Sh?ji Terayama

From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia Sh?ji Terayama December 10 1935 May 4 1983 was an avantgarde Japanese poet dramatist writer film director and photographer According to many critics and supporters he was one of the most productive and provocative creative artists to come out of Japan He was born December 10 1935 the only son of Hachiro and Hatsu Terayama in Hirosaki city in the northern Japanese prefecture of Aomori His father died at the end of Pacific War in Indonesia in September 1945 At the age of nine his mother moved to Ky?sh? to work at an American military base while he himself went to live with relatives in the city of Misawa also in Aomori At this same time Terayama lived through the Aomori air raids that killed more than 30000 people Terayama entered Aomori Prefectural Aomori High School in 1951 and in 1954 went to prestigious Waseda Universitys Faculty of Education to study Japanese language and literature However he soon dropped out because he fell ill with nephrotic syndrome He received his education through working in bars in Shinjuku His oeuvre includes a number of essays claiming that more can be learned about life through boxing and horse racing than by attending school and studying hard Accordingly he was one of the central figures of the runaway movement in Japan in the late 1960s as depicted in his book play and film Throw Away Your Books Run into the Streets In 1967 Terayama formed the Tenj? Sajiki theater troupe whose name comes from the Japanese translation of the 1945 Marcel Carné film Les Enfants du Paradis so can be translated as children of heaven however its correct translation is Ceiling Gallery and has a meaning similar to the English expression Peanut Gallery The troupe was dedicated to the avantgarde and staged a number of controversial plays tackling social issues from an iconoclastic perspective Some major plays include Bluebeard Yes and The Crime of Fatso Oyama among others Also involved with the theater were artists Aquirax Uno and Tadanori Yokoo who designed many of the advertisement posters for the group Musically he worked closely with experimental composer JA Seazer and folk musician Kan Mikami He was also involved in poetry and at 18 was the second winner of the Tanka Studies Award Terayama experimented with city plays a fantastical satire of civic life Also in 1967 Terayama started an experimental cinema and gallery called Universal Gravitation which is in fact still in existence at Misawa as a resource center The Terayama Sh?ji Memorial Hall which has a large collection of his plays novels poetry photography and a great number of his personal effects and relics from his theatre productions can also be found in Misawa In 1976 he was a member of the jury at the 26th Berlin International Film Festival Terayama published almost 200 literary works and over 20 short and fulllength films He was married to Tenj? Sajiki cofounder Ky?ko Kuj? but they later divorced although they continued to work together until Terayamas death on May 4 1983 from cirrhosis of the liver Description above from the Wikipedia article Sh?ji Terayama licensed under CCBYSA full list of contributors on Wikipedia