Yoji Yamada (山田 洋次 Yamada Yōji, born September 13, 1931 in Toyonaka City, Osaka, Japan) is a Japanese director best known for his Tora-san series of films.
He was born in Osaka. But because of the work of his father, who was an engineer for the South Manchuria Railway, from the age of 2 he was brought up in Manchuria. Following the end of World War II, he came back to Japan and subsequently he lived in Yamagata Prefecture.
After receiving his degree from Tokyo University in 1954, he entered Shochiku and worked under Yoshitaro Nomura as a scriptwriter or as an assistant director.
He has won many awards throughout his lengthy career and is well-respected in Japan and by critics throughout the world. He wrote his first screenplay in 1958, and directed his first movie in 1961. His movies have won the Best Picture award at the Japanese Academy Awards four times: in 1977 for The Yellow Handkerchief (幸福の黄色いハンカチ Shiawase no Kiiroi Hankachi), in 1991 for My Sons (息子 Musuko), in 1993 for A Class To Remember (学校 Gakkō), and in 2002 for The Twilight Samurai (たそがれ清兵衛 Tasogare Seibei). In 2003 The Twilight Samurai was nominated for the 76th Academy Awards' Best Foreign Language Film. His 2004 film, The Hidden Blade (Kakushi Ken Oni No Tsume), was nominated for sixteen awards and won three. Yamada continues to make movies to this day.
Yamada is best known in Japan under the title Otoko Wa Tsurai Yo (男はつらいよ, "It's tough being a man"), his Tora-san series features traveling merchant Torajirō, who is always unlucky in love. Kiyoshi Atsumi played the character in forty-eight films between 1969 and his death in 1996. Yamada wrote all 48 films and directed all but two of them. A 49th film which included archival footage of Atsumi was released in 1997. In 2019, at the age of 88, Yamada directed a 50th Tora-san film
, Tora-san, Wish You Were Here, for the 50th anniversary Milestone Celebration of the series. (The protagonist was Tora-san's nephew Mitsuo, played by the same actor).
Although Yamada is known for his long-running series of movies—4 films in the A Class to Remember (学校 Gakkō) series, 13 in the Free and Easy (釣りバカ日誌 Tsuribaka Nisshi) series—none have reached the prolific numbers of the Tora-san series. (See Tora's Pure Love on this wiki.)
Films by Yoji Yamada on TV Tropes:
- Tora's Pure Love (1976)
- The Yellow Handkerchief (1977)
- The Twilight Samurai (2003)
- Love and Honor (2006)
