Toshio Masuda

Toshio Masuda born October 5 1927 in Kobe Hyōgo Japan is a Japanese film director He developed a reputation as a consistent box office hitmaker Over the course of five decades 16 of his films made the yearly top ten lists at the Japanese box officea second place record in the industry Between 1958 and 1968 he directed 52 films for the Nikkatsu Company He was their top director of action films and worked with the companys top stars including Yujiro Ishihara with whom he made 25 films After the breakdown of the studio system he moved on to a succession of bigbudget movies including the AmericanJapanese coproduction Tora Tora Tora 1970 and the science fiction epic Catastrophe 1999 The Prophecies of Nostradamus 1974 He worked on such anime productions as the Space Battleship Yamato series His corporate drama Company Funeral 1989 earned him a Japanese Academy Award nomination and wins at the Blue Ribbon Awards and Mainichi Film Awards In Japan his films are well remembered by fans and called genre landmarks by critics He remains little known abroad save for rare exceptions of his postNikkatsu work such as Tora Tora Tora However a number of his films were screened in a 2005 Nikkatsu Action Cinema retrospective in Italy and a few have since made their way to the United States At the age of 81 he is currently prepping to helm Uchū Senkan Yamato Fukkatsu hen 2009 Description above from the Wikipedia article Toshio Masuda licensed under CCBYSA full list of contributors on Wikipedia