Pre-war Asakusa was a riotous district of cabarets, dance-halls and brothels - a striking backdrop for Shimazu's story of innocence and experience. Pretty, young Reiko is the new dancer in an infamous theatre troupe, and her fellow performers try to protect her virtue in a land of vice. Meanwhile, an ageing actor wants to be a hero off stage as well as on, and the troupe matriarch Marie has to keep them all together.
Two lost souls visiting Tokyo -- the young, neglected wife of a photographer and a washed-up movie star shooting a TV commercial -- find an odd solace and pensive freedom to be real in each other's company, away from their lives in America.
An American actor in Tokyo struggles to find purpose until he lands an unusual gig: working for a Japanese 'rental family' agency, playing stand-in roles for strangers.
An American woman is stranded in Tokyo after breaking up with her boyfriend. Searching for direction in life, she trains to be a ramen chef under a tyrannical Japanese master.
In the wake of Pearl Harbor, a young lieutenant leaves his expectant wife to volunteer for a secret bombing mission which will take the war to the Japanese homeland.
The policy-racket reaches it lean, bony fingers into the ivy-towers of a large university and the underworld trying to “beat the numbers-racket” with applied mathematics.
This travelogue begins at Bangkok's rail depot, a center of Indo-Chinese commerce. Next the narrator talks about Buddhism as the camera shows us some of Bangkok's many temples.
