is a Japanese film director. He developed a reputation as a consistent box office hit-maker. Over the course of five decades, 16 of his films made the yearly top ten lists at the Japanese box office—a second place record in the industry. Between 1958 and 1968 he directed 52 films for the Nikkatsu Company. He was their top director of action films and worked with the company's top stars, including Yujiro Ishihara with whom he made 25 films. After the breakdown of the studio system, he moved on to a succession of big-budget movies including the American-Japanese co-production Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) and the science fiction epic Catastrophe 1999: The Prophecies of Nostradamus (1974). He worked on such anime productions as the Space Battleship Yamato series. His corporate drama Company Funeral (1989) earned him a Japanese Academy Award nomination and wins at the Blue Ribbon Awards and Mainichi Film Awards. In Japan, his films are well-remembered by fans and called genre landmarks by critics. He remains little known abroad save for rare exceptions of his post-Nikkatsu work such as Tora! Tora! Tora!. However, a number of his films were screened in a 2005 Nikkatsu Action Cinema retrospective]in Italy and a few have since made their way to the United States. In 2009, he helped produce Space Battleship Yamato: Resurrection. Early life Toshio Masuda was born in Kobe, Japan. His father was a seaman. He enrolled in a technical training school, however, his mindset did not mesh with the school's military indoctrination, and he was expelled in July 1945. He next attended the Osaka University of Foreign Studies (now Osaka University) where he specialized in Russian literature. There he became enamoured with French cinema, which led him away from Russian grammar and toward a career in the film industry. He thought he would have been bored as a salaryman and that filmmaking would better suit him but suggested he probably would not have followed through had his friends not sought similar careers. After graduating in 1949, he moved to Tokyo to study screenwriting at the Shintoho Studio's Scenario Academy. Career In 1950, the Shintoho Company hired Toshio Masuda. He worked as screenwriter and an assistant director under Umetsugu Inoue, Nobuo Nakagawa and Mikio Naruse. He served as 2nd AD on Naruse's Ginza Cosmetics (1951) and Mother (1952). Inoue became a mentor figure to Masuda. They began collaborating on scripts and Masuda