Kō Nakahira

Kō Nakahira (中平康, Nakahira Kō, born January 3, 1926 in Tokyo) was a Japanese film director.

After dropping out of the University of Tokyo in 1949, Nakahira joined Shochiku as an assistant director. As assistant director, he worked for such filmmakers as Akira Kurosawa, Eisuke Takizawa, Keisuke Kinoshita and Yuzo Kawashima. In 1954, he moved to Nikkatsu. Two years later, while at Nikkatsu, he co-directed his first feature with Koreyoshi Kurahara, a 1956 noir film entitled The Shadow of Fear (Nerawareta otoko). That same year, he made his solo directorial debut with the film Crazed Fruit (Kurutta kajitsu). Though Crazed Fruit was technically Nakahira's second feature, it was released first, as the immediate success of Yūjirō Ishihara's film Season of the Sun encouraged Nikkatsu to swap the release dates of The Shadow of Fear and Crazed Fruit.

Nakahira would go on to direct 48 films between 1956 and 1976, before passing away on September 11, 1978. His 1971 film A Soul to Devils (Yami no naka no chimimoryo) was nominated for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

He was known for his foundational, and frequently controversial, Sun Tribe (Taiyōzoku) films in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as his late 1960s collaborations with the Shaw brothers and his independent period of the 1970s. Nakahira's body of work spanned multiple genres, including noirs, thrillers, comedies, exploitation films, erotic dramas, gambling movies, girl gang films and spy parodies. His films were noted for their tight pacing, modernist visual flair and experiments with narrative and cinematic form, as well as Nakahira's ability to produce them quickly. Among his thematic preoccupations were the changing role of women in Japanese society, evolving standards of sexual ethics, the rejection of tradition among Japan's disaffected countercultural youth, infidelity and the dark side of human sexual desire.