In 1923, teenager Kim Shun-Pei moves from Cheju Island, in South Korea, to Osaka, in Japan. Along the years, he becomes a cruel, greedy and violent man and builds a factory of kamaboko, processed seafood products, in his poor Korean-Japanese community exploiting his employees.
An alcoholic civil servant wakes up under a cherry tree in Tokyo next to a bar hostess with whom he's impulsively made a suicide pact. Though he's now changed his mind, he agrees to travel with her to Hokkaido, her preferred site for ending it all.
A man serving a sentence in a minimum-security prison. Life in the jail is rigid and organized, eventually leading all of the cell-mates to abandon their individuality.
A middle school teacher falls in love with a hostess and they end up quickly getting engaged and moving in together.
A humorous wedding story fueled by a rather no-good father and son, disguised as the old and new “good guys.” The father Nobuo, and his son Tamio, are unable to mature, unable to break the parent-child roles, have no sense of responsibility, and keep holding on to the past. The pair is overwhelmed by all the colorful characters around them telling them what to do. They go to strenuous and humorous efforts to make Tamio’s wedding an event to remember.
Abandoned by his father as a boy, Yuta grows up as the foster son of a restaurant owner and takes over the restaurant at the owner's death. Cheery, always smiling, always helpful, Yuta is known as Yama-chan, the friend everyone turns to. When Yuta discovers he had a hitherto unknown baby brother, he sets out to track him down. But the baby brother, Yusuke, has grown up to be half of a successful comedy team, the Kinjo Brothers, and Yusuke's professional "brother" has just written a best-selling book about their adventures growing up together. Yuta's appearance on the scene threatens to reveal that the book is a complete fiction and to set all three "brothers" into conflict with each other.
