Masaki Kobayashi, the army private who made obedience his enemy

Masaki Kobayashi

Photo: 新潮社　撮影者不明 / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	February 14, 1916 Otaru, Hokkaido, Japan
Died	October 4, 1996 (80)
Occupation	Film director
Known for	Harakiri, Kwaidan, Samurai Rebellion
Awards	2 Special Jury Prize, Cannes Film Festival · San Giorgio Prize, Venice Film Festival · FIPRESCI Prize, Venice Film Festival · Order of the Rising Sun · Ordre des Arts et des Lettres

Masaki Kobayashi went to war as a private and made sure he came back as one. Each time the Imperial Japanese Army offered him a higher rank, he turned it down, a quiet refusal by a man who called himself a pacifist and a socialist while wearing the uniform of an empire. That refusal is the key to the films that followed. Kaji, the idealist ground down across the nine and a half hours of The Human Condition, and the ronin of Harakiri, who walks into a clan courtyard to expose its code, are the same man in different centuries; so, in the end, is the retainer Toshiro Mifune plays in Samurai Rebellion. Kobayashi kept returning to one scene: a man discovering that the institution he obeys is prepared to consume him, and deciding what to do about it.

He grew up in Otaru, a port town on Hokkaido, where he was born on 14 February 1916 into a comfortable family; his father worked for Mitsui & Co., and the actress Kinuyo Tanaka was his second cousin. At Waseda University in Tokyo he studied philosophy and East Asian art under the poet Aizu Yaichi, followed him on temple visits to Nara and wrote his thesis on the dating of Murō-ji, a mountain temple where he lived for a month. He joined Shochiku as a trainee assistant director in 1941. Eight months later the army called him up.

The war sent him to the Manchurian border with the Soviet Union and then, in 1944, to Miyako-jima in the Ryukyu Islands, where his unit built an airfield and survived on grasshoppers and dogs. He never fought on a front line. After the surrender he spent nearly a year in a prisoner-of-war labour camp at Kadena, on Okinawa, where he ran a theatre company with other inmates. When he was released in November 1946, he learned that his father had died and that his older brother had been killed in China.

Back at Shochiku, he became the chief assistant of Keisuke Kinoshita, the studio’s most humane director, on eleven films. His own debut came in 1952 with the medium-length My Son’s Youth, the same year he married the Shochiku actress Chiyoko Fumiya. The first film that sounded like him was The Thick-Walled Room, written by Kōbō Abe from the diaries of lower-ranking war criminals held in Sugamo Prison. Shochiku, wary of offending the United States, refused to release it unless he cut it. He refused, and the film sat on a shelf for three years before opening in 1956. In I Will Buy You he turned to corruption in professional baseball scouting; in Black River to the crime and prostitution around an American base, with a young Tatsuya Nakadai in his first major role for him. Nakadai would become his closest collaborator.

Between 1959 and 1961 Kobayashi released The Human Condition, his adaptation of Junpei Gomikawa’s novel in six parts and three films, close to ten hours in total. Nakadai plays Kaji, a pacifist who manages a Manchurian labour camp, is drafted, and walks through the collapse of the Kwantung Army into Soviet captivity. Kobayashi had lived a version of that story, and it shows in the patience with which the film watches decent intentions being dismantled. It won the San Giorgio Prize at Venice.

Harakiri, scripted by Shinobu Hashimoto, took that argument into the samurai past. Kobayashi called it the densest film he ever made, and it won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes in 1963. He followed it with Kwaidan, his first film in colour: four ghost stories from Lafcadio Hearn staged on painted sets built inside a disused aircraft hangar, with a score by Tōru Takemitsu that works more like sound design than music. It won the same prize at Cannes in 1965 and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Samurai Rebellion, the first production of Mifune’s company, took the FIPRESCI prize at Venice in 1967.

The usual story casts Kobayashi as the conscience of Japanese cinema, overshadowed in his lifetime by Akira Kurosawa and Yasujirō Ozu and rescued by later critics. It leaves out what his conscience cost other people. Kwaidan ran so far over budget, with three hours of film and some 800 cast and crew, that it drove its independent producer, Ninjin Club, into bankruptcy. His most famous films are samurai films, the genre most associated with the loyalty he spent his career attacking. And Tokyo Trial, his monumental documentary on the war crimes tribunal, was praised for assembling years of archive footage but criticised for including Chinese footage of the Nanjing massacre whose reliability historians doubt. The pacifist who would not cut a frame of The Thick-Walled Room could be as stubborn about his material as the institutions he filmed.

The later decades were harder. With Kurosawa, Kinoshita and Kon Ichikawa he founded the Club of the Four Knights, which produced Kurosawa’s Dodes’ka-den in 1970. He was considered for the Japanese sequences of Tora! Tora! Tora! after Kurosawa left, and passed over. For years he prepared an adaptation of Yasushi Inoue’s novel Tun-huang, with a finished script, until a disagreement with the producer Yasuyoshi Tokuma ended it. Tokyo Trial arrived in 1983 after five years of work. His last feature, The Empty Table, a family drama shadowed by the United Red Army killings, competed at Venice in 1985.

Away from the set, he looked after Kinuyo Tanaka in her final illness, borrowing money to lift the mortgage on her house and paying her hospital bills. Through his efforts, the Mainichi Film Awards created a prize in her name in 1985. Japan awarded him the Order of the Rising Sun in 1990, the same year France made him a member of the Order of Arts and Letters.

Kobayashi died of a heart attack at his home in Setagaya, Tokyo, on 4 October 1996, aged 80, while preparing a film about his old teacher Aizu Yaichi. His ashes were divided between Engaku-ji in Kamakura and a cemetery in Shimonoseki, where Kinuyo Tanaka is buried.

Thirty years later his films are travelling again. Toho’s 4K restoration of the director’s cut of Kwaidan, about 183 minutes long, premiered in Venice Classics in 2025, opened in Japanese cinemas in August 2026 and began a Janus Films run at Film Forum in New York on 11 September. From 31 October to 21 November, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive pairs it with 35mm prints of Harakiri, Samurai Rebellion and all three parts of The Human Condition. Seen together, they keep asking the question the private on Miyako-jima answered for himself: what a person owes an institution that asks for their life.