Gosho was born on January 24, 1902, in
Kanda,
Tokyo, to merchant Heisuke Gosho and his father's
geisha mistress. At the age of five, after Heisuke's eldest son died, Gosho left his mother to be the successor to his father's
wholesale business. He studied business at
Keio University, graduating in 1923. Together with
Shirō Toyoda, Gosho was one of the first directors to adapt the works of the
junbungaku ("pure literature") movement for the screen, which opposed "popular" literature in favour of "serious" literature and a more complex handling of its subjects. A prominent example is
The Dancing Girl of Izu (1933), a successful adaptation of
Yasunari Kawabata's story of the same name, about the unfulfilled love between a student and a young country woman. Of his 36 1930s films, only slightly more than a half-dozen are extant. His best-known works of this era are the
social realist marriage drama
Where Chimneys Are Seen (1953), which was shown in competition at the
Berlin International Film Festival, and
Yellow Crow (1957), the portrait of a troubled father-son-relationship, which received the
Golden Globe Award for
Best Foreign Language Film. Although his films grew darker in tone by the mid-1950s, evident in works like
An Inn at Osaka, about a group of
Osaka residents struggling with an unrestrained materialistic environment, he stayed true to his ideals of "tolerance, compromise and rationality". Although having repeatedly worked with internationally known actresses and actors like
Kinuyo Tanaka, few of his films have been seen in the
Western world. In 1989–1990, a retrospective of his work was held by the
Japan Society and the
Museum of Modern Art, New York. ==Selected filmography==