He was one of the great figures of the Japanese New Wave, along with Nagisa Oshima, Shohei Imamura and Masahiro Shinoda. He was the most secretive, the most intellectual too. His career espouses the evolution of a system that was industrially very structured for a long time, then went into crisis, especially when young filmmakers tried to find the way to artistic emancipation. Filmmaker Yoshishige Yoshida, or Kiju Yoshida, died in Tokyo on December 8.
He was born in Fukui, in central Japan, on February 16, 1933. After studying French literature at the University of Tokyo, he entered the Shochiku studio in 1955, where he began as an assistant director. He will work in particular with Ozu, to whom he will later devote a book and a documentary, as well as with Keisuke Kinoshita. He also writes film reviews, confessing his enthusiasm for European cinematographic modernity.
In 1960, he signed his first feature film for Shochiku, Good-for-nothing. The Japanese studios, sensitive to the evolution and the rejuvenation of the cinema public, then give their chance to young filmmakers who enter their careers earlier than their elders and tackle fashionable subjects.. The film describes a certain youth, nihilistic, carefree and aimless, through the journey of a young man whom his girlfriend tries to put back on the right track. will follow The Dried Bloodon the manipulation by his company of an employee who attempted to commit suicide, then The end of a sweet nightabout the social ascent of an unscrupulous employee.
In 1962, he produced his first masterpiece, Akitsu Hot Spring. It is a poignant story of impossible love between two beings of different social classes which ends in a failed double suicide (she dies, he survives), a symbolic representation, according to the filmmaker, of “the death of post-war democratic Japan”. The wide screen is used in a masterly way. It was on the set of the film that he met the actress Mariko Okada whom he would marry two years later and who would appear in almost all of her husband’s films.
Sex and Politics
Yoshida continues to work for the Shochiku, which revamped the end ofEscape from Japan, telling how a young man tried to reach America clandestinely by hiding among the bearers of the Olympic flame. History written on waterin 1965, shot for the Nikkatsu studio, more open to sulphurous subjects, is a daring psychosexual portrait of a man torn between his attachment to his mother and his fiancée.
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