Hasebe Yasuharu

[Aaron Gerow]

The news services are reporting that the action film director, Hasebe  
Yasuharu, passed away on the 14th from pneumonia. He was 77.

Hasebe went to Waseda before joining the Nikkatsu film studio in  
1958. There he worked as an assistant director to such greats as  
Suzuki Seijun and Nomura Takashi before debuting as a director in  
1966 with Kobayashi Akira's outrageous Black Tight Killers (Ore ni  
sawaru to abunai ze). He was one of the central directors of late  
Nikkatsu Action, with Mina-goroshi no kenju and Shima wa moratta  
being two of Nikkatsu's best hard boiled films of the late 1960s.  
Hasebe often participated on the scripts using the name Fujii  
Takashi. As Nikkatsu moved to New Action in the 1960s, Hasebe helmed  
several of the Stray Cat Rock (Nora neko rokku) films, including Sex  
Hunter, which is a brilliant exploration of sex, violence, race and  
nationalism. Although he made the important Jack the Ripper (Boko  
kirisaku jakku), he never fit with Roman Poruno and switched to doing  
mostly TV from the 1980s on. His obituaries all note Abunai deka and  
the recent hit Aibo as his major films (both related to TV), but it's  
his Nikkatsu works that are worth a second look.


Aaron Gerow
KineJapan owner

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

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