Juzo Itami was born in Ehime on the southern island of Shikoku, and he spent much of his childhood and youth there. From the first, the boy was a rebel against the stifling conventions of Japanese society. He attended Matsuyama Minami High School, and one of his friends at the school was the future Nobel prizewinning novelist Kenzaburo Oe. Oe left us a striking portrait of young Itami in his book of essays published in 1995

Oe tells how the writer Ryotaro Shiba described Itami admiringly as an ijin, which means a person "who is different from the norm; a superior person . . . A person who practices mysterious arts; a wizard, a foreigner" (Kirkup, 1997, 16). When Oe met itami, the latter was already embroiled in a battle with the administration over the compulsory uniform rule for the school. Oe reported that his friend suffered from a sense of infringement on his human rights. Itami was unable to attend a university after he was expelled from school, meaning he could not sit for the university entrance exam. He then went to work as an illustrator (Kirkup, 1997, 16).

Itami moved to Tokyo in 1960 and went to work for the Daiei movie company as an actor, and there he specialized in supporting roles. In that year, he also married Kazuko Kawakita. He left Daiei in 1961 and went to work writing literary essays, much as his father had done. He con

The presence in The Funeral of Ryu, a favorite actor of director Yasujiro Ozu, is a reminder that Ozu not only started by making farces but also invariably included comic or even farcical scenes in his serious films . . . Other leading directors have gone further. Keisuke Kinoshita not only mixed politics, poverty, unwed motherhood, and modern art into his comic satire Karumen Jungosu (1952), but also inserted comedy into his downbeat Nihon No Higeki (1953); A Japanese Tragedy). Ichikawa, though best known in the United States for such thoroughly serious films as Biruma No Tategoto (1956; The Burmese Harp) and Nobi (1959; Fires on the Plain), is also a master at teaming farce with tragedy (Magill's Survey of Cinema, 1995).

Itami turned to directing in 1984 with Ososhiki (Funeral), a satirical comedy about the conventions of Japanese funeral ceremonies. Itami's second wife Nobuko appeared in this film and in all his subsequent films. Ososhiki was a very big hit in Japan. Funeral would later be distributed in the United States after the international success of itami's second directorial effort, Tampopo. The word means "Dandelion," and the film is a satire about the gourmet boom of the 1980s in Japan. the film draws on traditions of the film Western, though it is set in contemporary Japan:

Kirkup, J. (1997, December 23). "Obituary: Juzo Itami." Independent, 16.

Probably the most telling thing about Itami is found in the several obituaries that not only decried his suicide but noted that this act deprived the public of the films he would have made and the social commentary he would have built into those films. Itami made people laugh and think at the same time, mixing tragedy and comedy in a deft manner, and reaching out beyond the borders of his own country to the rest of the world.

She played tax inspectors, lawyers, smalltime entrepreneurs-women you mess with at your peril. They we