Shinobu Hashimoto, the screenwriter who has died at the age of 100, collaborated with director Akira Kurosawa on some of the most famous Japanese films of the 20th century.
Hashimoto was a 30-year-old accountant, his long-held ambition to be a professional screenwriter unfulfilled, when he wrote the first draft of Rashomon (1950).
It was adapted from a story set in 9th-century Japan where a court of inquiry tries to establish the truth about the murder of a samurai and the rape of his wife. Four witnesses (including the dead man, via a medium) give contradictory testimonies and questions raised ultimately go unanswered.
A philosophical disquisition on the unknowability of truth, as well as an action adventure and a courtroom drama, the film has become a classic. It also gave its name to the "Rashomon effect", the phenomenon of witnesses giving irreconcilable accounts.
The film was not well received in Japan, and when it was chosen to be shown at the Venice Film Festival in 1951 the government objected, feeling that it was too Western in style.
Nevertheless, it won the festival's Golden Lion award and received an honorary Oscar in 1952. Hashimoto recalled in old age that the film's warm reception in the West seemed like an act of forgiveness towards the Japanese, "casting something like a ray of light on battered souls whose hopes had been lost in the war".
Among the 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.
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. Hashimoto is survived by a son and two daughters.
1918-2018..