"I think that the shock I received when my elder sister died when I was ten years old was the first personal knowledge I had that people die. And since the conditions were very bad in wartime I lost two other older sisters in the wartime and right after the war to tuberculosis as well. This really brought home to me the ephemeral nature of life, the vanity of life, the lack of meaning that might be seen in life. Those were very close to me, personal events that happened in my own life. But during the war I lived in the spirit that I would die for the emperor because the emperor was a god. When after the war, when it was announced the emperor was no longer a god, he was just a human being, it was a great shock to me and I felt that all the gods who had lived in Japan had all become mortal rather than being gods. Of course, this threw me into great despair. But then it led me to have a curiosity about dealing with this type of theme afterwards -- that perhaps people become gods, gods may crash down and become people. So that kind of fluidity is something that became of interest to me as a fifteen-year-old boy."
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The Movie Experience: Conversation with actress Shima Iwashita and director Masahiro Shinoda/Shinoda on Directing (February 27, 1999)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Masahiro_Shinoda
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Masahiro Shinoda
Masahiro Shinoda (March 9, 1931 – March 25, 2025) was a retired Japanese film director.
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