Tatsumi Kumashiro

Tatsumi Kumashiro (; 24 April 1927 – 24 February 1995) was a Japanese film director and screenwriter known for his critically acclaimed, award-winning Roman Porno films.

Kumashiro was the most highly acclaimed director of the early Nikkatsu Roman Porno era, with many box-office successes, and films regularly appearing on the yearly Best Ten lists of the mainstream Kinema Junpo and Eiga Geijutsu film journals. Notable films include Ichijo's Wet Lust (1972) and The Woman with Red Hair (1979). Kumashiro has been called, "the most consistently successful director in Japan's cinematic history," and Allmovie calls him, "the most important Japanese director to emerge during the 1970s."

Life and career

Early life Tatsumi Kumashiro was born on April 24, 1927, in Saga, on Kyūshū—the southernmost of Japan's four main islands. Front Row Life anticipated Kumashiro's later career in its focus on striptease performers. In 1971, facing bankruptcy due to a loss of their audience to television, Nikkatsu decided to devote its facilities almost exclusively to theatrical soft-core pornography. Several directors, not wishing to work in pornography, left the studio, opening up vacant positions.

Nikkatsu gave its Roman porno directors a great deal of artistic freedom in their films, as long as they met the official minimum quota of four nude or sex scenes per hour. Wet Lips was also the first of Kumashiro's many films to use the word "Wet" (nureta) in the title. played the title role for which she won the important Kinema Jumpo prize for best actress. Accepting the best director and best script awards at the same ceremony, Kumashiro commented, "If I can shoot what I like without the pressure of how it will turn out, I am motivated."

Mid career For the next 20 years, Kumashiro directed a string of financial and critical hits unprecedented in Japanese cinematic history, completing ten films in 1972 and 1973 alone. Kumashiro's work was noted for its humanistic themes and for its sympathetic treatment of its characters. Stylistically, his films were experimental, using a variety of avant-garde cinematic devices, and complex narrative structure. Kumashiro also employs censorship as one of the stylistic devices of the film, exaggerating the fogging required by Japanese law by placing black blocks over large areas of the screen.

Lovers Are Wet and The World of Geisha (both 1973) were two more films in which Kumashiro similarly used the censor's tools to make an anti-censorship statement. Street of Joy a.k.a. Red Light District: Gonna Get Out (1974), employing the same setting as Mizoguchi's Street of Shame (1956), illustrates Kumashiro's common use of devices such as internal animated sequences to situate characters, and enka songs to comment on the action. Junko Miyashita won the Hochi News award for best actress of 1979 after starring in Kumashiro's The Woman with Red Hair, which the Weissers, in their Japanese Cinema Encyclopedia: The Sex Films call "one of the very best Nikkatsu pink films." Uncharacteristically for Kumashiro, The Woman with Red Hair has a straightforward narrative structure, but Jasper Sharp writes that it is still a "difficult" film for viewers who are not familiar with Kumashiro's work. The story, in which a woman running away from her husband and their two kids comes to live with a construction worker, can be viewed from many point of views: the one of a changing male friendship, the enormous difficulty of understanding that separates different sexes, or a woman's search for sexual satisfaction, as stated by Kumashiro himself. Sharp notes that "There is certainly more to the film than its superficial reading as a straightforward male fantasy [...] It is a love triangle character study built upon archetypes." The production was an unsuccessful attempt on Wakamatsu's part to emulate the success he had had in collaborating with the French in Nagisa Ōshima's In the Realm of the Senses (1976). The story, dealing with a Japanese man in Germany and his obsessive sexual relationship with a German woman during Hitler's rise to power, also seemed to echo Ōshima's film.

Death Throughout his life Kumashiro was a frail and sickly man. He died of heart and lung failure on February 24, 1995.

Filmography (1968-04-13) (1972-01-29) (1972-10-07) (1973-03-24) (1973-05-23) (1973-07-14) (1973-11-03) (1974-01-03) (1974-02-16) (1974-05-04) (1974-06-29) (1974-09-21) (1974-12-28) (1975-04-05) (1975-06-21) (1975-08-09) (1975-12-24) (1977-02-01) (1977-04-23) (1979-02-17) (1979-06-03) (1979-11-03) (1980-03-29) (1980-11-21) (1980-12-20) (1981-10-23) (1982-10-16) (1983-06-18) (1983-11-30) (1984-04-20) (1985-10-05) (1986-10-25) (1987-04-25) (1988-07-01) (1994-10-01) (1995-04-25)