Kaneto Shindo - Early Career As A Film Director

Early Career As A Film Director

In 1951, Shindo 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 threw away a career as a studio star to appear in Shindo's film. She became Shindo's lover, and would go on to play leading roles in almost all of the films Shindo directed during her life. After directing Avalanche in 1952, Shindo 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 for the first time since the bomb was dropped to find surviving former students. Both controversial and critically acclaimed on its release, it premiered at the 1953 Cannes Film Festival. It was the first Japanese film to deal with the subject of the atomic bomb, which had been forbidden under postwar American censorship.

After this international success, Shindo made Shukuzu 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 Shindo had "inherited from his mentor Mizoguchi his central theme of worship of womanhood...Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Shindo's view of women blossomed under his master's encouragement, but once in bloom revealed itself to be of a different hue...Shindo 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 Shindo continued to make political films that were social critiques of poverty and women's suffering in present day Japan. These included Onna no issho, 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. In 1959 he made Lucky Dragon Number 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 Shindo had formed an established "stock company" of actors and crew that he would work with for the majority of his career. This included actors Nobuko Otowa, Taiji Tonoyama and Kei Sato, composer Hikaru Hayashi and cinematographer Kiyomi Kuroda, who had been fired from the Toei studio for his political beliefs in the "red purge" of the early 1950s, and lost a legal battle for reinstatement.