The best Takehiko Ono’s comedy movies

Unemployed 35 year old Sakurai aspired to become an actor, but failed miserably. He decides to end his own life, but first he goes to purify himself at a public bathhouse. While there, he meets the very prosperous Kondo, who subsequently suffers a fall, erasing his memory. On a whim, Sakurai switches locker keys, steals the man's belongings, and decides to pass himself off as Kondo. What Sakurai does not know is that Kondo runs an illegal business, which brings him into contact with ornery Yakuza members. Meanwhile, Kondo has been convinced that he is actually the failed actor Sakurai and he faces the dismal reality of that life with increasing bewilderment. Fortunately, at the hospital he meets the lovely Kanae who, while yearning for marriage, goes out of her way to help "Sakurai" pull himself together. Eventually Kondo regains his memory, but before he can make a new life with Kanae, he has to solve the many problems caused by the theft of his identity.

A radio play is minutes away from airing at a Tokyo radio station. It is a weepy melodrama written by housewife Miyako, the winner of a competition run by the station. Suddenly, the hot-tempered lead actress Nokko decides she wants the name of her character to be Mary Jane and not Ritsuko. This leads to a chain of events which, live on-air, changes the play completely, taking it from an autobiographical fishing village romance to an ersatz American gangster drama cum disaster epic.

After Detective Shunsaku Aoshima is promoted to section chief he has the daunting task of dealing with eight cases at the same time, which includes a murder case, bomb threat, and a bus hijacking. Complications also arise between Detective Aoshima and his juniors.

Aoshima, a police detective working in the Bayside Precinct, is continually frustrated by the hierarchy and red tape that plague the system. His friend Muroi is climbing the ladder of the police bureaucracy. Muroi has made a pact with Aoshima that while Aoshima looks after the streets, Muroi would make life easier for the cops on the beat. One day in Bayside, a series of events turns the small station upside down. A corpse is found in the river, then the Police Commissioner is kidnapped, leading to the Metropolitian Police Department to take over the investigation which is led by Murai. Will he be true to his pact with Aoshima and co-operate with the local police? In the meantime, the murder investigation leads to a morbid web page and a deadly chat room in cyberspace...

Ryoro Kurojima (Sadao Abe) is the director of a Tokyo apology center. His job is to teach others how to apologize. Ryoro Kurojima solves problems by using his apology techniques on anything from simple arbitration to a national crisis.

Hiroki, Koji, and Shinya are engineers working at an air conditioning manufacturer ordered to develop a robot to boost the company's reputation. Just before they are due to present their invention, the robot is destroyed in a freak accident. With little time left, the three are forced to go for the last resort: Build a hollow robot suit and put a human being in it. After an audition, the only qualified man for the job is Suzuki, a cranky and lonely retiree who needs the job to kill time. After a public display that puts the robot on the headlines, the three engineers are forced to drag Suzuki on a publicity tour in order to keep up their façade. However, their plans are complicated when passionate robotics student Yoko is thrown into the mix.

Renji Ishibashi, starring in the movie for the first time in 18 years, plays a hero with two faces, a dull novelist and a legendary killer. Susumu Ichikawa, an obsolete writer with no manuscript at all, had another face - a legendary hitman. But the truth of the matter is... he had never shot a person. One day, he receives a murder request from a friend. Seeing this as an opportunity to achieve the ideal hard-boiled novel, he decides to hire a real hitman and demands that he report to him the assassination situation as it was.