Masaki Kobayashi

Masaki Kobayashi was a Japanese film director and screenwriter, best known for his epic trilogy The Human Condition (1959–1961), the samurai films Harakiri (1962) and Samurai Rebellion (1967), and the horror anthology Kwaidan (1964). He was one of the most prominent and influential filmmakers of post-war Japanese cinema, often tackling themes of social justice, pacifism, and humanism in his works. He was also a co-founder of the directors group Shiki no kai, along with Akira Kurosawa, Keisuke Kinoshita, and Kon Ichikawa, in an attempt to create movies for younger generations. Kobayashi was born in Otaru, Hokkaido, in 1916, and studied East Asian art and philosophy at Waseda University in Tokyo. He began his career in film in 1941 as an apprentice director at Shochiku Studios, but was drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army in 1942 and sent to Manchuria. He resisted the military regime by refusing promotion to a rank higher than private, and was captured by the Allied forces in 1945. He spent a year in a detention camp in Okinawa before returning to Shochiku in 1946 as an assistant to Keisuke Kinoshita. Kobayashi made his directorial debut in 1952 with My Son's Youth, a light drama influenced by Kinoshita. His first major film, The Thick-Walled Room (1953), was a controversial and realistic portrayal of Japanese war criminals, which was shelved by the studio for three years. He then made several films of social criticism, such as I Will Buy You (1956), a study of corruption in professional baseball, and Black River (1957), an expose of the criminal activities around the U.S. bases in Japan. His masterpiece, The Human Condition, was a nine-and-a-half-hour trilogy based on the novel by Junpei Gomikawa, which depicted the effects of World War II on a Japanese pacifist and socialist. The film was a huge critical and commercial success, and established Kobayashi as one of the leading directors of Japanese cinema. He followed it with Harakiri, a jidaigeki film that won the Jury Prize at the 1963 Cannes Film Festival, and Kwaidan, a collection of four ghost stories adapted from Lafcadio Hearn's books, which won the Special Jury Prize at the 1965 Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Kobayashi continued to make films of social and political relevance, such as Samurai Rebellion (1967), a jidaigeki film that criticized the feudal system, The Inheritance (1962), a satire on the greed of a wealthy family, and The Fossil (1975), a drama about an elderly man who sells his body to science. His last film was Tokyo Trial (1983), a documentary about the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. Kobayashi died of a heart attack in 1996, at the age of 80. He was widely regarded as one of the finest and most courageous filmmakers of Japan, and his films have influenced many directors around the world.