Kaneto Shindo - Early Life and Career

Early Life and Career

Shindo was born in 1912 in the Saeki District of Hiroshima Prefecture. He was 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 then 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 USA.

In 1933, Shindo, then living with his brother in Onomichi, was inspired by a film called 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 Shindo get the job in Shinkō Kinema was one of them. He asked Shindo to take his place, and Shindo got a job in Shinko Kinema's art department run by Hiroshi Mizutani. Shindo discovered that very many people wanted to become film directors, including Mizutani, and he decided that he might have a better chance of success as a scriptwriter.

For his work as an art director, Shindo 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. He also wrote a lot of film scripts. His friends severely criticized his scripts, 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 salary of 25 yen a month. However, the script was never filmed.

By the late 1930s he was working as an assistant to Kenji Mizoguchi on several films, most notably being in charge of the sets for The 47 Ronin. He submitted scripts to Mizoguchi, only for Mizoguchi to tell him that he "had no talent" for screenwriting, events dramatized in Shindo's film "The Story of a Beloved Wife". His first film as a screenwriter was the film Nanshin josei in 1940. He was asked to write a script by 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, Shindo exchanged his uniform for cigarettes and made his way back to the Shochiku film studio at Ōfuna. The studio was deserted, and Shindo spent his time in the script department reading the surviving scripts.

In 1946, with a secure job as a scriptwriter at Shochiku, he got married to his first wife, Miyo, via an arranged marriage, and bought a house in Zushi intending to start a family. At Shochiku, Shindo met director Kōzaburō Yoshimura. Their collaboration has been called "one of the most successful film partnerships in the postwar industry. Shindo playing Dudley Nichols to Yoshimura's John Ford." The duo scored a critical hit with A Ball at the Anjo House in 1947. Shindo wrote scripts for almost all of the Shochiku directors except Yasujirō Ozu.

Shindo and Yoshimura were both unhappy at Shōchiku Studios, which viewed the two as having a "dark outlook" on life. In 1950 they both left to form an independent production company, Kindai Eiga Kyokai with actor Taiji Tonoyama, which went on to produce most of Shindo's films.