Hiroshi Ishikawa, the director who gives his actors letters instead of lines

Hiroshi Ishikawa

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	May 18, 1963 Akita Prefecture, Japan
Occupation	Film director and screenwriter
Awards	New Montreal FilmFest

Most film directors arrive on set with a script and expect the cast to have learned it. Hiroshi Ishikawa arrives with letters. Before each day of shooting on Petal Dance, he handed every actor a private note guessing at what their character might be feeling, and what he filmed was, as he put it, their reply. Kazue Fukiishi took to calling the notes love letters. The method has given Japanese cinema a handful of films about women and silence that few other directors could have made, and it may also explain why there are so few of them: three features in eleven years, then thirteen years without one.

That gap is about to close. The Blue We Touch, which Ishikawa wrote, directed and edited, is in post-production at Bitters End, the company that produced Ryusuke Hamaguchi‘s Drive My Car, and its young cast is led by Nao. It will test whether a cinema of moods, colour and unmemorised words can find its audience again after so long away.

Ishikawa was born in Akita Prefecture on May 18, 1963, and grew up moving between Tokyo, Sendai and Ōdate, the small city in northern Akita where he would later shoot his second feature. He left Meiji University without finishing and, in 1990, joined TYO, the Tokyo production house, as a director of television commercials. His commercials sold Shiseido’s Ma Cherie hair line, Suntory’s vitaminwater, Toyota cars, Asahi Glass and Tombow pencils, and the work won him awards in advertising. He went independent in 2000. The careful handling of colour that marks his films was a commercials director’s skill first.

His first feature, Tokyo.sora, arrived in 2002 and set the terms for everything after it. Its title pairs the city with the Japanese word for sky, and it watches six young women living alone in Tokyo, each carrying a private worry under it. Ishikawa shot it without a finished screenplay. He fixed the structure and built the dialogue on set with his actors, among them Yuka Itaya, Haruka Igawa and Manami Honjo, with Hidetoshi Nishijima and Teruyuki Kagawa in small roles. Yoko Kanno wrote the music, and she would score his next two features as well.

Su-ki-da, his second, is the film he is best known for outside Japan. Its title means “I love you”, and the story turns on two teenagers, played by Aoi Miyazaki and Eita, who cannot say the words, then on the same pair at 34, played by Hiromi Nagasaku and Nishijima, meeting by chance in Tokyo seventeen years later. Ishikawa wrote, directed, shot and edited it himself, filming the teenage half in Ōdate in September 2003 and the adult half in Tokyo the following winter. Nagasaku later recalled that Ishikawa told her she could read the script but should not memorise it, and he kept her and Nishijima from speaking before the shoot, so that the first scene filmed was the reunion and the first words they exchanged were their characters’. Su-ki-da premiered in competition at the first New Montreal FilmFest in September 2005, where Ishikawa won the best director prize, and opened in Japan in February 2006.

A short film, Your Fingertips, with Maki Horikita and Meisa Kuroki, followed. Then came a seven-year wait for Petal Dance. Aoi Miyazaki came back to lead it alongside Sakura Ando, Shiori Kutsuna and Kazue Fukiishi, as two old friends and a young woman they barely know drive north to visit a university friend in hospital after a suicide attempt. It was filmed largely in Aomori, premiered at the Hong Kong International Film Festival in March 2013 and opened in Japan that April through Bitters End. The letters were only part of the method. Actors whose characters shared a history met beforehand; those playing strangers were kept apart until the camera rolled. Asked why his films stay so close to women, Ishikawa said he grew up with an older sister and many female friends, and that women’s reactions kept going beyond what he had predicted.

That is also where the doubts begin. A film built from the spaces between lines depends on those spaces landing, and Petal Dance divided critics. Mark Schilling of The Japan Times gave it three and a half stars out of five; Derek Elley of Film Business Asia gave it four out of ten and wrote that the “existential road drama of four young women offers diminishing results”. Elley’s complaint goes to the centre of the style: mood thins into drift when the improvised moments do not catch. His own explanation invites a second question. Ishikawa gives the decisive words to his actresses, but the frame, the edit and, on Su-ki-da, the camera itself are his, and a male director who builds women’s inner lives out of the surprises other women give him is still the one deciding which surprises stay in the film. And the pace of the work has a cost of its own. A filmmaker who takes nearly every job behind the camera and lets years pass between projects has left audiences with three features in more than two decades.

The fourth is now nearly finished. Bitters End announced The Blue We Touch, whose Japanese title is Awo no Jo, in June 2026 and presented it to international buyers ahead of the TIFFCOM market in October. “Awo” is an old word for blue that also carries the sense of something unripe, and the film follows people who are unfinished in exactly that way. Nao plays Mitsu, a 29-year-old contract web designer at an advertising firm who wants a permanent job and work that moves people, and who slowly opens up to Fujino, a colleague from personnel played by Ayumu Nakajima. Erika Karata plays Ayane, who works nights while studying for the bar exam and agrees to sit as a model for Tomoki, an art student played by Yuzu Aoki, who took drawing lessons for the part. Arisa Nakano plays Nozomi, a classmate who watches him change. In a statement, Ishikawa said he wanted to preserve the flow of feelings that sway and shift over small things. Nao, describing the shoot, said she had lost count of how many times she told herself she loved being part of his crew, and the Japanese phrase she used for it, suki da, is the title of his second film.

Bitters End will release The Blue We Touch in Japan in 2027, with a date still to be announced. It arrives thirteen years after Petal Dance, from a company now building its own international sales arm, which could carry Ishikawa to audiences abroad that his earlier films rarely reached.

Tags: Hidetoshi Nishijima, Aoi Miyazaki, Bitters End, Hiroshi Ishikawa, Petal Dance, The Blue We Touch

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