Shinobu Hashimoto (Japanese: 橋本 忍, Hashimoto Shinobu; 18 April 1918 – 19 July 2018) was a Japanese screenwriter, director and producer. A frequent collaborator of Akira Kurosawa, he wrote the scripts for critically acclaimed films such as Rashomon and Seven Samurai.[1][2][3][4]
Early life
Shinobu Hashimoto was born in the Hyogo Prefecture of Japan on 18 April 1918. In 1938 he enlisted in the army, but became ill with tuberculosis while still training and spent four years in a veterans' sanitarium.[5]
Career
While hospitalized, another patient gave Hashimoto a film magazine. The magazine sparked his interest in screenwriting and he began a screenplay about his army experience, spending three years on the project.[5]
Achieving international acclaim, Hashimoto's scripts inspired notable films abroad, including The Magnificent Seven (1960 and then remade again in 2016), a remake of Seven Samurai, and Star Wars (1977), which George Lucas has described as inspired by The Hidden Fortress.[5]
In 2006, he authored a memoir entitled Compound Cinematics: Akira Kurosawa and I. In 2008, Hashimoto wrote a screenplay for I Want to Be a Shellfish, a second full-length film adaptation of the post-World War II-based television series he wrote for Tokyo Broadcasting System Television in 1958.[9]
Later life and death
Hashimoto turned 100 in April 2018.[10] He died in Tokyo on 19 July 2018 at the age of 100.[8] In a tribute article for TIME magazine, film director Antoine Fuqua expressed his respect for Hashimoto as a screenwriter stating: "(Hashimoto's) … working with Akira Kurosawa and Hideo Oguni, was so beautiful and poetic and powerful and heartbreaking. It was all about justice, it was all about sacrifice, and it made me want to be one of those guys".[11]
