Kadokawa Haruki

Other Name: 角川春樹

Age: 83

Birthday: January 8, 1942

Nationality: Japanese

Gender: Male

Kadokawa Haruki is a Japanese publisher, film producer, director, and screenwriter. He was the son of Genyoshi Kadokawa and inherited the position of president of the publishing house Kadokawa Shoten in 1975. Under his guidance, the company soon branched into film production, and by 1994 Kadokawa had produced close to 60 films, many of them box-office hits. After being forced to resign from Kadokawa Shoten in 1994 due to a smuggling conviction, he established another company, Kadokawa Haruki Corporation, that has also been involved in the publishing and film production industries. Haruki's father was Kadokawa Genyoshi, the founder of the Japanese publishing house Kadokawa Shoten. After graduating from high school, Haruki was accepted into the literature department of Waseda University. However, with his father's influence, he was enrolled in Kokugakuin University instead. Haruki graduated in 1964 with a degree in literature and joined his father's company the next year. In 1993, Kadokawa was accused of instructing photographer Ikeda Takeshi, a close aide, to smuggle cocaine from the United States on several occasions. He was charged with smuggling and embezzling money from his company in order to fund drug purchases. While Kadokawa continued to argue his innocence throughout the ordeal, in September 1994 he was convicted and handed a four-year prison sentence, of which he ended up serving two and a half years. Due to the "moral embarrassment" regarding the incident the film Rex: A Dinosaur's Story, a 1993 summer blockbuster directed by Kadokawa, was pulled from theaters by Kadokawa's production company and its distribution partner, Shochiku Company. Kadokawa himself was forced to resign from Kadokawa Shoten. The new president was Haruki's younger brother Tsuguhiko, who had previously been forced out of the company in favor of Haruki's son Taro. In 1995, Kadokawa started the Kadokawa Haruki Corporation and continued in the publishing business by purchasing the teen magazine Popteen from his old company Kadokawa Shoten. In 2005, after more than a decade away from the business, Kadokawa returned to producing films with the World War II epic Yamato. Throughout his career, Kadokawa has earned a reputation for flamboyancy, not all of which stems from his large scale films and their advertising campaigns. In 1974, he built his own Shinto shrine and conducted monthly rituals there. He wrote critically praised haiku and tanka poetry that was published in poetry magazines, a hobby he continued while incarcerated. In 1991, Kadokawa finished building a full-size replica of Christopher Columbus' flagship Santa Maria, which sailed from Barcelona to Japan, with Kadokawa initially at the helm. (Source: Wikipedia).