or in [[Nihonbashi]] district."},"parts":[{"template":{"target":{"wt":"efn","href":"./Template:Efn"},"params":{"1":{"wt":"Depending on the source, either in [[Kanda, Tokyo|Kanda]] or in [[Nihonbashi]] district."}},"i":0}}]}"> [a] the second son of merchant Otojirō Shimazu. His father owned a long-established seaweed business named Kōshū-ya directly in front of the main Mitsukoshi department store in Nihonbashi. [4]
Shimazu entered Shōchiku in 1920 after answering an advertisement and began training under Kaoru Osanai. [3] He gave his debut as director in 1921 at Shōchiku's recently established Kamata studio, [3] directing both comedy and melodrama films, often depicting the everyday life of the lower middle classes. [1] Our Neighbor, Miss Yae (1934) and A Brother and His Younger Sister (1939) are regarded as his most exemplary and best films. [1] [5] By the end of the 1930s, he moved to Tōhō studios, where he made some films in cooperation with the Manchuria Film Association. [6] He died of cancer just after the war ended. [2] Many famous directors, such as Heinosuke Gosho, Shirō Toyoda, Kōzaburō Yoshimura, and Keisuke Kinoshita, started their careers as his assistant. [1]
Heinosuke Gosho was a Japanese film director and screenwriter who directed Japan's first successful sound film, The Neighbor's Wife and Mine, in 1931. His films are mostly associated with the shōshimin-eiga genre. Among his most noted works are Where Chimneys Are Seen, An Inn at Osaka, Takekurabe and Yellow Crow.
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Shōshimin-eiga, literally "petty bourgeois film" or "lower middle class film", is a genre of Japanese realist films which focus on the everyday lives of ordinary or middle class people. An alternate term for the shōshimin-eiga is the pseudo-Japanese word shomin-geki, literally "common people drama", which had been invented by Western film scholars. The term shōshimin-eiga as a definition of a specifically Japanese film genre presumably first appeared in 1932 in articles by critics Yoshio Ikeda and Ichiro Ueno.
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A Brother and His Younger Sister, also titled An Older Brother and His Younger Sister, is a 1939 Japanese comedy-drama film written and directed by Yasujirō Shimazu. Together with Our Neighbor, Miss Yae (1934), it is regarded as one of Shimazu's major films, and a representative of the shōshimin-eiga genre.