Shinobu Hashimoto

• Name — Shinobu Hashimoto • Born — 18 April 1918 • Birthplace — Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan • Died — 19 July 2018 • Place of death — Tokyo, Japan • Occupation — Film director, screenwriter, film producer

Shinobu Hashimoto was born in Hyōgo Prefecture 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.

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. Hashimoto was a frequent collaborator with Akira Kurosawa, from 1950 to 1970 writing eight screenplays Kurosawa directed. He often worked with Hideo Oguni, Ryūzō Kikushima as well as Kurosawa himself on the scripts for those projects. Hashimoto won numerous awards for his writing, including a succession of Blue Ribbon Awards and Mainichi Film Awards, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s. Hashimoto wrote more than eighty screenplays, including Rashomon, Ikiru, Seven Samurai (1950), Throne of Blood (a 1957 adaptation of Macbeth set in Japan), and The Hidden Fortress (1958). He also directed three films. 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. 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.

Hashimoto turned 100 in April 2018. He died in Tokyo on 19 July 2018 at the age of 100. In a tribute article for TIME, 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".

Hashimoto is credited in the making of at least 85 films.

Shinobu Hashimoto is recorded as having received Mainichi Film Award for Best Screenplay and Blue Ribbon Awards for Best Screenplay. Recorded at birth as 橋本 忍.