Shuuji Terayama

Terayama Shuuji was an avant-garde Japanese poet, dramatist, writer, film director, and photographer. According to many critics and supporters, he was one of the most productive and provocative creative artists to come out of Japan. The only son of Hachiro and Hatsu Terayama.

His father died at the end of Pacific War in Indonesia in September 1945. At the age of nine, his mother moved to Kyushu to work at an American military base while he himself went to live with relatives in the city of Misawa, also in Aomori. At this same time, Terayama lived through the Aomori air raids that killed more than 30,000 people.

By 1983, he had been hospitalized with recurring cirrhosis in the liver several times and later developed peritonitis in hospital, where he died from sepsis on May 4, 1983.