Japanese director Imamura dies at 79

TOKYO: Film director Shohei Imamura, the first Japanese to win the prestigious Palme d'Or at Cannes twice, died on Tueday of liver cancer at age 79, associates said.

Often considered the top Japanese director since the late Akira Kurosawa, Imamura was a pioneer of the country's New Wave movement, moving away from classical temes to focus on prostitutes, ex-convicts and other characters from the underground.

"He died at a hospital where he had been treated for about a month since he fell ill," said Mitsuo Hirakawa, chief secretary of the Japan Academy of Moving Images, which Imamura founded in 1975.

"Imamura seemed healthy and cheerful when he attended a party with our faculty last March," he said, adding that he did not know of any plan by the director to shoot a new film.

The cause of death was liver cancer, for which he underwent surgery in June last year, Imamura Studio said.

Imamura won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1983 for the "The Ballad of Narayama," a tale of a man who follows village tradition to let his mother die on a mountain top.

He won the award again in 1997 for "The Eel," about a man who was imprisoned for murdering his wife and meets another woman as he tries to start a new quiet life in a village. He also directed the 1989 film "Black Rain" depicting the aftermath of the world's first atomic bombing in Hiroshima.

Born in 1926 in Tokyo to a doctor father, Imamura entered a technical school to escape being drafted into the imperial army during its conquest of Asia. He went to study Western literature at prestigious Waseda University.