, also known as or Okura Pictures, is the largest and one of the oldest independent Japanese studios which produce and distribute pink films. It was founded in 1961 by Mitsuru Ōkura, former president of film studio Shintōhō. Along with Shintōhō Eiga, Kantō, Million Film, and Kōji Wakamatsu's production studio, Ōkura was one of the most influential studios on the pink film genre. Among the many notable pink films released by the studio are Satoru Kobayashi's Flesh Market (1962), the first film in the pink film genre. Ōkura Eiga in the 1960s Mitsuru Ōkura was the president of the major film studio, Shintōhō, from 1955 until the studio's bankruptcy in May 1961. He produced numerous films during this time, including Emperor Meiji and the Great Russo-Japanese War (1957), which held the Japanese box office record of 20million admissions for decades, up until its record was broken by Hayao Miyazaki's Studio Ghibli anime film Spirited Away (2001). In keeping with his carnival barker roots, Ōkura had moved Shintōhō into exploitation film genres during his time at the studio. Among the genres in which the studio specialized under Ōkura were horror, science-fiction, war, crime and sex films. The same year of Shintōhō's demise, Ōkura founded the Ōkura Eiga studio. Ōkura established his new studio by setting up production in Shintōhō's facilities in Setagaya, Tokyo which he had purchased with his own company. Shintōhō employee Kouichi Gotō bought the studio's Kansai studio as well as the use of the studio name to start up a new enterprise, Shintōhō Eiga. After Ōkura, Shintōhō Eiga is currently the second largest pink film studio. The early titles produced at Ōkura Eiga indicate that the films from Ōkura's new studio continued the themes pioneered at Shintōhō. Director Satoru Kobayashi's all-color 1963 film, The Mysterious Pearl of the Ama, for example, looks back to Shintōhō's boundary-pushing female pearl-diver films of the mid-1950s, starring Michiko Maeda and Yōko Mihara. Kobayashi also directed ghost stories in the style of the films of Shintōhō's Nobuo Nakagawa, with titles like (1962), (1963), and (1964). Kobayashi continued to occasionally make films in this style for Ōkura as late as 1995 with starring actresses Nao Saejima and Yumi Yoshiyuki, who would become a prominent pink film director herself, releasing mainly through Ōkura. Kobayashi had worked with Ōkura at Shintōhō since 1954 and came with him to the new studio. Kobayashi's name in the history