Ishido Toshiro

[BERRY Paul]

The news of Ishido Toshiro’s death is very sad. He wrote scenarios for a number of excellent films including those by Oshima, Yoshida and Jissoji. Some years ago I had the chance to talk with him for some time about his career and various topics. I was surprised that he was reluctant to discuss Imamura’s Black Rain. He said that at the time he had written that script he had not yet read the diary notes of Hirohito’s secrectary. After reading them he said he felt that the emperor had had a greater involvement in events that he had previously assumed and this made him ambivalent about his work on that film. He was more satisfied with the script he wrote for the Japanese part of the Emmy award winning Canadian/Japanese coproduction of the 1995 TV mini-series (distributed on DVD) titled Hiroshima. Filmed in English and Japanese, he had written the script for the Japanese half based on recently released records of the last stages of the war.  It always seemed a shame to me that he did not have more screenwriting opportunities in the last several decades. 

Paul Berry
Kyoto


----- Original Message -----
From: "Dick Stegewerns" <dick.stegewerns at xs4all.nl>
To: KineJapan at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu
Sent: Monday, December 5, 2011 7:56:53 PM GMT +09:00 Japan
Subject: Ishido Toshiro

Dear all,

The Japanese media reported a few days ago that the scenario-writer 
Ishido Toshiro had passed away on 1 November.

Ishido entered Shochiku in 1955, where he worked under Shibuya Minoru, 
and was part of 'the group of seven'. This group of young assistant 
directors, including Oshima Nagisa and Yoshida Kiju, aimed to 
revolutionize Japanese cinema and started out by writing original 
scenarios. They were later mobilised by the studio to bring about the 
Shochiku Nouvelle Vague. Ishido was one of the few (the only one?) of 
the group not to become a director, instead focusing on 
scenario-writing. He made his debut with Oshima's 1960 The Sun's Burial 
and (co-)wrote the scenarios for Oshima's next three films. He quit 
Shochiku when 'Night and Fog in Japan' was pulled from the cinemas by 
the company and joined Oshima in the independent production company 
Sozosha. After starting out on his own in 1965 he worked on three 
scenarios for Yoshida Kiju (ao A Story written in Water), followed in 
the early 1970s by scenarios for three ATG films by Jissoji Akio (ao 
This Transient Life). In the 1960s and 1970s he mainly worked for 
television, including tokusatsu-series as Ultraman and the jidaigeki 
Hissatsu, sometimes appearing on screen himself. His last major 
contribution to the medium of film was his scenario of Imamura Shohei's 
Black Rain (1989), for which he received various awards. During the 
1990s he functioned as president of the Scenario Writers Association and 
principal of Imamura's Nihon Eiga Gakko, but he was more known as an 
essayist. He died at the age of 79 due to cancer.

Dick Stegewerns