From a Film-Fascinated Childhood to His Directorial Debut
Yasushi Nakahira was born in 1926 in Takinogawa, Kita-Toshima District, Tokyo Prefecture (now Kita Ward, Tokyo), and grew up in an environment that encouraged the arts. Raised in an artistic family, with Western-style painter Toranosuke Takahashi as his father and a violinist as his mother, Nakahira took his mother's family name. He was absorbed in film from childhood and is said to have studied visual expression in junior high school by repeatedly watching works by directors such as René Clair.
After attending the former-system Kochi High School, he entered the Department of Aesthetics in the Faculty of Letters at the University of Tokyo, but left in 1948 to pursue the film industry in earnest. Following the example of the director Yuzo Kawashima, whom he admired, he took Shochiku Ofuna Studio's assistant-director examination that same year. He was one of eight successful applicants out of 1,500 and joined Shochiku. His cohort included Seijun Suzuki and Zenzo Matsuyama, who would later make names for themselves. As an assistant director, he trained under masters including Kawashima, Akira Kurosawa, and Keisuke Kinoshita, while showing a strong interest in editing. Both Kurosawa and Kawashima took a liking to him, and he demonstrated his talent by being entrusted with directing trailers.
Eager for an early promotion to director, however, Nakahira accepted an invitation from Katsumi Nishikawa and moved to Nikkatsu in 1954. In 1956, the prominent Nikkatsu producer Takiko Mizunoe recognized his talent, and although he was still an assistant director, he made his directing debut with The Man Who Was Targeted. His next film, the youth drama Crazed Fruit (1956), was shot in just 17 days and became a major hit, instantly bringing Nakahira attention as a promising new director.
Prolific Work in Nikkatsu's Golden Age and the Formation of a Distinctive Style
During his Nikkatsu years, Nakahira released entertainment films across a wide range of genres in rapid succession. In light comedies and romances such as Frankie the Milkman (1956), Street Lights (1957), and The Woman Scholar (1959), he displayed a sophisticated sense of pace, while suspense and mystery films such as Who Killed Him? (1957) and Crimson Wings (1958) revealed a harder-edged style. He also made stories of youthful pure love, including Modern Children (1963), starring Sayuri Yoshinaga, while the Yujiro Ishihara romance That Guy and I (1961) became Nakahira's biggest hit.
In 1964, Nakahira released in quick succession a group of films that could be called a new frontier in his later Nikkatsu period. They included the unusual Only on Mondays, with Mariko Kaga as its heroine; the thriller Diary of a Hunter, which contained perverse sexual imagery; the avant-garde psychological drama Flora on the Sand; and the socially conscious melodrama Whirlpool of Women. Each showcased brilliant visual technique, yet none received film awards at the time. Nakahira is reportedly said to have remarked to those around him, “Hitchcock doesn't win awards either.”
As contemporaries such as Yasuzo Masumura and Kihachi Okamoto, as well as Nikkatsu colleagues Shohei Imamura and Kirio Urayama, gained acclaim one after another, Nakahira reportedly began drinking heavily, perhaps out of anxiety that he was being left behind, and sometimes drank on set. Even so, he continued making films steadily and became known as one of Nikkatsu's leading hitmakers.
A Turning Point and Work Overseas
In the late 1960s, Nakahira clashed with company president Kyusaku Hori over filmmaking policies and content, leading to his effective dismissal from Nikkatsu in 1968. At the time, Japan's major film companies had a gentlemen's agreement known as the “Five-Company Agreement,” under which studios generally refrained from hiring a director who had left another company amid trouble. Nakahira personally appealed to Toho and Toei for directing work, but was refused contracts and found himself unable to make new films in Japan.
Having already received invitations from Hong Kong's Shaw Brothers, he decided to seek a base overseas. From 1967 onward, he went to Hong Kong, where he remade his Japanese films Borderless Guy, Crazed Fruit, and Diary of a Hunter, and also directed works including Flying Lady (1969), scripted by Yusuke Watanabe. He continued making films while traveling between Japan and Hong Kong, but after formally leaving Nikkatsu, his ties with the Japanese film industry gradually weakened.
Independence, His Final Years, and His Cinematic Legacy
In 1971, Yasushi Nakahira founded his own independent company, Nakahira Productions, in an attempt to make a comeback. The large-scale suspense film Chimimoryo: A Soul of Demons (1971), produced with screenwriter Kaneto Shindo, whom he had trusted since his assistant-director days, was selected for the competition at the 24th Cannes Film Festival. It was the first Nakahira work formally entered in a major international film festival.
The following year, at the invitation of Shindo's Kindai Eiga Kyokai, he directed the delinquent-girl action film Rika: The Mixed-Blood Girl, followed by its sequel in 1973. In 1974 he was invited by South Korea's Shin Film to coproduce with a Korean team a youth film based on his earlier Crimson Wings. In 1976, with support from the Art Theatre Guild, he released the ambitious Variations, shot entirely on location in France. By this point, however, chronic financial difficulties and production problems continued, and Nakahira is said to have become exhausted both physically and mentally.
In his later years, excessive use of alcohol and sleeping pills damaged Nakahira's health, and he was diagnosed with stomach cancer. Yet his creative drive did not diminish as his illness progressed: he is said to have appeared at production sites lying on a stretcher while receiving an IV. Shortly before his death, a television-drama remake of the Audrey Hepburn suspense film Wait Until Dark became his final work. In a twist of fate, the opportunity came from producer Takiko Mizunoe, who had first chosen Nakahira to direct a film and continued to believe in his talent until the end.
He died of stomach cancer on September 11, 1978, at the young age of 52. Akira Kurosawa and Minoru Shibuya were among those who attended his funeral, and industry colleagues reportedly mourned him by saying, “No one loved film as much as he did.”
Yasushi Nakahira's life was filled with love and passion for cinema. The boy who repeatedly watched René Clair's films in junior high school to study visual expression eventually became an innovative director who brought a fresh breeze to Japanese cinema. He maintained a visually focused style so consistently that he was called “a man of technique,” and took great pride in his cinematic aesthetic, declaring, “I don't think my films move too fast. Other directors' films are slow.”
Nakahira's films skillfully balanced commercialism and the avant-garde. Their very diversity prevented them from receiving sufficient recognition at the time, but their value was reassessed in later years, and they came to occupy a distinctive and important place in Japanese film history. The life of filmmaker Yasushi Nakahira was one devoted to cinema itself, overcoming hardship and setbacks while remaining true to his passion for film.
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