Birthday: 1942-11-29 Born in: Yokohama, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan
Known for
Tampopo
In this humorous paean to the joys of food, a pair of truck drivers happen onto a decrepit roadside shop selling ramen noodles. The widowed owner, Tampopo, begs them to help her turn her establishment into a paragon of the "art of noodle-soup making". Interspersed are satirical vignettes about the importance of food to different aspects of human life.
Intrepid tax investigator Ryoko Itakura sets her sights on the mysterious and philandering Hideki Gondo, a suspected millionaire and proprietor of a thriving chain of seedy hourly hotels, who has for years succeeded at hiding the true extent of his assets from the Japanese authorities. Itakura and Gondo soon find themselves engaged in a complicated, satirical battle of wits.
Biwako is a vain, middle-aged actress who witnesses a brutal murder. Realizing that the very public life of the woman makes their sole witness vulnerable to the killers, the police assign two officers to safeguard her until the trial. In the interim, the lives of Biwako and everyone around her are changed in unexpected ways.
A young girl suffers a terrifying nightmare of a vampire with blazing golden eyes. Eighteen years later, it is revealed to be a hellish prophecy when a strange package containing an empty coffin mysteriously turns up at a nearby lake.
A young man is falsely accused of molesting a high-school girl on a train. He is arrested and charged, and goes through endless court sessions, all the while insisting that he is innocent.
Failing supermarket manager Goro hires the energetic Hanako, his old classmate, to help him compete with a new, rival business in town. Soon, Hanako's ideas and energy completely revitalize the store – but not without ruffling some feathers and sparking some romance along the way.
Ryōko Itakura returns as the tough-as-nails government taxing agent. This time she must figure out a way to expose a fanatical religious cult lead by a corrupt sociopath.
In the aftermath of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, a journalist arrives in Nagaoka, a city decimated during a WWII air raid and by the 2004 Chūetsu earthquakes, to report on the disaster; there, she learns about the experiences of its inhabitants and stumbles upon a stage play written by an enigmatic student of her ex-boyfriend.
An alcoholic civil servant wakes up under a cherry tree in Tokyo next to a bar hostess with whom he's impulsively made a suicide pact. Though he's now changed his mind, he agrees to travel with her to Hokkaido, her preferred site for ending it all.
