[1][2] Finally graduating after the war, he entered the Toho studies in 1947 and worked as an assistant under such directors as Mikio Naruse, Masahiro Makino, Ishirō Honda, and Senkichi Taniguchi.

[4] Inspired to become a filmmaker after watching John Ford's Stagecoach,[3] he would insert elements of the Western in war films like Desperado Outpost (1959) and Westward Desperado (1960), and eventually even filmed his own samurai Western in East Meets West (1995).

"[1] His basically critical stance towards Japanese society led him to often pursue satire and black comedy, with his The Age of Assassins (1967) becoming so dark and absurd, Toho initially refused to release it.

Toho entrusted him with the epic Japan's Longest Day (1968), a cinematic version of what happened to official Japan at the end of the war, but the next year he also made The Human Bullet for Art Theatre Guild, a more personal and satirical vision of an everyman's experience of World War II.

[citation needed] On February 19, 2005, just two days after his 81st birthday, Okamoto died at home from esophageal cancer.