Kō Nakahira

[1] As assistant director, he worked for such filmmakers as Akira Kurosawa, Eisuke Takizawa, Keisuke Kinoshita and Yuzo Kawashima.

Two years later, while at Nikkatsu, he co-directed his first feature with Koreyoshi Kurahara, a 1956 noir film entitled The Shadow of Fear (Nerawareta otoko).

He was known for his foundational, and frequently controversial, Sun Tribe (Taiyōzoku) films in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as his late 1960s collaborations with the Shaw brothers and his independent period of the 1970s.

His films were noted for their tight pacing, modernist visual flair and experiments with narrative and cinematic form, as well as Nakahira's ability to produce them quickly.

In 1948, Nakahira enrolled in the Department of Art of The Faculty of Letters, University of Tokyo, but he dropped out the next year to become an assistant director at Shochiku.