Film director arrested

[Aaron Gerow]

The news services reported that the film director Imazeki Akiyoshi was 
arrested on a charge of soliciting prostitution from a minor. Imazeki 
was one of the generation of independent 8mm filmmakers who emerged 
into feature filmmaking in the early 1980s. His 8mm works won praise 
from a variety of critics and filmmakers, and one of his supporters, 
Obayashi Nobuhiko, engaged him in his first commercial feature film, 
Aiko 16-sai (1983). Now somewhat ironically, Imazeki carved a niche as 
a director of shojo, or young teenage girls, making numerous idol 
movies since the 1980s and even working on music videos for such idol 
groups as Morning Musume. I can't help but quote the critic Okubo 
Ken'ichi's commentary from the 1988 Kinejun Kantoku Zenshu:

"The 8mm camera, which sold in large numbers from the mid-1970s after 
being equipped with sync sound, helped produce some great filmmakers 
among high school and college students, but one of the few to vividly 
present on screen the special quality of the 8mm camera to become an 
extension of not only the filmmaker's eye, but simultaneously his hands 
as feelers, was Imazeki."

Is this life imitating art?

By the way, can anyone think of any other Japanese directors who were 
arrested? There's of course Kamei Fumio during the war, but any others?

Aaron Gerow
KineJapan owner

Assistant Professor
Film Studies Program/East Asian Languages and Literatures
Yale University

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