Hashimoto Shinobu was a Japanese screenwriter, film director and producer. A frequent collaborator of Akira Kurosawa, he wrote the scripts for such internationally acclaimed films as "Rashomon" and "Seven Samurai".

Hashimoto was born in the Hyogo Prefecture of Japan on 18 April 1918. In 1938 he enlisted in the army, but became ill with tuberculosis while still training and spent four years in a veterans' sanitarium. While hospitalized, another patient gave Hashimoto a film magazine. The magazine sparked his interest in screenwriting and he began a screenplay about his army experience, spending three years on the project.

Hashimoto was a frequent collaborator with Kurosawa Akira, from 1950 to 1970 writing eight screenplays Kurosawa directed. He often worked with Oguni Hideo, Kikushima Ryūzō as well as Kurosawa himself on the scripts for those projects. Hashimoto won numerous awards for his writing, including a succession of Blue Ribbon Awards and Mainichi Film Awards, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s. Hashimoto wrote more than eighty screenplays, including Rashomon, Ikiru, Seven Samurai (1950), Throne of Blood (a 1957 adaptation of Macbeth set in Japan), and The Hidden Fortress (1958). He also directed three films.

Achieving international acclaim, Hashimoto's scripts inspired notable films abroad, including The Magnificent Seven (1960 and then remade again in 2016), a remake of Seven Samurai, and Star Wars (1977), which George Lucas has described as inspired by The Hidden Fortress.

In 2006, he authored a memoir entitled Compound Cinematics: Akira Kurosawa and I. In 2008, Hashimoto wrote a screenplay for I Want to Be a Shellfish, a second full-length film adaptation of the post-World War II-based television series he wrote for Tokyo Broadcasting System Television in 1958.

Hashimoto is credited in the making of at least 85 films.

(Source: Wikipedia; edited by MyDramaList)