Motoyoshi Oda

Who was Motoyoshi Oda?

Motoyoshi Oda was a Japanese film director.

An English major who graduated from Waseda University, one of Japan's most prestigious, in 1935, Motoyoshi Oda was promptly accepted into the directors' program at Tokyo's P.C.L.. He studied under director Satsuo Yamamoto, as did Akira Kurosawa, Ishirō Honda, and Senkichi Taniguchi. When the latter two trainees were drafted into Japan's war in China, Oda found his career accelerated. He was promoted to director in 1940 with Song of Kunya, after a relatively scant few years of training. Perhaps because of this relative lack of training, and certainly because Oda was not drafted into the army, P.C.L. and Toho kept Oda going as a maker of programmers - trivial pictures that had to be made in order to keep product flowing into the theaters, but which offered little time or room for artistic achievement.

Probably his most distinguished credits are Lady From Hell, Tomei Ningen a 1954 Japanese horror classic inspired by The Invisible Man, a follow-up to his earlier 1954 film Ghost Man.