Hideo Gosha

was a Japanese director and screenwriter. He was the first Japanese director to make the transition from television to theatrical films, and is best known for his jidaigeki and yakuza films. Beginning with Three Outlaw Samurai in 1964, Gosha directed 24 films in his career, including The Geisha, which earned him the Japan Academy Film Prize for Director of the Year. and Yoshiaki Kawajiri.

Biography Born in Nishigahara, Tokyo Prefecture (present-day Kita, Tokyo), Gosha graduated from high school and served in the Imperial Japanese Navy as an aviator during World War II. After earning a business degree at Meiji University, he joined Nippon Broadcasting System as a reporter in 1953. In 1957 he moved on to the newly founded Fuji Television and rose through the ranks as a producer and director. One of his television shows, the chambara Three Outlaw Samurai, so impressed the heads of the Shochiku film studio that he was offered the chance to adapt it as a feature film in 1964. Following this film's financial success, he directed a string of equally successful chambara productions through the end of the 1960s. His two most critical and popular successes of the period are Goyokin and Hitokiri (also known as Tenchu), both released in 1969 and both considered to be two of the finest examples of the chambara genre. In The Samurai Film, the first book-length study of the genre in English, film historian Alain Silver devoted an entire chapter to Gosha's work and noted that "Tenchu/Hitokiri may, with some justice, be cited as one of the most accomplished examples of the samurai genre since World War II."

During the 1970s, Gosha abandoned pure chambara and turned his productive energies toward films in the yakuza genre but he still produced period sword films such as The Wolves (1971), Bandits vs. Samurai Squadron (1978), and Hunter in the Dark (1979).

In 1979, Gosha's wife disappeared while leaving behind a large amount of debt.

In 1985, the director founded Gosha Production. The following year, Yakuza Wives was a box office success that spawned what Mark Schilling called the most successful yakuza film series of 1980s.

Filmography Feature films 1964 1965 1966 1966 1966 1967 1969 1969 1971 1974 1978 1979 1982 1983 1984 1985 1985 1986 1986 1987 1988 1989 226 (a.k.a. Four Days of Snow and Blood) 1991 1992