationship between a family and their maid from Ilo Ilo, a province in the Philippines.

Satou Ichirou once called himself 'Maryuuin Kouga' and behaved as if he were a hero in a fantasy world. His strange behavior caused his classmates to bully him and he left the school. At his new school, he tries to behave like a normal boy, but one day he meets a girl who cosplays with a blue cape. She calls herself "a researcher traveling from the outer world to search for the 'Dragon Terminal'". At first, Ichirou rejects the girl, Satou Ryouko, because her behavior reminds him of his embarrassing past, but he changes his mind after seeing her getting bullied. In order to bring Ryouko back to real life, Ichirou accepts her and his past and begins the final battle as Maryuuin Kouga.

A lighthearted take on director Yasujiro Ozu’s perennial theme of the challenges of inter­generational relationships, Good Morning tells the story of two young boys who stop speaking in protest after their parents refuse to buy a television set. Ozu weaves a wealth of subtle gags through a family portrait as rich as those of his dramatic films, mocking the foibles of the adult world through the eyes of his child protagonists. Shot in stunning color and set in a suburb of Tokyo where housewives gossip about the neighbors’ new washing machine and unemployed husbands look for work as door-to-door salesmen, this charming comedy refashions Ozu’s own silent classic I Was Born, But . . . to gently satirize consumerism in postwar Japan.

Tomoya Okazaki is a third year high school student resentful of his life. His mother passed away from a car accident when he was younger, causing his father to resort to alcohol and cigarettes. This results in fights between the two until Tomoya's shoulder is injured in a fight. Since then, Tomoya has had distant relationships with his father, causing him to become a delinquent over time. While on a walk to school, he meets a strange girl named Nagisa Furukawa who is a year older, but is repeating due to illness. Due to this, she is often alone as most of her friends have moved on. The two begin hanging out and slowly, as time goes by, Tomoya finds his life shifting in a new direction. Anime based on a popular visual novel game.

When Yadomi Jinta was a child, he was a central piece in a group of close friends. In time, however, these childhood friends drifted apart, and when they became high school students, they had long ceased to think of each other as friends.One of the friends from that group, Honma Meiko, now has a wish she asks Jinta to fulfil. The problem is, she can't remember what her wish is anymore. As Meiko won't cease to bother Jinta about it, he gives in and decides to try to grant this wish he knows nothing of; for that, however, the help of his other former friends, now all very estranged from himself and from each other, may turn out to be necessary. He hasn't spoken to Anjou Naruko, Matsuyuki Atsumu, Tsurumi Chiriko, or Hisakawa Tetsudou in a long time; as he struggles to grant Meiko's wish and gathers his old friends together in the process, all the old feelings that still exist between them and have long been stashed away are bound to come up again.

In the aftermath of the most devastating conflict mankind had ever experienced, the tiny island of Shikotan became part of the Sakhalin Oblast... and on the unhealed border in this remote corner of the world, friendship among children from two different countries timidly blossomed, striving to overcome language barriers and the waves of history. Inspired by true events.

Love is blooming at Sakuragaoka High School. Natsuki Enomoto has finally mustered the courage to confess to her childhood friend, Yuu Setoguchi. However, in the final moments of her confession, an embarrassed Natsuki passes it off as a "practice confession." Oblivious to her true feelings and struggling with his own, Yuu promises to support Natsuki in her quest for love. While Natsuki deals with her failed confession, fellow classmate Koyuki Ayase struggles with his own feelings for Natsuki. Despite his timidness, he is determined to win over her heart. This movie follows Natsuki as she dreams of one day ending her practices and genuinely confessing to Yuu. Meanwhile, close friends also find themselves entangled in their own webs of unrequited love and unspoken affections.

Summary of the first season of the show, as seen from Rikka's perspective with new elements.

Moritaka Mashiro (Takeru Satoh) doesn't want to follow in the path of his uncle who worked as a manga artist, but ultimately died because of exhaustion. Moritaka Mashiro figures he will graduate from school and work at an office. Things change though when falls in love with a girl at school. The girl, who hopes to become a voice actress, tells Moritaka they can marry, but only after they both achieve their dreams. Moritaka then teams up with fellow classmate Akito Takagi (Ryunosuke Kamiki) to publish their first manga.

Hinako is a surf-loving college student who has just moved to a small seaside town. When a sudden fire breaks out at her apartment building, she is rescued by Minato, a handsome firefighter, and the two soon fall in love. Just as they become inseparable, Minato loses his life in an accident at sea. Hinako is so distraught that she can no longer even look at the ocean, but one day she sings a song that reminds her of their time together, and Minato appears in the water. From then on, she can summon him in any watery surface as soon as she sings their song, but can the two really remain together forever? And what is the real reason for Minato’s sudden reappearance?

The film centers on Asuna, a young girl who spends her solitary days listening to the mysterious music emanating from the crystal radio she received from her late father as a memento. One day while walking home she is attacked by a fearsome monster and saved mysterious boy named Shun. However, Shun disappears and Asuna embarks on a journey of adventure to the land of Agartha with her teacher Mr. Morisaki to meet a Shun again. Through her journey she comes to know the cruelty and beauty of the world, as well as loss.

Five friends who reunite in an attempt to top their epic pub crawl from 20 years earlier unwittingly become humankind's only hope for survival.

One hot summer day a little girl gets lost in an enchanted forest of the mountain god where spirits reside. A young boy appears before her, but she cannot touch him for fear of making him disappear. And so a wondrous adventure awaits...

It’s 1982, and Taeko is 27 years old, unmarried, and has lived her whole life in Tokyo. She decides to visit her family in the countryside, and as the train travels through the night, memories flood back of her younger years: the first immature stirrings of romance, the onset of puberty, and the frustrations of math and boys. At the station she is met by young farmer Toshio, and the encounters with him begin to reconnect her to forgotten longings. In lyrical switches between the present and the past, Taeko contemplates the arc of her life, and wonders if she has been true to the dreams of her childhood self.

Found inside a shining stalk of bamboo by an old bamboo cutter and his wife, a tiny girl grows rapidly into an exquisite young lady. The mysterious young princess enthralls all who encounter her - but ultimately she must confront her fate, the punishment for her crime.

This is the story of how Satoshi and Pikachu first met. At first, Pikachu was disobedient towards Satoshi, but Satoshi only wanted to be friends with Pikachu. On the day they set out from Masara Town, both of them saw a Ho-Oh flying and they made a vow to meet it.

Adaptation of the Violet Evergarden Gaiden spin-off novel.

Raised suckling poison arrows among the sparring Iga ninja factions, Mumon (Satoshi Ohno, of idol group Arashi) is a carefree 16th-century mercenary. When the ninja council makes a power play to defeat the young Nobukatsu Oda struggling to step into his father’s warlord shoes as they expand rule across the country, Mumon jumps into the fray to satisfy his new bride Okuni’s (Satomi Ishihara of Shin Godzilla, Attack on Titan) demand that he make good on his promises of wealth. Yet Mumon soon finds what is worth fighting for beyond money or nation. A longtime JAPAN CUTS favorite known for his offbeat dramas, Yoshihiro Nakamura (Fish Story, Golden Slumber) takes on the jidaigeki epic with his signature sense of play featuring a jazzy soundtrack and fantastical ninja tricks. -JAPAN CUTS: Festival of New Japanese Film

Just Because! is a Japanese original anime television series by Hajime Kamoshida, the author of The Pet Girl of Sakurasou, and Kiseki Himura, the author of Getsuyōbi no Tawawa. Pine Jam produced the animation.

A group visits Saipan to search for locations for their company's newest resort. As they find what they think is the perfect spot, they discover a hidden bunker on the property which they decide to explore. However, they soon find out that curiosity can kill. As each member faces their most private secrets and the secrets of the bunker itself, the results lead to a most shocking conclusion.

Nakamura Aoi stars as a young aspiring manga artist who's able to deal with loneliness and separation from his family through the companionship of an American Shorthair cat named Gin-o-gou.

Ninagawa is a powerful man in Japanese politics and with top economic connections.His granddaughter is then murdered. The suspect is Kunihide Kiyomaru (Tatsuya Fujiwara). Kunihide Kiyomaru has a prior conviction for assaulting and killing a girl 8 years ago. The police could never apprehend the suspect in the prior killing.

If you are chosen by the bizarre black sphere known as the Gantz, you are already dead—yet you might be able to reclaim your mortality. First, the Gantz demands that you undertake brutal missions of madness, killing aliens hidden among the population. It is your only chance and you have no choice. You must play this disturbing game. And if you die again—and you likely will—it’s permanent.

Jun, Akari, Sakurako, and Fumi truly believe that they can confide in each other. But one day, at a party, Jun confesses that she is seeking a divorce from her husband and this information seems to upset the other three. They follow her trial as she attempts to win her case against her husband's will.

Jiantan is a young boy who has to leave Xi'an after the death of his mother to go deep into the Tibetan prairies to start living with the father he barely remembers. His dad, LaGeBa, is a busy doctor who decided to depart from the city and reside in Tibet where he is the essential physician of the poor community he lives in. To help his father, Jiantan has to learn how to herd sheep. While trying to learn his new responsibility, he is saved by a stray gold-colored Tibetan Mastiff. Both Jiantan and the big dog help each other as they try to adjust to this new environment.

I (Takumi Kitamura) am a high school student. I happen to find a diary by my classmate Sakura Yamauchi (Minami Hamabe) that reveals she is suffering from a pancreatic disease. I spent time with Sakura, but she dies. 12 years later, due to Sakura’s words, I (Shun Oguri) am now a high school teacher at the same school where I graduated from. While I talk with my student, I remember several months I spent with Sakura. Meanwhile, Kyoko (Keiko Kitagawa), who was Sakura’s friend, is soon to marry. Kyoko also recalls the days she spent with me and Sakura.

Erika Shinohara (Fumi Nikaido) is a first year of high school student. While talking to friends, she makes up a story about her "boyfriend." In reality, Erika Shinohara doesn't have a boyfriend. Erika's friends soon begin to doubt her story and Erika is also running out of lies. Erika then sees a pretty boy on the street and takes his picture discreetly. She later shows his picture to her friends as her boyfriend. The boy in the picture is Kyouya Sata (Kento Yamazaki) and happens to attend the same school as Erika. She tells Kyouya about her situation and asks him to be her pretend boyfriend. Even though Kyouya has a pretty appearance, he has a dark side.

By the year 2050 AD, a mysterious organization called Galactor has occupied half of the Earth and threatens to exterminate the human race. Around the same time, the International Science Organization had uncovered mysterious stones that bear unusual powers. It is said that one person out of approximately eight million is able to harness the power of the stones; they are known as a "Receptor". Dr. Kozaburo Nambu gathers a team of these five lucky Receptors together. Known as the "Gatchaman" team, it is their mission to defeat Galactor.

A bravado period action film set at the end of Japan's feudal era in which a group of unemployed samurai are enlisted to bring down a sadistic lord and prevent him from ascending to the throne and plunging the country into a war-torn future.

In a valley, with a dense growth of trees, a baby is killed. The baby's mother Satomi is arrested as the prime suspect. The police also learn that Satomi is involved in a romantic relationship with her next door neighbor Ozaki. The information was provided by the neighbor's lover Kanako. Meanwhile, magazine reporter Watanabe, who is covering the story, discovers the shocking fact that Ozaki was involved in a rape case 15 years ago. Even more shocking, the victim in the rape case is Kanako.

The Governor of Tokyo, Yuichiro Asakura, receives a threatening letter the day before the opening of Touto Line, a new train line for the Tokyo Metro. During the opening ceremony of the line, Conan Edogawa and the Detective Boys are driven by Professor Agasa and pass under the Touto Line. Conan, having heard about the threatening letter, notices explosives connected to the Touto railway; Using his original voice to inform the police as Shinichi Kudo, he is able to stop the train and divert traffic away from the explosives preventing any deaths.

Clinging to an unfinished letter written by her recently deceased father, young Momo moves with her mother from bustling Tokyo to the remote Japanese island of Shio. Upon their arrival, she begins to explore her new habitat, meeting local children and learning their routines and customs. However, it's not long before several bizarre occurrences crop up around the previously tranquil island. Orchards are found ransacked, prized trinkets start disappearing and, worst of all, each morning after her mother leaves for work, Momo hears strange mumblings coming from the attic of their home. Annoyed by these creepy goings-on and her mother's refusal to believe them, Momo embarks on a strange and supernatural adventure to discover the source of the mischief, which leads her to a trio of troublesome imps: the flatulent lizard Kawa, the childlike Mame and their hulking ogre leader Iwa. Momo also learns that her visit to the island is in some way connected to her father's mysterious letter.

A story about the disappearance of Kirishima, a star athlete of the volleyball club, and how his disappearance affects every person in school.

The historical novel series depicts Heizou Hasegawa, who metes justice on wrongdoers and supervises the crackdown on arsonists and robbers in Japan's Edo period (1603-1868).

Ken Kaneki (Masataka Kubota) is a university student. He becomes injured by Rize, a human eating ghoul. Ken is saved from the ghoul when a steel frame falls on Rize. They are both sent to the hospital. Ken receives an organ transplant from Rize and becomes a half ghoul.

As the Japanese surrender at the end of WWII, Gen. Fellers is tasked with deciding if Emperor Hirohito will be hanged as a war criminal. Influencing his ruling is his quest to find Aya, an exchange student he met years earlier in the U.S.

The year is 1987 and Japan is just reaching the peak of its economic success. Eighteen-year old Yonosuke Yokomichi arrives in Tokyo from Nagasaki. Ordinary in every way possible, he lives in a suburb far from the excitement of the big city and commutes to a university in the center of Tokyo.

The background to and depiction of a watershed battle in Japanese history, at Sekigahara in 1600, when Tokugawa Ieyasu's Army of the East defeated the Army of the West of Ishida Mitsunari. The story includes the intrigues and shifting loyalties of the various retainers, family members, and samurai.