Best movies like A Japanese Tragedy

A unique, carefully handpicked, selection of the best movies like A Japanese Tragedy Starring Yūko Mochizuki, Keiji Sada, Teiji Takahashi, Yōko Katsuragi, and more. If you liked A Japanese Tragedy then you may also like: The Vicious Years, Waterland, The Land of Rain Trees, Oh Lucy!, The Only Son and many more popular movies featured on this list. You can further filter the list even more or get a random selection from the list of similar movies, to make your selection even easier.

At the close of the war in Japan, a widowed mother makes every possible sacrifice to bring up her ungrateful son and daughter who are unimpressed with their poor standard of living at home. They gradually reject her in search of the material comforts that working as a maid cannot provide. The mother's despair becomes interminable.

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Know any good movies to watch like A Japanese Tragedy 1953. With a similar plot or stoyline. Suggest it.

The Vicious Years

Mario, an Italian war orphan, sees Luca Rossi commit a murder. Eager for a home and family life, Mario promises not to tell the police if Luca takes him into his household and family. Luca fears and hates Mario, but his father, mother and sister all come to love him.

Waterland

The story of a mentally anguished high school history teacher going through a complete reassessment of his life. His method for reassessing his life is to narrate it to his class and interweave in it three generations of his family's history.

The Land of Rain Trees

Nobuyuki Sakisaka (Yuta Tamamori) is a salaryman. When he was in middle school student, he read light novel "Fairy Game”. He still has that light novel, because he was so shocked by the ending. One day, Nobuyuki Sakisaka browses the internet and comes across the blog "Rein Tsuri no Kuni.” He learns that the blog writer, Rika Hitomi (Mariya Nishiuchi), also was shocked by the ending in light novel "Fairy Game." Nobuyuki and Rika soon begin to exchange emails. Nobuyuki wants to meet Rika, but she refuses due to her secret.

Oh Lucy!

A lonely, chain-smoking office lady in Tokyo falls for her teacher when she decides to take English lessons. When her teacher disappears, she sets out on a journey to find him.

The Only Son

A silk factory worker is persuaded to support her son's education up to a college level despite their poverty. Many years later, she travels to Tokyo to visit her son.

Rhapsody in August

The story centers on an elderly hibakusha, whose husband was one of 80,000 human beings killed in the 1945 atomic bombing of Nagasaki, caring for her four grandchildren over the summer. She learns of a long-lost brother, Suzujiro, living in Hawaii who wants her to visit him before he dies.

Breathe In

When a foreign exchange student arrives in a small upstate New York town, she challenges the dynamics of her host family's relationships and alters their lives forever.

Abducted: The Mary Stauffer Story

High school teacher Mary Stauffer and her eight-year old daughter, Beth are held captive for 53 days by an obsessed former student. Based on a true story.

Children of Hiroshima

Shows the devastation caused by the atomic bomb, and by use of a fictional storyline, portrays the struggle of the ordinary Japanese people in dealing with the aftermath.

The City

The stories of four Hispanic immigrants living in New York City.

Double Suicide

Successful and married with children, paper-mill owner Jihei knows better than to contradict the strict social and moral codes of 18th-century Japan. But when he meets the lovely courtesan Koharu, he becomes a man obsessed. Koharu returns his love, even foregoing other customers while Jihei schemes to somehow buy her freedom. His efforts yield ruinous consequences for his business and his family life, and Koharu is meanwhile purchased by another client.

Murder on the Orient Express

In 1935, when his train is stopped by deep snow, detective Hercule Poirot is called on to solve a murder that occurred in his car the night before.

Dodes'ka-den

This film follows the daily lives of a group of people barely scraping by in a slum on the outskirts of Tokyo. Yet as desperate as their circumstances are, each of them—the homeless father and son envisioning their dream house; the young woman abused by her uncle; the boy who imagines himself a trolley conductor—finds reasons to carry on.

A Geisha

In the post-war Gion district of Kyoto, the geisha Miyoharu agrees to apprentice the 16 year-old Eiko, whose mother was a former geisha who had just died. After a year of training they have to find a large sum of money before Eiko can debut. Miyoharu borrows the money from the tea-house owner, Okimi, who in turn obtains the money from the businessman Kusuda. Kusuda fancies Eiko himself and wants to give Miyoharu to Kanzaki in order to close a large business deal. However both geishas have minds of their own and, going against tradition, want to be able to say no to clients.

Late Spring

Noriko is perfectly happy living at home with her widowed father, Shukichi, and has no plans to marry -- that is, until her aunt Masa convinces Shukichi that unless he marries off his 27-year-old daughter soon, she will likely remain alone for the rest of her life. When Noriko resists Masa's matchmaking, Shukichi is forced to deceive his daughter and sacrifice his own happiness to do what he believes is right.

Madadayo

Based on the life of Hyakken Uchida, a Japanese author and academic. The film opens with Uchida resigning his job as a German professor at the onset of WWII. The story is told mostly in vignettes as he is cared for by former students in his old age.

Mother

A teenaged girl witnesses her widowed mother's attempt to sustain her family.

Moving

Physically separated from her father and at odds with her distraught mother, a girl must negotiate her own passage to maturity.

Street of Shame

The lives of five prostitutes employed at a Japanese brothel while the nation is debating the passage of an anti-prostitution law.

Tokyo Story

The elderly Shukishi and his wife, Tomi, take the long journey from their small seaside village to visit their adult children in Tokyo. Their elder son, Koichi, a doctor, and their daughter, Shige, a hairdresser, don't have much time to spend with their aged parents, and so it falls to Noriko, the widow of their younger son who was killed in the war, to keep her in-laws company.

Tokyo Twilight

Two sisters find out the existence of their long-lost mother, but the younger cannot accept the fact that she was abandoned as a child.

Twenty-Four Eyes

Schoolteacher Hisako Oishi struggles to imbue her students with a positive view of the world despite the fact that war is looming.

A Woman of Experience

It is 1915 in Vienna and the Great War has caused many casualties. Elsa, a beautiful prostitute, wants to help the war effort, but is rejected as a nurse, but a government official thinks that she will make an excellent spy.

The Great Gilly Hopkins

Wisecracking, gum-chewing 12-year-old Gilly is well known in the foster system. Totally unmanageable, she has stayed with more families than she can remember and has outwitted them all. After all, how can she settle down when her real mother, the beautiful and glamourous Courtney, might be out there waiting for her? When Gilly is sent to live with the Trotters, the weirdest family yet, she isn’t planning to stick around. But cheerful, affectionate Maime Trotter isn’t giving up on Gilly just yet...

Suzaku

Depicts the life of a family in a remote Japanese timber village. Family head Tahara Kozo lives with his mother Sachiko, wife Yasuyo, nephew Eisuke and young daughter Michiru. Economic recession and failed development plans cause tragedy in the family.

The Secret Heart

Penny Addams lives in a constant state of depression stemming from the trauma of her father's death when she was just a young girl. Her brother, Chase, and stepmother, Lee, work to help Penny process her grief through psychotherapy and revisiting their past, but only the revelation of long-buried family secrets -- including her mother's secret lover and the true nature of her father's death -- can bring Penny out of her intense despair.

Best Boy

In this documentary, the director follows the day-to-day activities of his retarded, middle-aged cousin Philly, over a three-year period.

Oyuki the Virgin

When a civil war threatens to break out, two geishas flee from their village with aristocrats. During the long journey, the socially inferior women prove to be morally superior to their betters.

Absent

Documentary on the social pandemic of fatherlessness afflicting today's societies.

Enlighten Thy Daughter

A remake of the 1917 picture of the same name. Ruth, the offspring of Stevens' hypocritical brother, is neglected by her parents in matters of sex education; as consequence, she trods the primrose path, ending up pregnant, then dead.

My Brother Jonathan

Jonathan Dakers' early ambition was to become a great surgeon and to marry Edie Martyn. But, on the death of his father, he is obliged to start work as a partner in a poor general practice in the Black Country. Edie falls in love with Jonathan's brother, Harold, who is killed in the Great War, and Jonathan marries her as planned. It is only afterwards that he realises he now loves another.

Remembering the Cosmos Flower

Akiko returns to her home village in Japan after seven years in South America, where she contracted AIDS from a blood transfusion. The town, thick with paranoia, is quick to ostracize the ailing Akiko. With only her best friend and her mom in her corner, Akiko suffers awful discrimination at school and at home.

Memory for Max, Claire, Ida and Company

At Baycrest, an old-age home in Toronto, we follow a social worker as she talks to residents, particularly Max, Claire, Ida, and Rachel. The film opens on Claire's birthday, she's 89; Max, a tiny cheerful man, is her close friend. Rachel is lonesome, missing her son, complaining he rarely visits. Ida relies on memory for her solace. Helen has no memory and doesn't recognize her daughter; her moods swing. Murray keeps his cap on and likes women. Staff members bring medication, provide care, and offer small talk. Memory is fleeting: Claire re-experiences the death of a close companion several times, each time without remembering her previous grieving. Lives are circumscribed

The Divine Ryans

When Draper Doyle’s father drops dead two days after his birthday, Draper realises that he his memories of visiting his father two days previously have vanished. With the help of Uncle Reg, he attempts to piece his memory back together.

A Story Written with Water

Struggling with his true emotions, dreams, memories of the past and the reality Shizuo is about to marry, but is torn between his wife-to-be and the love to his mother.

Lazybones

Steve Tuttle, the titular lazybones, takes on the responsibility of raising a fatherless girl, causing a scandal in his small town. Many years later, having returned from World War I, he discovers that he loves the grown-up girl.

Before The Leaves Fall

An elderly woman sets out to see in person a painting by a famous artist.She believes she was the inspiration for the painting.

First Love

This is a story about coming of age, coming out and a gay marriage that is sprinkled with both love and comedy, at the centre of which is a teenager who doesn’t yet know what he wants.

Housewife, 49

Downtrodden wife and mother Nella's life takes an unexpected turn for the better after she joins the Women's Voluntary Service office in Barrow-in-Furness during the Second World War. However, her new-found happiness is shattered when her son Cliff leaves to join the troops - provoking a painful confrontation with her husband Will.

Poor Cow

A young woman lives a life filled with bad choices. At a young age she marries and has a child--with an abusive thief who quickly ends up in prison. Left alone, she takes up with the guy's mate, another thief, who seems to give her some happiness but who also ends up locked up. She then takes up with a series of seedy types who offer nothing but momentary pleasure--if that.

Millie's Daughter

An errant mother tries to teach her daughter to avoid the same errors she made by choosing a different lifestyle.

Woman of Rumor

Yukiko's fiance learns her mother runs a geisha house and ends their engagement. She despises what her mother does until one of her clients shows interest and starts to woo her.

To the Lighthouse

A faithful dramatization of Virginia Woolf's novel. A lecturer, his family, the spinster Aunt Lily, an old friend, and a student, Charles Tansley, spend a summer in an isolated house in Cornwall just before World War I. The stern Mr. Ramsay scolds everybody, while Mrs. Ramsay is the linchpin in keeping the family together. Aunt Lily paints, and the family talk about sailing to the lighthouse, but the trip is always postponed.

The Rickshaw Man

The story of Muhōmatsu, a rickshaw man who becomes a surrogate father to the child of a recently widowed woman.

Term of Trial

A schoolteacher plagued by alcoholism and his refusal to serve in World War II, Graham Weir inspires contempt in almost everyone around him, including his bitter wife, Anna. When the lovely young Shirley Taylor, one of Weir's students, falls for her unfortunate instructor, he is tempted and flattered but turns down her advances. Taylor's subsequent actions make Weir's life even more complicated.

Passing Fancy

Two Tokyo co-workers come across a destitute young lady in search of a place to live.

The Empty Table

One year has passed since the Kidojis' eldest son Otohiko was arrested for his part in a terrorist kidnapping, which resulted in multiple deaths. Although the parents of all the other perpetrators have either resigned from their professional positions or taken their own lives, Nobuyuki Kidoji tries to remain adamant that he was not responsible for his son's actions.

Last Letter

It is only at their sister's and mother's funeral when a woman meets her niece after many years. The niece is now a grown girl. The sister takes on the task of informing the deceased's friends of the death while the daughter cannot bring herself to symbolically accept the demise of her mother. In the midst of all this an old flame messages the sister to say he is still in love with her, but is he messaging the living sister or the dead one?

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