Minoru Murata
Career. Born in Tokyo, Murata started out as a shingeki actor on the stage. Murata's troupe appeared in the first "pure films" directed by Norimasa Kaeriyama at Tenkatsu in 1918. On the recommendation of the playwright Kaoru Osanai, he then joined Shochiku in 1920 and participated in the actors school Osanai ran there. He ended up directing "Souls on the Road" (1921), a ground breaking reformist film that is one of the few films surviving from that era. Murata later moved to Nikkatsu, where he directed such critical hits as "Seisaku's Wife" (1924) and "The Street  Juggler" (1925) which were "important in establishing the form of Japanese films about contemporary life." He later worked at Shinkō Kinema. He started up the important journal, "Eiga kagaku kenkyū", in 1928 with Kiyohiko Ushihara, and helped found the Directors Guild of Japan in 1936, becoming its first president. Often battling illness, he died suddenly in 1937.