was a Japanese film director, screenwriter, film producer, and writer, who directed 48 films and wrote scripts for 238. His best known films as a director include Children of Hiroshima, The Naked Island, Onibaba, Kuroneko and A Last Note. His screenplays were filmed by directors such as Kenji Mizoguchi, Kōzaburō Yoshimura, Kon Ichikawa, Keisuke Kinoshita, Seijun Suzuki, and Tadashi Imai.
His films of the first decade were often in a social realist vein, repeatedly depicting the fate of women, while since the seventies, portraits of artists became a speciality. Many of his films were autobiographical, beginning with his 1951 directorial debut, Story of a Beloved Wife, and, being born in Hiroshima Prefecture, he also made several films about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and the effect of nuclear weapons.
Shindō was one of the pioneers of independent film production in Japan, co-founding his own film company Kindai Eiga Kyōkai with director Yoshimura and actor Taiji Tonoyama in 1950. He continued working as a screenwriter, director, and author until close to his death at the age of 100.
Biography Early life Shindō was born in 1912 in the Saeki District of Hiroshima Prefecture as the youngest of four children. His family were wealthy landowners, but his father went bankrupt and lost all his land after acting as a loan guarantor. His older brother and two sisters went to find work, and he and his mother and father lived in a storehouse. His mother became an agricultural labourer and died during his early childhood. His older brother was good at judo and became a policeman. One of his sisters became a nurse and would go on to work caring for atom bomb victims. The other sister married a Japanese-American and went to live in the US.
In 1933, Shindō, then living with his brother in Onomichi, was inspired by Sadao Yamanaka's film Bangaku No isshō to want to start a career in films. He saved money by working in a bicycle shop and in 1934, with a letter of introduction from his brother to a policeman in Kyoto, he set off for Kyoto. After a long wait, he was able to get a job in the film developing department of Shinkō Kinema, which he joined because he was too short to join the lighting department. He was one of eleven workers in the developing department, but only three of them actually worked, the others being members of the company baseball team. At this time he learned that films were based on scripts because old scripts were used as toilet paper. He would take the scripts home to study them. His job involved drying 200-foot lengths of film on a roller three metres long and two metres high, and he learned the relationship between the pieces of film he was drying and the scripts he read.
When Shinkō Kinema moved from Kyoto to Tokyo in November 1935, many of the staff, who were Kyoto locals, did not want to move. The brother of the policeman who had helped Shindō get the job in Shinkō Kinema was one of them. He asked Shindō to take his place, and Shindō got a job in Shinko Kinema's art department run by Hiroshi Mizutani. For his work as an art director, Shindō trained under a local artist. He had a talent for sketching which he used in scouting locations, since cameras were less often used in those days. Shindō discovered that a lot of people wanted to become film directors, including Mizutani, and he decided that he might have a better chance of success as a screenwriter.
Screenwriter years Shindō wrote a lot of film scripts, which were severely criticized by his friends, but he persisted. He submitted a script called Tsuchi o ushinatta hyakushō, about a farmer who loses his land due to the construction of a dam, to a film magazine and won a prize of 100 yen, four times his then monthly salary of 25 yen. However, the script was never filmed.
By the late 1930s he was working as an assistant to Kenji Mizoguchi on several films, most notably as chief assistant director and art director on The 47 Ronin. He submitted scripts to Mizoguchi, only for Mizoguchi to tell him that he "had no talent" for screenwriting, events dramatized years later in Shindō's debut film Story of a Beloved Wife. His first realised screenplay was for the film Nanshin josei in 1940. He was asked to write a script by director Tomu Uchida, but the script was never filmed due to Uchida's untimely military conscription.
In 1942, he joined a Shochiku subsidiary, the Koa Film company under the tutelage of Kenji Mizoguchi. In 1943 he transferred to the Shochiku studio. Later that year, his common-law wife Takako Kuji died of tuberculosis. In April 1944, despite being graded class C in the military physical exam, he was drafted into the navy. The group of 100 men he was serving with were initially assigned to clean buildings. Sixty of the men were selected by lottery to serve on a ship and then died in a submarine attack. Thirty more men were selected by lottery to serve on a submarine and were not heard from again. Four men were selected by lottery to be machine-gunners on freight ships converted to military use, and died in submarine attacks. The remaining six men cleaned the Takarazuka theatre which was then being used by the military, then sent to a camp where they were insulted and beaten.
At the surrender of Japan, Shindō exchanged his uniform for cigarettes and made his way back to the Shochiku film studio at Ōfuna. The studio was deserted, and Shindō spent his time in the script department reading the surviving scripts.
In 1946, with a secure job as a scriptwriter at Shochiku, he married Miyo Shindō via an arranged marriage, and bought a house in Zushi, intending to start a family. At Shochiku, Shindō met director Kōzaburō Yoshimura. According to film historian Donald Richie, this started "one of the most successful film partnerships in the postwar industry, Shindō playing Dudley Nichols to Yoshimura's John Ford." The duo scored a critical hit with A Ball at the Anjo House in 1947. Shindō wrote scripts for almost all of the Shochiku directors except Yasujirō Ozu.
Shindō and Yoshimura were both unhappy at Shochiku, which viewed the two as having a "dark outlook" on life. In 1950 they both left to form an independent production company with actor Taiji Tonoyama, Kindai Eiga Kyokai, which went on to produce most of Shindō's films.
Early career as a film director In 1951, Shindō made his debut as a director with the autobiographical Story of a Beloved Wife, starring Nobuko Otowa in the role of his deceased common-law wife Takako Kuji. Otowa became Shindō's mistress (he was married to his second wife at the time), and would go on to play leading roles in almost all of his films during her life. After directing Avalanche in 1952, Shindō was invited by the Japan Teachers Union to make a film about the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Children of Hiroshima stars Nobuko Otowa as a young teacher who returns to Hiroshima to visit her family's grave and find surviving former students and colleagues. It premiered at the 1953 Cannes Film Festival, being the first Japanese film to deal with the subject of the atomic bomb, which had been forbidden under postwar American censorship. Children of Hiroshima met with acclaim, but also with criticism for its sentimentality and, according to the producing Japan Teachers Union, for not being political enough.
After this international success, Shindō made Epitome in 1953. Nobuko Otowa is Ginko, a poor girl who must become a geisha in order to support her family, and cannot marry the rich client whom she falls in love with because of his family honor. Film critic Tadao Sato said, Shindō had "inherited from his mentor Mizoguchi his central theme of worship of womanhood...Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Shindō's view of women blossomed under his master's encouragement, but once in bloom revealed itself to be of a different hue...Shindō differs from Mizoguchi by idealizing the intimidating capacity of Japanese women for sustained work, and contrasting them with shamefully lazy men."
Between 1953 and 1959 Shindō continued to make political films that were social critiques of poverty and women's suffering in present-day Japan. These included Life of a Woman, an adaptation of Maupassant's Une Vie in 1953, and Dobu, a 1954 film about the struggles of unskilled workers and petty thieves that starred Otowa as a tragic prostitute. Wolf (1955), based on an actual event of a money transport robbed by a group of men and women out of sheer desperation, failed due to its extremely limited release. Still, actor Tonoyama later called his role in Wolf his favourite of all of the director's films. In 1959 Shindō made Lucky Dragon No. 5, the true story of a fishing crew irradiated by an atomic bomb test at Bikini Atoll. The film received the Peace Prize at a Czech film festival, but was not a success with either critics or audiences.
By this time Shindō had formed an established "stock company" of actors and crew that he would work with for the majority of his career. These included actors Nobuko Otowa, Taiji Tonoyama and Jūkichi Uno, composer Hikaru Hayashi and cinematographer Kiyomi Kuroda, who had been fired from the Toei studio for his political beliefs during the "red purge" of the early 1950s, and lost a legal battle for reinstatement.
International success With Kindai Eiga Kyokai close to bankruptcy, Shindō poured what little financial resources he had left into The Naked Island, a film without dialogue which he described as "a cinematic poem to try and capture the life of human beings struggling like ants against the forces of nature." Nobuko Otowa and Taiji Tonoyama are a couple living on a small island with their two young sons and no water supply. Every day they boat to another island to retrieve fresh water to drink and irrigate their crops. The film saved Shindō's company when it was awarded the Grand Prize at the 2nd Moscow International Film Festival in 1961. Shindō made his first ever trip abroad to attend the Moscow film festival, and he was able to sell the film in sixty-one countries.
After making two more films of social relevance (Ningen in 1962 and Mother in 1963), Shindō shifted his focus as a filmmaker to the individuality of a person, specifically a person's sexual nature. He explained: "Political things such as class consciousness or class struggle or other aspects of social existence really come down to the problem of man alone [...]. I have discovered the powerful, very fundamental force in man which sustains his survival and which can be called sexual energy [...]. My idea of sex is nothing but the expression of the vitality of man, his urge for survival." From these new ideas came Onibaba in 1964.
Onibaba stars Nobuko Otowa and Jitsuko Yoshimura as 14th-century Japanese peasant women living in a reed-filled marshland who survive by killing and robbing defeated samurai. The film won numerous awards and the Grand Prix at the Panama Film Festival, and Best Supporting Actress (Jitsuko Yoshimura) and Best Cinematography (Kiyomi Kuroda) at the Blue Ribbon Awards in 1964.