Shochiku Co

The plot: A Samurai warrior travels from Japan to the American West, confronts the people who live there and ends up joining a tribe of Native Americans. That's the summary of "East Meets West," an upcoming movie from the Japanese studio Shochiku Co., one of the country's three major television and film entertainment companies. But it is also an appropriate metaphor to describe Kazuyoshi Okuyama, Shochiku's executive vice president and son of Chief Executive Toru Okuyama.

The plot: A Samurai warrior travels from Japan to the American West, confronts the people who live there and ends up joining a tribe of Native Americans. That's the summary of "East Meets West," an upcoming movie from the Japanese studio Shochiku Co., one of the country's three major television and film entertainment companies. But it is also an appropriate metaphor to describe Kazuyoshi Okuyama, Shochiku's executive vice president and son of Chief Executive Toru Okuyama.

Grand Kabuki Tour: Shochiku Co. Ltd. of Tokyo has announced that a 65-member Grand Kabuki company will visit 12 cities across the United States this summer--including Southern California stops in Costa Mesa at the Orange County Performing Arts Center and in Los Angeles at Japan America Theater. This will be the largest American tour in history for this classic Japanese performing ensemble.

The casting of Richard Gere as a Japanese-American in Akira Kurosawa's "Rhapsody in August" has been described as "far-fetched" by an Asian American actors group that has been sharply critical of the similar casting of a Caucasian in a Eurasian role in the Broadway musical "Miss Saigon." The Assn.

Scenes in Bernardo Bertolucci's "The Last Emperor" depicting the Rape of Nanking, Japan's four-day massacre in that Chinese city before World War II, will be cut from the film when it opens in Tokyo on Saturday. The Manchester Guardian reported this week that Bertolucci and others involved in the film felt that Japanese audiences might be offended by the re-enactment of the 1937 event, when an estimated 430,000 Chinese civilians were raped or murdered by the Imperial Japanese Army.

The Scene: Tuesday's American premiere of the Japanese film "The Mystery of Rampo" at the Directors Guild. That the erotic fantasy/mystery was last year's highest grossing live-action film in Japan (where movie tickets cost $22) gave the opening added zing. The Buzz: To many American viewers, the film was beautiful, but inscrutable. To one guest, it was "like Sherlock Holmes meets Barton Fink." To another: "David Lynch meets Luis Bunuel on acid."

"The Last Emperor," Bernardo Bertolucci's 2 3/4-hour epic about Aisin Gioro Pu Yi, the last emperor of China and a one-time puppet of Japanese occupation forces, opened in Tokyo to largely positive reviews and an enthusiastic box office. But the furor over its missing 15 seconds continues. Before screening the film, the Japanese distributor, Shochiku Fuji Co.

Italian film director Bernardo Bertolucci said Thursday that Japanese distributors of "The Last Emperor" had restored its sequences on the so-called Rape of Nanking in 1937 after he and Chinese officials objected.

The Japanese movie "Hachi-Ko" (at the Little Tokyo Cinema) shows us an example of love and fidelity so extreme that it seems, in our modern context, anachronistic. But this meticulously fashioned tale of devotion between dog and master evades most of the pitfalls of sentimentality; it even survives the gaucherie of cherry blossom fantasies and a saccharine disco song pasted over its witheringly poignant last shot. It becomes a movie to break your heart.

Japan's Shochiku Co. is surely the last major studio in the world still making the old-fashioned woman's picture on a regular basis. Its latest, "Women Who Do Not Divorce" (opening Friday at Little Tokyo Cinema 1), would have been perfect for Joan Fontaine and Olivia de Havilland back in the '40s. Its two meaty roles are in fact played by sisters, Chieko and Mitsuko Baisho, durable and talented stars who have never before appeared together on the screen.

In the past, the arrival of a film like "Sure Death 3" (Little Tokyo Cinema I) would have been routine, but nowadays the opening of a new Japanese period picture is an occasion, for the genre is almost--but happily not quite--as dead as the Western. "Sure Death 3" is satisfyingly familiar, well done, good-looking and timeless in its appeal to aficionados. As the title suggests, Makoto Fujita's Mondo Nakamura, intrepid policeman in the Edo (Tokyo) of 1820, is back for the third time.