Fuyuhiko Kitagawa

Who was Fuyuhiko Kitagawa?

Fuyuhiko Kitagawa was a Japanese poet and film critic. His real name was Tadahiko Taguro. While born in Shiga Prefecture, he was raised in Manchukuo in China due to his father's work on the South Manchurian Railway, and then graduated from Tokyo University. He began publishing his own poetry in Manchukuo in 1924 and his work was influenced by that colonial context. His work was praised by Riichi Yokomitsu, and he became a prominent figure in modernist poetry in Japan, pursuing especially prose poetry. Kitagawa was also a well-known film critic, one who especially praised the work of Mansaku Itami, calling it a new, realistic "prose cinema" in opposition to the old "poetic cinema" of Sadao Yamanaka, Daisuke Itō, and others. He was a champion of neorealism in the postwar era.