Yoshimitsu Morita
Japanese film director (1950–2011)
Yoshimitsu Morita (森田 芳光, Morita Yoshimitsu; 25 January 1950 – 20 December 2011) was a Japanese film director. He was known for his versatility, having directed satires, melodramas, crime thrillers, and pinku films. His most acclaimed films include The Family Game (1983), Sorekara (1985), Haru (1996), and Lost Paradise (1997).
Career
Self-taught, first making shorts on 8 mm film during the 1970s, he made his feature film debut with No Yōna Mono (Something Like It, 1981).
In 1983 he won acclaim for his movie Kazoku Gēmu (The Family Game), which was voted the best film of the year by Japanese critics in the Kinema Junpo magazine poll. The magazine went on to vote it as the best Japanese film of the 1980s (in 2018) and as the 10th best Japanese film of all time (in 2009). This black comedy dealt with then-recent changes in the structure of Japanese home life. It also earned Morita the Directors Guild of Japan New Directors Award.
The director has been nominated for eight Japanese Academy Awards, winning the 2004 Best Director award for Ashura no Gotoku (Like Asura, 2003). He also won the award for best director at the 21st Yokohama Film Festival for 39 keihō dai sanjūkyū jō (Keiho, 2003) and the award for best screenplay at the 18th Yokohama Film Festival for Haru (1996).
The public source identifies “Yoshimitsu Morita” as japanese film director (1950–2011). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Yoshimitsu, Morita and Japanese.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1138125. VIAF identifies the subject as 113301830. The Library of Congress control number is n85291742. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1950, 2011, 1983 and 1985.
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This entry incorporates text from “Yoshimitsu Morita” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.