![]() It was during this period that he saw a film that would point towards his future career. During the 1930s, he moved among a number of studios and became known for his meticulous work. Hajime, the first of their three sons, was born a year later. Thus began the work for which he would become known-special visual effects.ġ930 was also the year of his marriage to Masano Araki. In the 1930 film Chohichiro Matsudaira, he created a film illusion by super-imposition. He began using and creating innovative filming techniques during this period, including the first use of a camera crane in Japanese film. He joined Shochiku Kyoto Studios in 1926 and became full-time cameraman there in 1927. He was head cameraman on Hunchback of Enmeiin (Enmeiin no Semushiotoko), and served as assistant cameraman on Teinosuke Kinugasa's ground-breaking 1925 film, Kurutta Ippeiji ( A Page of Madness). After serving as a member of the correspondence staff to the military from 1921 to 1923, he joined Ogasaware Productions. In 1919, his first job in the film industry was as an assistant cinematographer at the Nihon Katsudou Shashin Kabushiki-kaisha (Nihon Cinematograph Company or Kokkatsu for short) in Kyoto, which later became better known as Nikkatsu. While the Tsuburaya family's traditional religion was Nichiren Buddhism, Tsuburaya converted to Roman Catholicism in his later years (his wife had already been a practicing Roman Catholic). ![]() ![]() He became quite successful in the research and development department of the Utsumi toy company, but a chance meeting at a company party in 1919, set the course for his destiny-he was offered a job by director Yoshiro Edamasa, a job that would train him to be a motion picture cameraman. After the school was closed on account of the accidental death of its founder, Seitaro Tamai, in 1917, Tsuburaya attended trade school. In 1915, at the age of 14, he graduated the equivalent of High School, and begged his family to let him enroll in the Nippon Flying school at Haneda. He attended elementary school at the Sukagawa Choritsu Dai'ichi Jinjo Koutou Shogakko beginning in 1908, and two years later, he took up the hobby of building model airplanes, due to the sensational success of Japanese aviators, an interest he would retain for the rest of his life. Young Eiji was raised by his barely older uncle, Ichiro, and his paternal grandmother, Natsu. His mother died when he was only three and his father moved to China for the family business. Tsuburaya described his childhood as filled with "mixed emotions." He was the first son of Isamu and Sei Tsumuraya, with a large extended family. Tsuburaya's actual birthdate of July 10 has been verified by his last surviving son, Akira, and the company Eiji founded, Tsuburaya Productions, as the official entry in the Tsuburaya Family Register, in researching the official English-language biography on this important figure of cinema, Eiji Tsuburaya: Master of Monsters, Chronicle Books, 2007. This is akin to an American saying that they were born on the Fourth of July. During his rise to post-war fame in the wake of Godzilla (1954), many press accounts gave Tsuburaya's birthdate as July 7, which falls on the high day of the star festival, Tanabata, a sign of good fortune. Eiji Tsuburaya ( 円谷 英二, Tsuburaya Eiji) ( Eiichi Tsumuraya ( 圓谷 英一, Tsumuraya Eiichi) J– January 25, 1970, in Sukagawa, Fukushima) was a Japanese special effects director responsible for many Japanese science-fiction films and television series, being one of the co-creators of the Godzilla series, as well as the main creator of the Ultra Series.
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