Word: shinoda
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Toko Shinoda bases new abstractions on ancient calligraphy...
...Toko Shinoda, 70, lives and works here. She can be, when she chooses, one of Japan's foremost calligraphers, master of an intricate manner of writing that traces its lines back some 3,000 years to ancient China. She is also an avant-garde artist of international renown, whose abstract paintings and lithographs rest in museums around the world. These diverse talents do not seem to belong in the same epoch. Yet they have somehow converged in this diminutive woman who appears in her tiny foyer, offering slippers and ritual bows of greeting...
...meaning the period of the Tokugawa shoguns, before her city was renamed Tokyo in 1868. Her black hair is pulled back from her face, which is virtually free of lines and wrinkles. Except for the gold-rimmed spectacles perched low on her nose (this visionary is apparently nearsighted), Shinoda could have stepped directly from a 19th century Meiji print...
...feels so quintessentially Japanese that Shinoda's opening remarks come as a surprise. She points out (through a translator) that she was not born in Japan at all but in Dairen, Manchuria. Her father had been posted there to manage a tobacco company under the aegis of the occupying Japanese forces, which seized the region from Russia in 1905. She says, "People born in foreign places are very free in their thinking, not restricted." But since her family went back to Japan in 1915, when she was two, she could hardly remember much about a liberated childhood? She answers...
...planning and shooting a film. Oshima financed his last three films with help from producers in France, Britain and New Zealand. Other directors may receive grants from the Art Theater Guild, which in the past 20 years has helped launch the careers of Oshima, Susumu Hani and Masahiro Shinoda. "If Japanese cinema hasn't become extinct," says Critic Sato, "it is because of the life-and-death efforts of directors who risk their own money and property to make movies...