Yuzo Kawashima

Like many Japanese directors of the period, Kawashima was very prolific, completing 51 films during a career that only lasted 19 years. He died suddenly in 1963 of cor pulmonale. His grave in Mutsu bears one of the lines from Kashima ari: "Saying goodbye is all life is" (Sayonara dake ga jinsei da).

He was a key influence on Shohei Imamura, who worked as his assistant director and referred to him as "my teacher." Imamura later remade Kawashima's 1957 film Sun in the Last Days of the Shogunate as Eijanaika.

Kawashima was born in Mutsu, Aomori in the Shimokita Peninsula. From his youth, he suffered from a paralysis that affected his right leg and arm. He was educated at Meiji University, where he was a member of the film study circle. He entered the Shōchiku studios in 1938 and served as an assistant director under Minoru Shibuya and Keisuke Kinoshita before directing his first film, The Man Who Has Returned, in 1944. At Shōchiku after the war, he made many comedies before switching to Nikkatsu in 1955, when the studio resumed film production. There he made such notable works as Burden of Love (1955), Suzaki Paradise: Red Light District (1956), and Sun in the Last Days of the Shogunate (1957), which was later voted the fifth best Japanese film of all time in Kinema Junpō's poll of 140 film critics and filmmakers in 1999. In his remaining years, Kawashima worked at multiple studios—Daiei, Tokyo Eiga, and Toho— continuing to create satirical works like Temptation on Glamour Island (1959), Room for Let (1959), and The Graceful Brute (1962), as well as literary adaptations like Women Are Born Twice (1961) and The Temple of Wild Geese (1962).

Yūzō Kawashima (川島雄三, Kawashima Yūzō, 4 February 1918 – 11 June 1963) was a Japanese film director, most famous for making tragi-comic films and satires.