Shirō Toyoda (豊田 四郎) was a Japanese film director and screenwriter who directed over 60 films during his career which spanned 50 years. He was denoted for his high-quality adaptations of works of many important twentieth-century Japanese writers.

Career

Born in Kyoto, Toyoda moved to Tokyo after finishing high school. Intent on becoming a theatre playwright at first, he studied scriptwriting under the pioneering film director Eizō Tanaka. He joined the Kamata section of the Shōchiku film studios in 1925 and worked as an assistant director under Yasujirō Shimazu, before giving his directorial debut in 1929. Forced to continue to work as an assistant director, and dissatisfied with the material he was given at Shochiku, he moved to the independent Tokyo Hassei Eiga Shisaku studio (later Toho). There he directed the successful Young People (1937) and gained a reputation for directing literary adaptations with a humanistic touch, in particular Uguisu (1938) and Spring on Leper's Island (1940). After World War II, Toyoda adapted the works of writers like Yasunari Kawabata, Kafū Nagai, Naoya Shiga, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki and Masuji Ibuse for his films. Distinguished by their visual imagination and superb acting, they established Toyoda's reputation as an actor's director. Noted works of this era include The Wild Geese (1953), Marital Relations (1955), A Cat, Shozo, and Two Women (1956), Snow Country (1957) and The Twilight Story (1960). Working as closely with his cameramen and scenarists as with his actors, he relied on a steady group of collaborators, including cinematographers Kinya Kokura and Mitsuo Miura and scriptwriter Toshio Yasumi. Toyoda died in Tokyo in 1977.

Filmography

Director

Screenwriter

Scripts not realised by Toyoda himself:

Actor

Awards

Legacy

Toyoda's films have repeatedly been shown at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive as part of retrospectives, and three of his works added to the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in 1987.