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Japanese auteur Hirokazu Kore-eda’s latest Netflix series, Asura, has been received very well – thanks to the brilliant storytelling, masterful direction, and fantastic acting performances by the cast. In this article, we’re going to look into who is playing what in the show and talk about the character for a bit.

Jun Kunimura as Kotaro

Veteran actor Jun Kunimura — whose most famous work is playing the Japanese priest in Korean director Na Hong-Jin’s The Wailing (2016), which I considered to be the greatest horror movie of this generation — plays Kotaro in Asura. The show begins with Takako discovering her seventy-something father – Kotaro – being unfaithful to her mother for a long time and even having a child. Kunimura is quite fantastic in the role, where most of the acting is done by expression and not words.

Keiko Matsuzaka as Fuji

Keiko Matsuzaka, who has a sprawling career and was also...

“Doesn’t everyone have something they’re not proud of?” This question, asked by the eldest sister Tsunako in the new trailer for Asura, sets the tone for a series that dives into family secrets and personal struggles. The Japanese drama remake, directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda, will premiere on January 9 and promises to engage audiences with its powerful story and talented cast.

The main cast includes Jun Kunimura as the sisters’ father Kotaro, Keiko Matsuzaka as their mother Fuji, and Masahiro Motoki as Makiko’s (Machiko Ono) husband Takao. Ryuhei Matsuda plays Katsumata, a private investigator who has feelings for Takiko (Yu Aoi).

Kisetsu Fujiwara appears as Sakiko’s (Suzu Hirose) boxer boyfriend Hide, while Seiyo Uchino portrays Sadaharu, a restaurant owner secretly involved with Tsunako (Rie Miyazawa). These supporting characters shine alongside the four sisters, building excitement for their on-screen dynamics.

Other notable roles include Yui Natsukawa as the wife of Tsunako’s lover,...

The Japan Academy Film Prize Association held the 47th edition of its awards ceremony on March 8, 2024. The nominees are selected by the Nippon Academy-Sho Association of industry professionals from the pool of film releases between January 1 and December 31, 2023 which must have screened in Tokyo cinemas.

Following its success at the recent Blue Ribbon Awards and leading with 12 nominations, Toho Studios' and Takashi Yamazaki's kaiju cinema masterpiece “Godzilla Minus One” takes top honours winning Picture of the Year and a slew of technical awards. Sakura Ando cements her place as one of Japan's top actresses securing both awards for Outstanding Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role (for “Monster”) as well as Supporting Role (for “Godzilla Minus One”).

The full list of winners is described below.

Picture of the Year

Monster

Godzilla Minus One

Mom, Is That You?!

September 1923

Perfect Days

Animation of the Year

Kitaro Tanjo – GeGeGe no...

It's not the first time that internationally acclaimed maestro Hirokazu Koreeda put his effort on a serial drama. In 2019 he directed the first episode and coordinated the collective show “A Day-Off of Kasumi Arimura” and before that, in 2012, he directed the lovely (a personal favourite) “Going My Home”, starring Hiroshi Abe as a clumsy father struggling with his roles as son and as father too. However, his recent “The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House” has been propelled to global audience by the intervention of giant platform Netflix. The show is co-written, co-produced and co-directed by Koreeda, alongside a handful of Japanese filmmakers and is based on a famous manga of the same title that has sold more than 1.8 million copies in Japan.

Click the image below to follow our Tribute to Netflix

After seeing maiko (apprentice geishas) walking the street of Kyoto on a school trip, 16-year-old inseparable best...

“You must show what’s unseen, but you cannot show too much either,” Mother Chiyo (Keiko Matsuzaka) explains to apprentice maiko Sumire (Natsuki Deguchi) about the delicate balance of expressing the story of a traditional mai dance. This same ethos permeates throughout the soft tone of the new Netflix series “The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House,” from acclaimed filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda.

Continue reading ‘The Makanai: Cooking For The Maiko House’ Season One Review: Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Netflix Show Is A Rich and Rewarding Experience at The Playlist.

The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House (Maiko-san Chino makanai-san) is a Japanese series created by Hirokazu Koreeda starring Mayu Matsuoka, Ai Hashimoto, Nana Mori and Keiko Matsuzaka. Based on the manga by Aiko Koyama.

The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House, is a tender Japanese story about art, friendship, youth, time… and, what can merge all these concepts in a single one? Food as an art form and an expression of ephemerality and at the same time, eternity, serves this series to achieve a portrayal of youth that is charming, consoling and above all, very, very tender.

About the Series The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House

A small delicacy for those that love the most traditional aspects of Japanese culture. The lives of these two kitchen apprentices will lead us, almost apologetically, to view a kind of Kyoto in which time goes by almost unnoticed, like those first...

Cannes Palme d’Or-winning director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s first series for Netflix, The Makanai: Cooking For The Maiko House, is based on a best-selling manga about two young girls who move to Kyoto to start their training as ‘maiko’ or apprentice geisha.

One of them turns out to be a star maiko, but the other is not so talented in the geisha arts, which mostly comprise traditional song and dance, and ends up cooking for the household where the girls are being trained, an activity in which she excels. Neither the manga, created by Aiko Koyama, or the series are set in the Edo period, the golden era of geisha culture, but in contemporary Japan, where the profession still exists and is respected, but is also regarded as a dying art.

Scheduled to start streaming tomorrow (January 12), the series is produced by Kore-eda and Genki Kawamura, a leading producer behind hits such as Confessions,...

Shoplifters director Hirokazu Kore-eda is to adapt popular comic Maiko in Kyoto: From the Maiko House into an eight-part Netflix TV series, his first for the streamer. The prolific Kore-eda teased a TV and film project for Netflix late last year and these are the first details to emerge.

Airing later this year, The Makanai: Cooking For The Maiko House from Story Inc and Bun-Buku Inc is set in the geisha district of Kyoto, as protagonist Kiyo becomes a Makanai (person who cooks meals) at a house where Maiko (apprentice geishas) live together. The story depicts the everyday life of Kiyo maiko Sumire, her childhood friend who came with her from Aomori to Kyoto, amid a vibrant world of geisha and maiko courtesans.

Kore-eda, who won the Palme d’Or in 2018 for Shoplifters, his story about a family that relies on shoplifting to cope with poverty, is also in the...

‘The Takatsu River’ stars Masahiro Koumoto and ‘Meeting Myself’ stars Takahiro and Keiko Matsuzaka

Japan’s Free Stone Productions has picked up international rights to two dramas directed by Yoshinari Nishikori: The Takatsu River and Meeting Myself.

Starring Masahiro Koumoto and Naho Toda, The Takatsu River is set in a town that is struggling with population decline and the loss of its traditional arts, as young people move away to the big cities. Japanese release is scheduled for the first quarter of 2020.

Meeting Myself is the story of a fisherman suffering from amnesia following an accident, whose mother sees an...

Takashi Miike has answered the “Can a film be so bad that is good?” question affirmatively a number of times, and the “Katakuris” is definitely among the movie that provide a positive reply.

The script is loosely based on Kim Jee-woon’s film, “The Quiet Family”, but Takashi Miike took the basic premises of the original and turned them completely upside down, in order to present a movie that lingers between the musical and the thriller, also including elements of slapstick comedy, parody and claymation.

The Katakuris are a four-generation family of failures: patriarch Masao Katakuri, his wife Terue, his father Jinpei, his formerly criminal son Masayuki, his divorced daughter Shizue, her child Yurie and their dog, Pochi. The family uses the father’s redundancy pay to purchase an old home in the country, near Mount Fuji, in order to convert it into a bed and breakfast.

Japanese actress joins cast of Chen Kaige’s [pictured] Chinese-Japanese co-production, which is currently in production in China.

Japanese actress Keiko Matsuzaka has joined the cast of Chen Kaige’s Kukai, co-produced by China’s New Classics Media and Japan’s Kadokawa, which is currently in production.

Based on a novel by Japanese author Baku Yumemakura, the film tells the story of a Japanese Buddhist monk who visits Tang Dynasty China to learn about its culture and civilisation.

The film, which will be distributed in Japan by Kadokawa and Toho, has been shooting in Hubei province in China since the end of July.

The casting was announced today at Tokyo International Film Festival (Tiff) at an event attended by Matsuzaka, Tsuguhiko Kadokawa and Yoshishige Shimatani, who head Kadowkawa and Toho respectively, and Japanese and Chinese government officials.

The film’s previously announced cast includes Chinese actor Huang Xuan (The Golden Era) and Shota Sometani, who also appears...

Shudder will take viewers to the place that's "not as brightly lit" this Halloween season, as the 1980s anthology series Tales From the Darkside will be available to watch in its entirety on the horror streaming service beginning October 1st:

Press Release: New York, New York – September 26, 2016 – The AMC-backed streaming service, Shudder, is The entertainment destination for everything you need to watch this Halloween season. Whether you’re a hardcore horror fan or simply looking for the scariest films to celebrate this time of year, Shudder has something for everyone in its sweeping library, carefully curated by some of the top horror experts in the world.

As Halloween approaches, Shudder is expanding its database with a variety of new titles including cult favorites, blockbuster hits, and classic thrillers. Additionally, for the first time ever, Shudder will be offering horror TV series to complement its expansive film library.

Premiering October 20th...

Takashi Miike‘s The Happiness of the Katakuris begins with a woman probing a freshly delivered bowl of soup only to fish out a miniature angel/gargoyle/teletubby? whose presence seems to instigate the onscreen conversion of the world into claymation before tearing out the poor woman’s uvula and tossing it into the air to float away like a heart-shaped balloon. This is a film that, even in an oeuvre that includes works as disparate as gross out shocker Visitor Q and the kid friendly The Great Yokai War, is pure unpredictable insanity that baffles as much as it entertains. Essentially a horror comedy musical, Miike’s genre mashing farce is loosely based on Kim Jee-woon’s The Quiet Family, in which a family owns a remotely located bed and breakfast whose customers always happen to die during their stay, yet takes that simple premise to its outermost extremes in the silliest of ways.

Stars: Kenji Sawada, Keiko Matsuzaka, Shinji Takeda, Naomi Nishida, Kiyoshirô Imawano, Tetsurô Tanba, Naoto Takenaka, Tamaki Miyazaki, Takashi Matsuzaki | Written by Ai Kennedy, Kikumi Yamagishi | Directed by Takashi Miike

Being a Takashi Miike fan takes you down some strange roads. Whether it is the extreme Ichi the Killer and Visitor Q, or the fun Crow Zero movies there is always something a little off about all of his movies. One of the strangest to come from him has to be The Happiness of the Katakuris, a musical about happiness, family and death which is out now from Arrow Video…

When the Katakuri family build a bed and breakfast in the country, they do so on the promise of a new road being built close to it to provide them with plenty of customers. When the road doesn’t appear though they start to wonder if they are cursed to fail.

Eita (27) and Kenichi Matsuyama (25) will be co-starring as train otaku in a new movie by Yoshimitsu Morita (The Family Game, The Mamiya Brothers) called Bokutachi Kyuko: A-Ressha de Ikou.

Pictured left are Matsuyama and Eita, sporting “pair look” cardigans and fully ensconced in their new dweebish personas. In the film, their characters meet each other by chance while riding on the same train.

Morita, himself a train enthusiast since childhood, has been planning the film for several decades and reportedly intends to incorporate 80 different trains in the film.

Additional cast members include Keiko Matsuzaka (58) and Shihori Kanjiya (24). In keeping with Morita’s own enthusiasm, most of the main characters in the film have been named after Shinkansen and limited express trains such as “Kodama”. “Komachi”, “Azusa”, and “Hokuto”.

Filming began in early September and wrapped on October 19th. A theatrical release is slated for next fall.

Sources: Tokyograph, Sponichi Annex...