Screenwriter, director and producer Shinobu Hashimoto, known for his work with Akira Kurosawa, passed away last week in Tokyo. He was 100 years old.

Hashimoto enlisted in the army in 1938, though did not see any fighting during WWII due to contracting tuberculosis during training. While spending time recovering in a sanitarium, he was given a film magazine, which piqued his interest in filmmaking and screenwriting. He soon began writing a screenplay based on his own experiences in the Japanese army.

His script based on the short story In a Grove was the one that initially caught the attention of Kurosawa, who adapted it into the 1950 film Rashomon. The film won the Golden Lion at the 1951 Venice Film Festival, after which Hashimoto was able to dedicate himself fulltime to filmmaking. He later worked on Ikiru, Throne of Blood, and Seven Samurai for Kurosawa. Hashimoto also worked with various other directors over the course of his career, including Masaki Hobayashi (Harakiri) and Kihachi Okamoto (The Sword of Doom); however, his association with Kurosawa remained strong, and Hashimoto eventually wrote a memoir about his time spent with the director, called Compound Cinematics: Akira Kurosawa and I.

Hashimoto eventually got into the director’s chair himself, with I Want to Be a Shellfish in 1959, which he had scripted as a television series the year prior. In 1973 he launched Hashimoto Production, which produced such hits as Village of Eight Gravestones and The Castle of Sand in the 1970s. Hashimoto’s last work was for a second full-length film adaptation of I Want to Be a Shellfish in 2008.

Over the course of his storied career, Hashimoto picked up several awards, including both the Blue Ribbon Award and Mainichi Film Award for Best Screenplay on films such as Rashomon, Ikiru, Mahiru no Ankoku, The Chase, and others. In 2015 he received the Special Prize from the Mainichi Film Awards for screenwriting.