The best Shun Sugata’s drama movies

Two Jesuit priests travel to seventeenth century Japan which has, under the Tokugawa shogunate, banned Catholicism and almost all foreign contact.

A former American G.I. joins a yakuza family after his release from prison in post-World War II Osaka.

Nathan Algren is an American hired to instruct the Japanese army in the ways of modern warfare, which finds him learning to respect the samurai and the honorable principles that rule them. Pressed to destroy the samurai's way of life in the name of modernization and open trade, Algren decides to become an ultimate warrior himself and to fight for their right to exist.

Manji, a highly skilled samurai, becomes cursed with immortality after a legendary battle. Haunted by the brutal murder of his sister, Manji knows that only fighting evil will regain his soul. He promises to help a young girl named Rin avenge her parents, who were killed by a group of master swordsmen led by ruthless warrior Anotsu. The mission will change Manji in ways he could never imagine.

In a world with no guns, a mysterious drifter, a bartender and a young samurai plot revenge against a ruthless leader and his army of thugs, headed by nine diverse and deadly assassins.

Izo is an assassin in the service of a Tosa lord and Imperial supporter. After killing dozens of the Shogun's men, Izo is captured and crucified. Instead of being extinguished, his rage propels him through the space-time continuum to present-day Tokyo. Here Izo transforms himself into a new, improved killing machine.

A story of yakuza family from 1999 to 2019. Kenji Yamamoto’s (Gou Ayano) father died from using a stimulant drug. His life fell into desperation. Kenji Yamamoto then joined a crime syndicate. There, he meets the gang's boss Hiroshi Shibasaki (Hiroshi Tachi). Hiroshi Shibasaki reaches out to Kenji Yamamoto and they developed a relationship like father and son. As time passes, Kenji Yamamoto has his own family.

Takeshi Kitano plays a version of himself in which he's a struggling director cycling through a number of different genres in an effort to complete his latest project.

Set in the icy wilderness of Hokkaido during the early days of the Meiji era, where the brutal warden of Kabato Prison terrorizes convicts sentenced to forced labor to build the roads needed to open up the territory.

A drama based on the 1985 plane crash that caused 520 deaths, the worst aviation event in Japanese history.

The story follows a trio of Japanese youths of Chinese descent who escape their semi-rural upbringing and relocate to Shinjuku, Tokyo, where they befriend a troubled Shanghai prostitute and fall foul of a local crime syndicate. Like many of Miike's works, the film examines the underbelly of respectable Japanese society and the problems of assimilation faced by non-ethnically Japanese people in Japan.

Shuji is an uncompromising young filmmaker at odds with Japanese society. One day he learns that his loan shark brother, who had helped to finance his films, has been executed by his own yakuza gang for failing to repay his debts. Described as a love poem to Japanese films of the past, as well as a protest at the present, CUT is an exploration of one man’s obsessive relationship with cinema.

On board at the boat Kanikosen, where fish and crabs preserves, forced workers to work under miserable conditions, with minimum wages. Some can not cope with conditions and even death from malnutrition, and is also the supervisor of the more vicious variety. Shinjo, one of the employees, trying to convince the others that they will get good luck and fortune in his next life, and persuades them because they commit suicide to get there faster. It ends, however, in a single major failure. Rather than flee Shinjo being picked up by a Russian ship. Once there, he is overwhelmed by the social conditions that are completely different from those he has just left and decided therefore to return to Kanikosen to save their employees.

After the Great Kanto earthquake in 1923, a troupe of female sumo wrestlers arrive in Tokyo.

Tendokai's Washio Kazuma, the underboss of Japan's largest crime syndicate, goes on the warpath when his blood brother and family turn up dead.

In 16th century Japan, a young man has to choose between becoming a master steel maker like his father and grandfather before him, or becoming a samurai so that he can help protect his village from attacks by the various clans which want the high-quality steel made there.

In the early 1200s, Dogen brought Chinese Zen philosophy to Japan, and established the Japanese Zen school of Buddhism. He taught that a person was capable of realizing Buddhahood within himself, by way of Zazen. Zazen is extended hours of sitting and meditating to achieve a state of “Mu” (nothingness, or empty existence).