Anecdotes

Keisuke Kinoshita, Akira Kurosawa, Kon Ichikawa and Masaki Kobayashi founded their own company, Yonki No Kai ('Club of The Four Knights'), in 1969 to assert an independent film making process and escape the studio system. They managed to produce only one movie, Kurosawa's Dodeskaden (1970).

Attended art classes at Waseda University. His work with the Shochiku film company was interrupted by becoming a POW during the Sino-Japanese war. His most famous film, the epic "The Human Condition", set in a Manchurian forced labor camp, was partly based on his experience of wartime incarceration. With films like "Hara-Kiri" and "Kwaidan", he came to be feted in the 1960s as a master of both the samurai movie and the supernatural genre.

Keisuke Kinoshita is his mentor.

Member of the jury at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1969.

Biography in: John Wakeman, editor. "World Film Directors, Volume Two, 1945-1985". Pages 527-533. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1988.

Cousin of Kinuyo Tanaka.