Yoji Yamada is a Japanese film director best known for his Otoko wa Tsurai yo series of films and his Samurai Trilogy (The Twilight Samurai, The Hidden Blade, and Love and Honor).

He was born in Osaka. But because of the work of his father, who was an engineer for the South Manchuria Railway, from the age of 2 he was brought up in Manchuria. Following the end of World War II, he came back to Japan, and subsequently, he lived in Yamagata Prefecture. After receiving his degree from Tokyo University in 1954, he entered Shochiku and worked under Yoshitaro Nomura as a scriptwriter or as an assistant director.

He has won many awards throughout his lengthy career and is well respected in Japan and by critics throughout the world. He wrote his first screenplay in 1958 and directed his first movie in 1961. Yamada continues to make movies to this day. His movies have won the Best Picture award at the Japanese Academy Awards four times: in 1977 for The Yellow Handkerchief, in 1991 for My Sons, in 1993 for A Class to Remember, and in 2002 for The Twilight Samurai, which was nominated for the 76th Academy Awards' Best Foreign Language Film. He has won the Japan Academy Prize for Director of the Year three times. His 1984 film Tora-san's Forbidden Love was nominated for the Golden Prize at the 14th Moscow International Film Festival. His 2004 film, The Hidden Blade, was nominated for sixteen awards and won three.

In 2010 Yoji Yamada was honored at the 2010 Berlin Film Festival with a screening of his latest film Ototo during the awards ceremony, as well as receiving a Berlinale Camera award for his numerous contributions to the festival's program.

He once served as president of the Directors Guild of Japan and is currently a guest professor at Ritsumeikan University. Edit Biography