Kaneto Shindo - Later Career and Death

Later Career and Death

From 1972 to 1981, Shindo served as chair of the Japan Writers Guild.

In 1975, Shindo made Kenji Mizoguchi: The Life of a Film Director, a documentary about his mentor who had died in 1956. The film uses film clips, footage of the hospital where the director spent his last days and interviews with actors, technicians and friends to paint a portrait of the director. Shindo also wrote a book on Mizoguchi, published in 1976.

In 1977 The Life of Chikuzan was released about the life of blind shamisen player Takahashi Chikuzan.

In 1977 he also travelled to America to film a television documentary, "Document 8.6", about the Hiroshima atomic bomb. He met Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the plane which dropped the bomb, but was not able to interview him on film. The documentary was broadcast in 1978.

In 1978, after the death of his ex-wife, he married Nobuko Otowa.

The Strangling was in competition at the 1979 Venice Film Festival, where Nobuko Otowa won the award for Best Actress.

Edo Porn (Hokusai manga), released in 1981, is about the life of the 18th century Japanese wood engraver Katsushika Hokusai.

In 1984 Shindo made The Horizon based on the life of his sister. The film chronicles her experiences as a poor farm girl who is sold as a mail-order bride to a Japanese American and never sees her family again. She spends time in a Japanese internment camp during World War II and lives a life of difficulty and disappointment.

During production of Shindo's 1995 film A Last Note, Nobuko Otowa was diagnosed with liver cancer. She died in December 1994. A Last Note won numerous awards, including Best Film awards at the Blue Ribbon Awards, Hochi Film Awards, Japan Academy Prizes, Kinema Junpo Awards and Mainichi Film Awards, as well as awards for Best Director at the Japanese Academy, Nikkan Sports Film Awards, Kinema Junpo Awards and Mainichi Film Award.

After Otowa's death, her role as lead actress in Shindo's films was taken over by Shinobu Otake. In Will to Live, a black comedy on the problems of ageing, Otake played a daughter with bipolar disorder of an elderly father who has fecal incontinence, played by Rentarō Mikuni.

According to his son Jiro, Shindo gave up his hobbies of Mahjong, Shogi, and baseball at the age of eighty to concentrate on film-making.

In 2000, at the age of 88, Shindo filmed By Player, a biography of actor Taiji Tonoyama incorporating aspects of the history of Shindo's film company, Kindai Eiga Kyokai, and using footage of Otowa shot in 1994.

In 2003, when Shindo was 91, he directed Owl (Fukurō) based on a true story of farmers sent back from Japanese colonies in Manchuria to unworkable farmland at the end of the Second World War. The entire film was shot on a single set, partly because of Shindo's mobility problems.

Shindo's son Jiro was the producer of his later films, and Kaze Shindo, Jiro's daughter and Shindo's granddaughter, followed in Shindo's footsteps as a film director and scriptwriter. She studied at the Japan Academy of Moving Images, and in 2000 she made her debut film, Love/Juice.

For the last forty years of his life, Shindo lived in a small apartment in Akasaka. After the death of Nobuko Otowa, he lived alone. Although he had been able to walk all over Tokyo in his eighties, he lost mobility in his legs in his nineties. Because of his need for care, Kaze Shindo moved in to his apartment and lived with him for the last six years of his life, acting as his caregiver. Kaze Shindo appears in the credits for Shindo's later films credited as "Kantoku Kenkō Kanri", "Management of director's health".

In 2010, Shindo directed Postcard, a story of middle-aged men drafted for military service at the end of the second world war loosely based on Shindo's own experiences. Postcard was selected as the Japanese submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, but did not make the January shortlist. Due to failing health, Shindo announced that it would be his last film.

From April to May 2012 a committee in the city of Hiroshima presented a tribute to Shindo to commemorate his 100th birthday. This event included screenings of most of his films and special guests such as Shindo himself and longtime admirer Benicio del Toro.

Shindo died of natural causes on May 29, 2012. According to his son Jiro, he was talking in his sleep about new film projects even at the end of his life. He requested that his ashes be scattered on the Sukune island in Mihara where The Naked Island was filmed, and where half of Nobuko Otowa's ashes were also scattered.