Shochiku

Shochiku Company Limited is a Japanese movie studio and production company for kabuki. It also produces and distributes anime films. Its best remembered directors include Yasujirō Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi, Mikio Naruse, Keisuke Kinoshita and Yōji Yamada. Shochiku has also produced films by highly regarded independent and "loner" directors such as Takashi Miike, Takeshi Kitano, Akira Kurosawa and Taiwanese New Wave director Hou Hsiao-Hsien. The company was founded in 1895 by brothers Takejirō Ōtani and Matsujirō Shirai as a kabuki production company, and named in 1902 after the combined characters of take and matsu from their names, reflecting the traditional three symbols of happiness, bamboo, pine, and plum. The name was initially read as the kunyomi matsutake, but changed in 1937 to the onyomi shōchiku. Shochiku grew quickly, expanding its business to many other Japanese live theatric styles, like Noh and Bunraku. The company began making films in 1920 and was the first film studio to abandon the use of female impersonators and sought to model itself and its films after Hollywood standards, bringing such things as the star system and the sound stage to Japan.