Introduction: Kore-Eda Hirokazu, Director at a Crossroads (Editorial‪)‬

Why Kore-eda Hirokazu? Why a Special Issue devoted to this Japanese director rather than other filmmakers of his generation, like Shinozaki Makoto, Aoyama Shinji, Suwa Nobuhiro, and Kawase Naomi, with whom he has been grouped in the so-called "New Japanese New Wave" of the late 90s? All of these directors merit attention, but 48-year old Kore-eda (born June 6, 1962) stands out for his unique body of work and the unusual trajectory of his career. Hailed as "one of a kind" (Rayns 67) and "the most serious-minded filmmaker of his generation" (Stevens 34), he has made seven feature films and even more television documentaries. At college, unlike some of his peers, he did not study under influential scholar/critic Hasumi Shigehiko, or experiment with Super 8 shorts, or even belong to a cine club. In fact, he originally intended to become a novelist. However, he was an avid student of film with "'a voracious appetite for watching films and reading scripts" (Mes and Sharp 206), and once he found his way into film, he pursued a highly individual set of themes and concerns. As critics have noted, he is preoccupied with memory, loss, and death, and how people find a way to go on living, how they manage to survive. Although his films are "sober, socially conscious, and emotionally reserved" (Stevens 34), they are not without humor (often wry), and their tone is never shrill or polemical. Most importantly, they are notable for the sensitive exploration of their characters' inner lives. As he told one interviewer, "I'm not interested in creating heroes, superheroes, or antiheroes. I simply want to look at people as they are" (Cacoulidis). Indeed, Kore-eda stands alone as the only major director of his generation to follow in the humanist tradition of classical Japanese directors of the past. After graduating from Waseda University where he studied literature, Kore-eda joined TV Man Union in 1987, Japan's first independent television production company. He spent three years as an assistant director before making his first two documentaries in 1991, Lessons from a Calf (Mo hitotsu no kyoiku: Ina shogakko haru gumi no kiroku), which chronicles the experiences of elementary school children who raise a calf, and However ... (Shikashi ... fukushi kirisute no jidai ni), which investigates the suicide of an official in charge of Japan's Social Welfare Bureau who was disillusioned by the agency's cutting off compensation to recipients, one of whom took her own life. These two documentaries so impressed TV Man Union that Kore-eda was promoted to the status of director.