Asian Drama

The joint Korean-Japanese movie "Virgin Snow",starring Korean actor Lee Joon-ki and Japanese actress Aoi Miyazaki, is a story about a high school student named Min (Lee), who goes to Japan to study and falls in love with a young girl named Naname (Miyazaki), whose melancholic personality captivates his heart. The movie also is entitled "First Love" in Japanese.

Romeo, A.K.A. Kosuke Matsuyama (Shun Shioya), is a second-year high school student. A nice, normal, nonviolent type, he suddenly finds himself in the middle of a rampaging crowd of Korean boys, outraged by insults perpetrated by several of his idiotic class-mates on two Korean girls. He makes a narrow escape, but soon after, he and his best bud Yoshio (Keisuke Koide) are sent by their home-room teacher to invite the Korean students to a friendly soccer game as a way of restoring the peace. Trembling like black-uniformed leaves, they enter enemy territory, where Kosuke encounters a doll-faced, but serious-looking girl (Erika Sawajiri) playing a Korean folk song, "Imjin River," on a flute. He and Yoshio are also nearly lynched by her older brother Lee Ang Son (Sosuke Takaoka) and his gang, but he is already smitten -- and eager to learn that haunting tune. The story concentrates on Kosuke's struggle to not only master a song, but win the love of a girl who seems to live in an alien, hostile world. Meanwhile, Ang Son and his crew are street-fighting with Japanese toughs as if playing a contact sport, with one side scoring hits, then the other. He is macho to a fault, but when he learns that his sweet-heart (Kyoko Yanagihara) is pregnant and determined to keep the baby, he faces a choice that makes him quail: grow up or cop out.

Based on a 1993 novel by Naoki Award-winner Sato Jiro, the film revolves around a top secret mission to hide Japanese treasures near the conclusion of World War II which would currently be valued at around 200 trillion yen.

Sakai Masato stars as Major Mashiba, an intelligence officer with Japan's Imperial Guard. Together with First Lieutenant Koizumi (Fukushi Seiji) and Master Sergeant Mochizuki (Nakamura Shido), Mashiba attempts to execute secret orders to hide the treasures from the occupying forces of Douglas MacArthur in the hopes of funding the nation's reconstruction at some point in the future.

Out of necessity, 20 young schoolgirls are enlisted to help with the mission without being informed of the details. Santamaria Yusuke plays the girls' teacher and Yachigusa Kaoru plays one of the girls in the present day.

Masaru, a 23-year-old who has a passive attitude toward life in general, professes himself as a "genius odd-job-man" but is screwing up all of the time. He is freeloading off his girlfriend Kiriko, who works as a tattoo artist. One day, he is offered to do a rather eccentric job from an otaku-looking public employee named Nirasawa, who claims that Masaru's voice is necessary in activating a giant robot named Land Zeppelin. He goes on straight-faced that the Earth is about to be attacked by Saturnians, and the robot is necessary in the fight against them. At first, Masaru ignores this far-fetched story, but one day he is framed in a dangerous job he takes on together with his friend Kou, and is driven into a tight squeeze. What will happen to Masaru? Does this robot Land Zeppelin really exist?

Koji Namiki, a talented young pitcher, who had won the National High School Baseball Championships enters university, but soon afterwards injures his elbow. He and his teammates work hard to get back on the field placing all his hopes on a new slow-ball, "the magic pitch." However, the outbreak of WWII wipes out the baseball ambitions from everyone. They join the military and in the navy undergo the severe training that prepares them for death. Death awaits them in a "kaiten" (special attack submarine or "human torpedo") within the gloomy ocean depths, but Koji never gives up his dream of the "magic pitch."