Erotic Film
Regarded by many as Japan’s answer to Brigitte Bardot — both for her glamorousness and vaguely European looks (she wasn’t actually mixed-race) — Mari Atsumi became one of Japanese cinema’s most prominent sex symbols of the early 1970s. As the daughter of Daiei actors Susumu Atsumi and Reiko Wakamiya, she too joined the studio
Pinku softcore porn films were big business for Japanese studios throughout the 1970s; so lucrative were these films, that when Nikkatsu was on the verge of bankruptcy in 1971, they were able to save themselves by focusing almost their entire output on the soon-to-be highly successful Roman Porno line. It wasn’t just big studios such
Back in the 1970s, the names of Reiko Ike and Miki Sugimoto were on everyone’s lips. Hailed as the “queens of porno”, they not only became exploitation cinema royalty but burst through into mainstream pop culture. If you bought any random issue of Heibon Punch, Weekly Playboy, or one of the countless other men’s magazines
Nowadays manga adaptations are commonplace, and often fairly inevitable – however, this wasn’t always the case. Prior to the 1970s, adaptations of manga were a rare sight, especially live-action ones. In 1969, predated by just two other live-action adult manga adaptations (Ko Kojima’s Sennin Buraku & Teruo Tanaka’s Crimson Bat), Daiei would take a step
A Kite (or simply Kite to Western audiences) is a 1998 OVA anime, written and directed by Yasuomi Umetsu. Originally released as two separate episodes on VHS, all subsequent DVD releases have been edited into one cohesive movie. The story follows Sawa, a young girl who was orphaned as a child and taken in by