Even in today's theater world in Japan, which tends to venerate age, at just 52 Hideki Noda is already a towering, legendary figure.
Wherever you go and talk to dramatists or stage performers, you will find his name and achievements almost invariably come up. This is especially the case among young dramatists in Japan, who, even though their theater styles might be different from his, almost all acknowledge a huge artistic debt to Noda in their own theatrical creations.
Born on tiny Sakito-jima Island in Kyushu's Nagasaki Prefecture, Noda was just 4 years old when his family moved to Tokyo. His origins, though, have never deserted him, and in 1999 a play he wrote and staged called "Pandora's Bell" dealt with the U.S. atomic bombing of Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945, when the grotesquely named "Fat Man" exploded over the city and took at least 80,000 human lives with it in a flash. In that work, Noda posed challenging questions about the Showa Emperor's war responsibility, his subjects' blind fanaticism and World War II's ongoing scars in Japan.