Sadaharu Tanikawa (谷川貞治, Tanikawa Sadaharu) (27 September 1961 in Nagoya) is a Japanese combat sports promoter and was…Sadaharu Tanikawa (谷川貞治, Tanikawa Sadaharu) (27 September 1961 in Nagoya) is a Japanese combat sports promoter and was previously the president of Fighting and Entertainment Group.
Toshio Suzuki (Japanese: 鈴木 敏夫, Hepburn: Suzuki Toshio; born August 19, 1948) is a Japanese film producer and studio…Toshio Suzuki (Japanese: 鈴木 敏夫, Hepburn: Suzuki Toshio; born August 19, 1948) is a Japanese film producer and studio executive. He is a co-founder and the current chairman of Studio Ghibli. He began his career at Tokuma Shoten, working as a magazine editor and covering manga and animation, before becoming editor of Animage, where he established professional relationships with Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata. After co-founding Studio Ghibli, he served on the production committees of several of its early films, including Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, My Neighbor Totoro, and Grave of the Fireflies. Suzuki has served as producer or co-producer on numerous Ghibli films, including Kiki's Delivery Service, Only Yesterday, Porco Rosso, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle, Earwig and the Witch, and The Boy and the Heron. He officially retired from his producer role in 2014, becoming general manager, but has remained involved in the studio's management and creative activities. In 2023, following the acquisition of Studio Ghibli by Nippon Television Holdings, Suzuki became chairman.
Kansuke Yamamoto (Japanese: 山本 悍右; 30 March 1914 – 2 April 1987) was a Japanese Surrealist photographer, poet, editor…Kansuke Yamamoto (Japanese: 山本 悍右; 30 March 1914 – 2 April 1987) was a Japanese Surrealist photographer, poet, editor, and publisher based in Nagoya. Eiko Aoki describes him as a driving force in Japan's avant-garde movement, producing innovative photographs with an uncompromising spirit. Photography historian Ryūichi Kaneko regards the establishment of the 1932 date of Yamamoto's photocollage The Developing Thought of a Human... Mist and Bedroom and as a landmark for understanding the formation and development of modern Japanese photography in the 1930s. Drawing on French Surrealist literature and periodicals, Yamamoto developed a practice that Amanda Maddox and John Solt discuss in terms of interpretation, translation, and dialogue rather than belated imitation of European models. Yamamoto's Surrealist practice also took the form of editing, translation, and publishing. Through Yoru no Funsui, which he founded and edited in 1938, he brought together poetry, photography, translations of French Surrealist writing, and reproduced drawings. The journal ceased publication in 1939 under pressure from the Special Higher Police (Tokkō), and Yamamoto was questioned about the political meaning of his Surrealist photography and poetry. He nevertheless continued Surrealist publishing under wartime conditions through Carnet Bleu, including a Japanese translation of an essay on photography by Philippe Soupault. Maddox argues that Yamamoto resisted pressure to strip Surrealism of provocation, politics, and thought. After the war, Yamamoto continued to pursue Surrealist ideas through collective activity and new photographic forms. He co-founded VIVI in 1947, which Maddox describes as an effort to keep the spirit of Surrealist ideology alive in the postwar period. Jelena Stojković traces Yamamoto's postwar photographic narratives from a pair of self-portraits made in 1949 to staged sequences of the 1950s, including My Thin-Aired Room (1956), in which he appeared as both actor and director. Stojković argues that these experiments made a direct link between Yamamoto's Surrealist background and emerging conceptual and performative uses of photography, and describes his work as a point of reference both for the prewar Japanese avant-garde and for the development of contemporary art and photography in Japan. Kaneko likewise rejects the accepted division of Yamamoto's career into separate prewar and postwar periods, arguing that his postwar work increased in complexity and strength and that modern Japanese photography, despite the interruption of war, should be reconsidered as a continuous and interconnected history. The 2001 retrospective Kansuke Yamamoto: Conveyor of the Impossible at Tokyo Station Gallery became a turning point in the later reassessment of Yamamoto's work. His work was subsequently featured in Japan's Modern Divide at the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2013 and Surrealism Beyond Borders at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Tate Modern in 2021–2022.
