Donald Richie

Donald Richie was born in Ohio and first arrived in Japan with the American occupation force in 1947. While working as a typist and writer for the Stars and Stripes newspaper, he befriended Japanese filmmakers and began his lifelong effort to promote Japanese film and culture in the west. He went to New York to attend Columbia University in 1953 but soon returned to Japan, where he spent the majority of his life. A prolific film critic, he wrote hundreds of reviews for The Japan Times as well as some of the foundational texts on Japanese film theory for an English-speaking audience, including The Films of Akira Kurosawa.