Minoru Shibuya (渋谷実, Shibuya Minoru, 2 January 1907 – 20 December 1980) was a Japanese film director.
Career
Born in Tokyo, Shibuya attended Keiō University but left before graduating.[1] He joined Shochiku in 1930 and worked as an assistant under Yasujirō Ozu, Mikio Naruse, and Heinosuke Gosho, before making his debut as a director in 1937.[2] Shibuya "worked with equal facility in comedy and melodrama, [and] made his mark as an ironic but compassionate chronicler of the difficulties of the early postwar period".[3]
One notable film was The Radish and the Carrot, which was supposed to be Ozu's next film before he died. But as the critic Chris Fujiwara notes, Shibuya's "films are a world apart from Ozu: harsh, sometimes strident, in tone, splashed with dark humor, tending to contort the human body or thrust it into the bottoms of violently modernist compositions".[3]
He directed over four dozen films between 1937 and 1966.
