Screenwriter had hand in classic Japanese films
Rashomon, Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood
Shinobu Hashimoto, the screenwriter who has died aged 100, collaborated with the director Akira Kurosawa on some of the most famous Japanese films of the 20th century, including Rashomon, Seven Samurai and Throne of Blood.
Hashimoto was a 30-yearold accountant when he wrote the first draft of Rashomon (1950). It was among a sheaf of scripts he sent on spec to Kurosawa, one of Japan’s leading filmmakers. Some time after he read it Kurosawa remembered it when he was looking for a new project: “The memory of it jumped out of one of those creases in my brain and told me to give it a chance.”
In Rashomon, adapted from a story by Ryunosuke Akutagawa and set in ninthcentury Japan, a court of inquiry tries to establish the truth about the alleged murder of a samurai and the rape of his wife; four witnesses (including the dead man, via a medium) give contradictory testimonies, and the questions raised ultimately go unanswered.
A disquisition on the unknowability of truth, as well as an action adventure and a courtroom drama, the film has become a classic and regularly features on lists of the 100 best pictures ever made; it also gave its name to the “Rashomon effect,” the phenomenon of witnesses giving unreconcilable accounts of an event.
Initially the film was not well-received in Japan, and when chosen to be shown at the Venice Film Festival in 1951 the government objected, feeling it was too western to be properly representative of Japanese cinema.
Nevertheless, it won the festival’s Golden Lion award and went on to receive an honorary Oscar in 1952, making Kurosawa’s international reputation and sparking a new enthusiasm in the west for Japanese cinema.
Hashimoto recalled in old age that the film’s warm reception in the west seemed like an act of forgiveness, “casting something like a ray of light on battered souls whose hopes had been lost in the war.”
After the success of Rashomon, Hashimoto joined Kurosawa’s regular stable of screenwriters. The director’s favoured method was to have his team of writers holed up in an inn working furiously round a table for two weeks or so until the script was finished.
Emotions would run high in this hothouse atmosphere. On one occasion Kurosawa became so upset about the script that he tore up the 30 pages his writers had already produced, forcing them to start again from scratch.
“Mr. Kurosawa’s face was utterly crimson with rage, his expression that of a richly painted red demon,” Hashimoto recalled.
The first film he worked on after Rashomon was Ikiru (1952), inspired by Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich and starring Takashi Shimura as a terminally ill civil servant who desperately wants to atone for a lifetime as a soulless bureaucrat.
Hashimoto observed that although it was not the most famous film he worked on, it was often the one best liked by professional filmmakers.
Among the other Kurosawa films Hashimoto contributed to were Seven Samurai (1954), a historical epic that inspired The Magnificent Seven and countless other action films; Throne of Blood (1957), which transposed the plot of Macbeth to feudal Japan; and The Hidden Fortress (1958), a picaresque adventure that George Lucas claimed as a direct influence on Star Wars.
Hashimoto found Kurosawa’s working methods stressful and exhausting, and often at the end of a scriptwriting session he vowed that it would be their last collaboration. His respect for Kurosawa’s genius helped him to overcome his qualms initially, but in the 1960s they worked together only sporadically and thereafter not at all.
Kurosawa continued to make films into the 1990s, but Hashimoto felt none of them matched the pictures on which he had worked, a view many critics shared.
Shinobu Hashimoto was born on April 18, 1918, in Hyugo Prefecture on Honshu. At 18 he joined the army but contracted tuberculosis during training and spent four years in a sanatorium.
He had no particular interest in cinema but one of his fellow patients, a film buff, lent him a magazine, and Hashimoto decided he could write something better than the sample screenplay it contained. He asked his friend to name the greatest Japanese screenwriter, and was given the name Mansaku Itami.
Hashimoto eventually sent a script about his army experiences to Itami, who became his mentor, giving him personal tuition over several years. Itami died in 1946, but not before alerting friends in the film business to his talented pupil’s potential.
His sample scripts were recommended to Kurosawa, who arranged to meet him in 1949. Hashimoto wrote of their first meeting: “Mr. Kurosawa ... was astoundingly tall. I especially remember his graceful, deeply-chiselled features ... We spoke for only one or two minutes, and then I put my manuscript in my bag.”
Kurosawa, however, reported in his memoirs that: “This Hashimoto ... visited my home, and I talked with him for hours. He seemed to have substance, and I took a liking to him.”
Hashimoto wrote more than 80 screenplays during his long career. His most admired film, apart from his work for Kurosawa, was Masaki Kobayashi’s Harakiri (1962), about a wandering samurai ultimately bound by his feudal code to kill himself.
In 1974 he set up his own production company, Hashimoto Pro, and also occasionally directed films, notably I Want To Be a Shellfish (1959), an antiwar drama. In 2008 he wrote the screenplay for a well-received remake; it was his last film.
In 2006 he published a memoir, Compound Cinematics: Akira Kurosawa and I, in which he observed that when he and Kurosawa were working well together, it felt that they were looking at things with a “compound eye.”
“I can’t help but feel that all of it was somehow predestined,” he wrote.
In 2013 Hashimoto received the Writers’ Guild of America’s Jean Renoir Award for lifetime achievement jointly with Kurosawa and their main writing partners Ryuzo Kikushima and Hideo Oguni, all of whom had by then predeceased him.
Shinobu Hashimoto is survived by a son and two daughters.
MR. KUROSAWA’S FACE WAS UTTERLY CRIMSON WITH RAGE, HIS EXPRESSION THAT OF A RICHLY PAINTED RED DEMON.