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Juzo Itami

Juzo Itami was a filmmaker who achieved what only a handful of Japanese directors have managed--he made films with a distinctly Japanese flavor that also reached out to the rest of the world and attracted audiences in Japan and elsewhere. Yet, Itami's life included a number of terrors for the man leading in time to his suicide. The suicide seems all the more inexplicable in the West given the relatively mild scandal that seems to have been acing him at the time. However, in this Itami shows himself to be more traditionally Japanese than his satiric films might make the viewer believe, for there is a certain tradition of suicide in Japanese culture that has a long history.

Juzo Itami had connections in the film industry as his father, Mansaku Itami, who died in 1946, was a distinguished director and essayist of the 1930s. However, Juzo did not originally intend to follow in his father's footsteps. His early experience was in such diverse fields as commercial design and boxing, and he was also an actor before becoming a director. he made the change when he was over 50. Itami himself attributed his delayed shift to director to the awe he felt because of his father's reputation. He stated that a father's profession "is like a huge mountain in front of you. It took me 50 years to convince myself I could climb the mountain, too" ("Obituary of Juzo Itami Film Director," 1997). the films itami made were very unlike his father's, and only two of the father's films survive for comparison. Mansaku Itami specialized in costume dramas, while Juzo Itami concentrated on contemporary satire.

Juzo Itami was born in Ehime on the southern island of Shikoku, and he spent much of his childhood and youth there. From the first, the boy was a rebel against the stifling conventions of Japanese society. He attended Matsuyama Minami High School, and one of his friends at the school was the future Nobel prizewinning novelist Kenzaburo Oe...

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Juzo Itami. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 04:34, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1707904.html