Samurai Pirates

2013

Japanese

4.4

♡ 3

Ken'ichi Ohmori Director

Wakana Aoi as

Naomasa Musaka as

Kôtarô Koizumi as

Takashi Naitô as

Long ago, Japan was home to several navies. The Murakami Navy, said to be the strongest of them all, once defeated even Nobunaga, and refused to join Hideyoshi, choosing to pursue their love of freedom and the sea. The man who led these samurai of the sea was the great pirate lord Takeyoshi Murakami. And now Kaede Murakami, a descendant of Takeyoshi, is an elementary schooler living on an island. On her 12th birthday, Kaede discovers a flute in her family's storehouse that has been passed down through the Murakami family for generations. The flute holds the key to finding the Murakami Navy's buried treasure. This adventure story tells the tale of an ancient pirate and his descendant forming a connection that transcends time, uniting the island.

The Seburi Story

6.3

Sadao Nakajima Director

Nenji Kobayashi as Army

Ai Saotome as Hana

Ken Mitsuishi as Jiro

Takashi Naitô as Kazuo

The culturally isolated, nomadic Seburi people of western Japan are the subject of this tragedy about a few of the community's members who especially experience difficulties as modern Japan encroaches on their world. The setting is World War II, and conflicts have already arisen when the military police come to take Seburi men away into the army. Still following their own customs that can be harsh at times, and are particularly cruel to women (women must give birth alone and unaided, a woman's adultery is punished by burying her up to her neck in the earth and then leaving her for days), the Seburi are mainly treated with fear and animosity by the non-Seburi townspeople of the region. Along with the hardships arising from cultural clashes, nature's own vagaries present other challenges to the Seburi -- who still lived in tents until the 1950s. Winter avalanches and snowstorms cause as much havoc as the tensions engendered by the slow encroachment of the modern world.