Shinobu Hashimoto was born on April 18, 1918 in Hyogo Prefecture, Japan. He was a writer and director, known for The Hidden Fortress (1958), Hara-Kiri (1962) and Rashomon (1950). He died on July 19, 2018 in Tokyo, Japan.He wrote more than 70 screenplays for major Japanese directors including Tadashi Imai, Masaki Kobayashi and Mikio Naruse, but was best known for his work with Akira Kurosawa. He was diagnosed with tuberculosis after he enlisted in the army in 1938. This ended his military career, and he was sent to a veterans' hospital. While convalescing, he looked through some movie magazines, found a sample screenplay, and figured he could write something much better. He wrote his own script, based on his experiences in the hospital, and sent it to Mansaku Itami, a prominent screenwriter. Itami was so impressed that he became a mentor for Hashimoto. For the 1958 film Yoru no tsuzumi (1958) (Night Drum), Hashimoto worked on the script with the slightly older screenwriter-director Kaneto Shindô. By a strange coincidence, both Shindô and Hashimoto would die much later at the age of 100 years, Shindô in May 2012 and Hashimoto in July 2018. This was the only film on which the two men collaborated.