is a Japan

Japan

Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

ese movie that was directed by Yoshimitsu Morita in 1983. The movie portrays the changing dynamics of Japanese family life around the time. It focuses on a dysfunctional middle-class nuclear family—each family member is connected not internally, but through the social roles they are expected to take on, and the pressure of these social expectations further accelerates the breakdown in their communication. The Family Game received several awards including the best movie of the year as selected by Japanese critics. Although the movie missed the Japan Academy Prize for the Best Picture (losing out to The Ballad of Narayama

The Ballad of Narayama (1983 film)

is a 1983 Japanese film by director Shohei Imamura. It stars Sumiko Sakamoto as Orin, Ken Ogata, and Shoichi Ozawa. It is an adaptation of the book Narayama bushiko by Shichiro Fukazawa and remake of the 1958 film directed by Keisuke Kinoshita.- Plot :...

), Ichirōta Miyagawa was awarded Newcomer of the Year.

Plot summary

The Family Game presents an exaggerated look of the family structure in 1980s Japan, through the Numata family. The Numata family consists of the father, Kōsuke (Juzo Itami); mother, Chikako (Saori Yuki); and two sons, Shinichi (Jun'ichi Tsujita) and Shigeyuki (Ichirōta Miyagawa). Shigeyuki is a junior high school student who will soon be taking a high school entrance examination. Unlike the high school student brother, Shinichi, who lives up to Kōsuke’s expectations, Shigeyuki’s grades are consistently poor. So the typical white-collar workaholic father finds a private tutor, Yoshimoto (Yusaku Matsuda), for Shigeyuki and imposes all responsibilities for his exam on the tutor. Even though Yoshimoto is a seventh year student of a third-rate university, Shigeyuki’s marks become better and better. This movie explores not only dysfunctional families

Dysfunctional family

A dysfunctional family is a family in which conflict, misbehavior, and often abuse on the part of individual members occur continually and regularly, leading other members to accommodate such actions. Children sometimes grow up in such families with the understanding that such an arrangement is...

 and competitive educational problems, but other issues prevailing in Japan in the 1980s.

Cast

• Yusaku Matsuda
  Yusaku Matsuda
  was a Japanese actor. Yusaku was born in Shimonoseki, Yamaguchi to a Zainichi Korean mother. His father is not known. His date was wrongly recorded as 1950 on his birth records due to a parental error in filing a report.-Career:...
  
   as Katsu Yoshimoto
• Juzo Itami
  Juzo Itami
  , born , was an actor and a popular modern Japanese film director. Many critics came to regard him as Japan's greatest director since Akira Kurosawa. His 10 movies, all of which he wrote himself, are comic satires on elements of Japanese culture....
  
   as Kōsuke Numata
• Saori Yuki
  Saori Yuki
  is a Japanese singer and actress. She was born as Akiko Yasuda in Kiryu, Gunma, Japan and raised in Yokohama. She started her singing career with her older sister Sachiko as a child singer...
  
  as Chikako Numata
• Ichirōta Miyagawa as Shigeyuki Numata
• Junichi Tsujita as Shinichi Numata, the older brother

External links