Though little known in the West, Yasujiro Shimazu is a key figure in prewar Japa­nese cinema, and one of the pioneers of the gendai-geki (film of contemporary life). In the 1920s, working at Shochiku’s To­kyo studio in Kamata, he began, with the encouragement of studio head Shiro Kido, to realize light comedies with contempo­rary settings, among them Chichi (Father, 1923) and Nichiyobi (Sunday, 1924). These films prefigured the shomin-geki, the drama of the lower middle classes, which was to become Shochiku’s special­ity and to which such directors as Yasujiro Ozu, Mikio Naruse and Keisuke Kinoshita were to make distinguished contributions.
The story of a sailor who begins a love af­fair with a woman he saves from suicide, First Steps Ashore was Shochiku’s sec­ond sound film and Shimazu’s first. It is a reworking of Josef von Sternberg’s silent classic The Docks of New York (1928) transplanted to the waterfront of Japan’s cosmopolitan port city, Yokohama. Stern­berg’s film had been named the best for­eign film to be released in Japan in 1929 by the country’s leading film magazine, “Kinema Junpo”, and it had already been adapted for the Japanese stage in 1931 as a shinpa play. The same scenario writer, Komatsu Kitamura, worked on both the stage play and the film, and both starred the same actress, Yaeko Mizutani. As Mit­suyo Wada-Marciano observes, “In the process of adapting the film from silent to sound […] the filmmaker not only added words, but also used the shinpa theatri­cal influence – most evident in Mizutani’s acting and elocution – to ‘Japanize’ the script”. The film took joint sixth place in the “Kinema Junpo” Best Ten for that year.
Shimazu was to work prolifically at Sho­chiku and then Toho up to his death from stomach cancer in 1945. Among his later sound films, he produced literary adapta­tions such as Okoto to Sasuke (Okoto and Sasuke, 1935), based on Junichiro Tani­zaki, and realist dramas such as Tonari no Yae-chan (Our Neighbour Miss Yae, 1934) and Ani to sono imoto (An Older Brother and His Younger Sister, 1939). Despite his early death, he was a crucial influence on postwar Japanese film: Heinosuke Gos­ho, Yuzo Kawashima, Keisuke Kinoshita, Senkichi Taniguchi, Shiro Toyoda, and Kozaburo Yoshimura all served as his as­sistants, and he was a key figure in the development of a generic tradition central to Japanese film art.