Years active 1995 – Name Shinji Imaoka | Role Film director | |
 | ||
Born 1965 (age 50–51) Osaka, Japan Occupation Film director, screenwriter, and actor Movies The Drudgery Train, Hanadama, La La La at Rock Bottom, The Woman of Shinjuku, Tsuma ga koishita natsu Similar People Hisayasu Sato, Nobuhiro Yamashita, Hideo Jojo, Kenta Nishimura, Masashi Yamamoto | ||
Education Yokohama City University | ||
ONNA NO KAPPA
Shinji Imaoka (今岡信治 or いまおかしんじ, いまおかしんぢ, Imaoka Shinji) a.k.a. 羅門ナカ is a Japanese film director, screenwriter, and actor. He is one of a group of pink film directors of the 2000s known collectively as the "Seven Lucky Gods of Pink" (ピンク七福神, shichifukujin), which besides Imaoka, also includes Toshiya Ueno, Mitsuru Meike, Yūji Tajiri, Yoshitaka Kamata, Toshirō Enomoto and Rei Sakamoto.
Contents
Life and career
Shinji Imaoka was born in Osaka in 1965. He attended Yokohama City University, but dropped out in 1990 in order to pursue a film career. He entered the film industry as an assistant director at pink film pioneer Satoru Kobayashi's Shishi Productions. There he worked principally under Hisayasu Satō, and also with such directors at Takahisa Zeze and Mototsugu Watanabe. In December 1994 he worked as assistant director to the esteemed Nikkatsu Roman Porno director Tatsumi Kumashiro on his last film, Immoral: Indecent Relations (インモラル･淫らな関係, Immoral: midarana kankei). Imaoka's directorial debut film was Sex Party of the Beasts: Come Together (獣たちの性宴・イクときいっしょ) a.k.a. Waiting for the Comet (1995).
In his Behind the Pink Curtain: The Complete History of Japanese Sex Cinema, Jasper Sharp writes that Imaoka's style is quite different from that of his mentor, Hisayasu Satō, and that his approach to the pink film is much closer to Toshiki Satō. Like Toshiki Satō, Imaoka's sex scenes are often sparser than the norm for a pink film, and not given much emphasis. According to Sharp, "[Imaoka's] films possess the same deadpan comic touch that masks a painfully honest emotional core, although Imaoka's peculiar brand of pathos is less wry and more sentimental." Further, he writes, "Imaoka's particular strength is his understated depiction of characters trapped in a rut, desperately reaching out for something they secretly know they can't have."
While Imaoka's approach to the sex scenes has not won him favor with the traditional pink film audience and theater owners, his films have been praised by critics. He has been awarded Best Director at the Pink Grand Prix, and two of his films have been voted the Best Film of the year at the ceremony. In 2000, the Tokyo Athénée Français gave Imaoka a career retrospective tribute which broke the institution's record for attendance.