Shintaro Ishihara - Early Life and Artistic Career

Early Life and Artistic Career

Shintaro Ishihara was born in Suma-ku, Kobe. His father Kiyoshi was an employee, later a general manager, of a shipping company. Shintaro grew up in Zushi, Kanagawa. In 1952, he entered Hitotsubashi University, and he graduated in 1956. Just two months before graduation, Ishihara won the Akutagawa Prize (Japan's most prestigious literary prize) for the novel Season of the Sun (太陽の季節, Taiyō no kisetsu?). His brother Yujiro played a supporting role in the screen adaptation of the novel (for which Shintaro wrote the screenplay), and the two soon became the center of a youth-oriented cult. Ishihara had dabbled in directing a couple of films starring his brother. Regarding these early years as a filmmaker, he stated to a Playboy interviewer in 1990 that "If I had remained a movie director, I can assure you that I would have at least become a better one than Akira Kurosawa".

In the early 1960s, he concentrated on writing, including plays, novels, and a musical version of Treasure Island. One of his later novels, Lost Country (1982), speculated about Japan under the control of the Soviet Union. He also ran a theatre company, and found time to visit the North Pole, race his yacht The Contessa and cross South America on a motorcycle. He wrote a memoir of his journey, Nanbei Odan Ichiman Kiro.

From 1966 to 1967, he covered the Vietnam War at the request of Yomiuri Shimbun. The experience influenced his decision to enter politics.