Kaneto Shindo, Filmmaker, Dies at 100 Janus Films Kichiemon Nakamura, left, and Nobuko Otowa in Kaneto Shindo's 1968 film "Kuroneko.' Kaneto Shindo, a venerable filmmaker whose work was haunted by the wartime devastation of his native Hiroshima, died on Tuesday at his home in Tokyo. He was 100. His office confirmed the death to Agence France-Presse. The director of nearly 50 pictures - his most recent, the World War II melodrama "Postcard," was released in 2010 - Mr. Shindo was the oldest active filmmaker in Japan. He was believed to have been the second-oldest in the world, after Manoel de Oliveira of Portugal, now 103. Mr. Shindo's body of work was known for its vast stylistic diversity: over six decades it ranged across social realism, horror, sex comedy and documentary. What unified his output was its obsessive quality; its concern with people - peasants, prostitutes, the poor - on the margins of society; the use of isolated, often claustrophobic spaces; the damaging interference of ghosts (of the psychological sort, though sometimes also the literal kind); and the presence of strong women. But for all their darkness, Mr. Shindo's films were ultimately pervaded by an essential humanism, even hopefulness. The net effect left some Western critics enraptured and others bewildered. As a result of his mixed reception in the West, Mr. Shindo never attained the global reputation of countrymen like Akira Kurosawa and Kenji Mizoguchi. Mr. Shindo came to international prominence early in his career with two features, "Children of Hiroshima" and "The Naked Island." Released in 1952, the year after the American occupation ended, "Children of Hiroshima" was the first Japanese film to treat the atomic bombing of the country by United States forces in 1945. It starred Nobuko Otowa as a schoolteacher who returns to the city several years after the war to search for her former students - those who have survived. The film was released in the United States only last year, in a retrospective of Mr. Shindo's work at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Reviewing the picture in The New York Times, A. O. Scott called Mr. Shindo "a distinctive and protean visual storyteller" whose films "balance ethical seriousness with an almost voluptuous appetite for natural beauty and pictorial elegance." "The Naked Island," released in 1960, is a stark, wordless drama, filmed in quasi-documentary style, about an impoverished farming family scraping out a living on a barren outcropping devoid of fresh water. The film, which has no dialogue, follows its characters" lives of crushing toil on their daily pilgrimage to haul water by hand from the mainland. The picture shared the Grand Prix at the Moscow Film Festival in 1961. Mr. Shindo was also known for two critically praised horror films, "Onibaba" (1964) and "Black Cat" (1968). Both are set in the Middle Ages, a time of war, famine and lawlessness. In "Onibaba," a woman and her daughter-in-law, desperate to survive, murder roaming samurai and sell their weapons and armor. In "The Black Cat," two peasant women, raped and killed by samurai, return as seductive, vengeful demons. Mr. Shindo also wrote the screenplays for well over 100 films, both his own and those of prominent directors including Kozaburo Yoshimura, with whom he long collaborated. Kaneto Shindo was born in Hiroshima in April 1912. His family, once prosperous landowners, had lost their money and, as he later wrote, he watched his parents engage in "the backbreaking labor of wheat-harvesting" and "the grueling job of threshing by hand with primitive implements." Drafted into the Japanese Imperial Navy, Mr. Shindo was one of only six members of his 100-man unit to survive the war. After beginning his cinematic career in the 1930s as a film developer for a small Japanese studio, Mr. Shindo was later an assistant to Mr. Mizoguchi. A feature-length documentary portrait, "Kenji Mizoguchi: The Life of a Film Director," written and directed by Mr. Shindo, was released in 1975. Mr. Shindo's first wife died in the early 1940s; his first film as a director, the drama "Story of a Beloved Wife" (1951), starring Ms. Otowa, was based partly on their marriage. After Mr. Shindo's second marriage ended, Ms. Otowa, who appeared in nearly all his films, became his third wife. Ms. Otowa died in 1994. Mr. Shindo's survivors include a son, Jiro, and a granddaughter. Mr. Shindo returned to the theme of atomic devastation in several other films. These include "Lucky Dragon No. 5" (1959), which dramatized the true story of Japanese fishermen contaminated in 1954 by fallout from United States nuclear tests on Bikini Atoll. If Mr. Shindo's work was informed inevitably by the war, it was informed in particular by his acute awareness that the vagaries of fate - and nothing else - had let him survive where most of his unit had not. As he said in an interview quoted in his obituary in the British newspaper The Guardian, "I have always had the souls of the 94 with me and have made them the theme of my existence."