Hisashi Shimonaga
- Sound Department
Hisashi Shimonaga was one of the Toho Studios' most accomplished and
important technicians of sound. Though many Japanese movies were filmed
without sound, then dubbed after the fact, Shimonaga was one of the few
who specialized in recording live sound, and editing it to the
performances on screen. He received one of the first Japanese Film
Technique Awards for Sound Recording for Yama no Oto (1954). That same
year, Shimonaga recorded Gojira (1954). Though a favorite sound
recordist of directors Akira Kurosawa, Ishiro Honda and Mikio Naruse,
after Gojira (on which he collaborated with composer Akira Ifukube),
Shimonaga started a new career of supervising the sound effects for
movies produced by Toho. This often involved creating the roars of
Toho's famous giant monsters.
