Yoshishige Yoshida
, also known as Kijū Yoshida, is a retired Japanese film director and screenwriter. Career. Graduating from the University of Tokyo, where he studied French literature, Yoshida entered the Shōchiku studio in 1955 and worked as an assistant to Keisuke Kinoshita, before debuting as a director in 1960 with "Rokudenashi". He was a central member of what came to be called the "Shōchiku Nouvelle Vague" along with Nagisa Oshima and Masahiro Shinoda, and his works have been studied under the larger rubric of the Japanese New Wave, a linkage which Yoshida himself disliked. Like many of his New Wave  cohorts, he felt restricted under the studio system. After Shōchiku's re-editing of his "Escape from Japan" (1964), he left the studio to start his own production company, for which he directed such films as "Eros + Massacre". Between 1960 and 2004, Yoshida directed more than 20 films, some of which starred his wife, actress Mariko Okada. After a long absence from the screen following the 1973 "Coup d'État", he returned with "A Promise", which was shown in the Un Certain Regard section the 1986 Cannes Film Festival. Two years later, his film "Wuthering Heights" would compete for the  Golden Palm at the 1988 Festival. In 2002, "Women in the Mirror" followed after another hiatus of 14 years. In addition to his theatrical films, Yoshida directed a series of documentaries for Japanese TV. Yoshida named European cinema as a great influence on his work, most notably the directors Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni, and pre-war French films like the works of Jean Renoir. He also published a number of books on the topic of cinema, including one on his own cinematic work and an analysis of the films of Yasujirō Ozu.