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Yoshishige Yoshida

Yoshishige Yoshida
in "Kinema Junpo" April 1962
Born	(1933-02-16)16 February 1933 Fukui, Japan
Died	8 December 2022(2022-12-08) (aged 89) Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan
Occupation(s)	Film director, screenwriter, writer
Years active	1960–2004

Yoshishige Yoshida (吉田 喜重, Yoshida Yoshishige, 16 February 1933 – 8 December 2022), also known as Kijū Yoshida, was a Japanese film director and screenwriter.

Life and career[edit]

Graduating from the University of Tokyo, where he studied French literature, Yoshida entered the Shōchiku studio in 1955 and worked as an assistant to Keisuke Kinoshita,^[1] before debuting as a director in 1960 with Rokudenashi.^[2] He was a central member of what came to be called the『Shōchiku Nouvelle Vague』along with Nagisa Oshima and Masahiro Shinoda,^[3] and his works have been studied under the larger rubric of the Japanese New Wave,^[4] a linkage which Yoshida himself disliked.^[1] Like many of his New Wave cohorts, he felt restricted under the studio system. After Shōchiku's re-editing of his Escape from Japan (1964), he left the studio to start his own production company,^[1] for which he directed such films as Eros + Massacre.^[2]

Between 1960 and 2004, Yoshida directed more than 20 films, some of which starred his wife, actress Mariko Okada.^[1] After a long absence from the screen following the 1973 Coup d'État, he returned with A Promise, which was shown in the Un Certain Regard section of the 1986 Cannes Film Festival.^[5] Two years later, his film Wuthering Heights would compete for the Golden Palm at the 1988 Festival.^[6] In 2002, Women in the Mirror followed after another hiatus of 14 years.^[7] In addition to his theatrical films, Yoshida directed a series of documentaries for Japanese TV.

Yoshida named European cinema as a great influence on his work, most notably the directors Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni, and pre-war French films like the works of Jean Renoir.^[1] He also published a number of books on the topic of cinema, including one on his own cinematic work and an analysis of the films of Yasujirō Ozu.

Yoshida died from pneumonia at a hospital in Shibuya, on 8 December 2022, at the age of 89.^[8][9]

Selected filmography[edit]

Film[edit]

Television[edit]

Selected bibliography[edit]

• Yoshida, Kijū (1984). Mehiko yorokobashiki inyu. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten Publishers. ISBN 978-2-918040-46-0.
• Yoshida, Kiju (2003). Ozu's Anti-Cinema. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan. ISBN 978-1-929280-27-8. OCLC 53013473.
• Yoshida, Kijū (December 2010). "My Theory of Film: A Logic of Self-Negation". Review of Japanese Culture and Society. 22: 104–109.

References[edit]

External links[edit]

• Yoshishige YoshidaatIMDb
• Yoshishige Yoshida at the Japanese Movie Database (in Japanese)