Akiyuki Nosaka

Akiyuki Nosaka was a Japanese writer, singer, lyricist, and politician who was born in 1930 in Kamakura, Kanagawa. He was adopted by his maternal aunt and her husband, a Harimaya family, and grew up in Kobe, Hyogo. He lost his biological father, his adoptive father, and two sisters during World War II, and later based his short story "Grave of the Fireflies" on his experiences of the firebombing of Kobe and the death of his younger sister from malnutrition. He also wrote "American Hijiki", a story about the cultural clash between Japan and the US after the war. He won the Naoki Prize in 1967 for these two stories. He was also known for his novel "The Pornographers", which was translated into English and adapted into a film by Shohei Imamura. He used the pen name Yukio Aki as a broadcasting writer and Claude Nosaka as a chanson singer. He was elected to the House of Councillors in 1983 and served until 1989. He suffered a stroke in 2003 and continued to write a column for the Mainichi Shimbun until his death in 2015. He was also a vocal critic of the Japanese government's revision of the pacifist constitution and the national security legislation. He was regarded as one of the most influential writers of the post-war generation in Japan.