Akimoto Matsuyo

Her collected works were published in five volumes in 2002, a year after her death.

In 2001, the year of Akimoto's death, the Asahi Shimbun newspaper established the Asahi Awards for the Theater Arts (Asahi Butai Geijutsu Shō). The annual Asahi Awards consist of five prizes, one of which is named after Akimoto Matsuyo and is awarded for "theatrical works, individuals, or organizations that have succeeded in combining popular entertainment with artistic merit."

Then in 1975 she won the Yomiuri Literary Award for her play Nana-nin Misaki This play was popular all across Japan that it was also awarded the Purple Ribbon the following years in 1979.

At the age of 35 and end of WWII, she became a professional playwright. She wrote for major shingeki companies, and even got to run her own company Theatre Troupe Engekza from 1967-1970. Akimoto wrote her plays in a realist style with a focus on interpersonal family relationships.

However, in her later plays she strayed from her realists approach and switched to a shamaness style that incorporated dark poetry in order to capture her vision on how she saw the Japanese community of her time. This can be seen in her award-winning masterpiece Kaison of Priest of Hitachi (1967 translated 1988) where the dialogue was used to present Japan's postwar culture. Her interest in human suffering and her compassion for those who suffer no doubt reflected her own experience as a child.

There was a time in her career where she felt under appreciated as a playwright. So she stopped writing plays for a while and chose to become a scriptwriter for radio and television shows instead, but did not make what she hoped to get out of it. Regardless, her play Kaision of Priest of Hitachi won over Hanada Kiyoteru, a well-known critic in 1967 at the Engeki Theatre and since then her plays have been performed.

In 1964 Akimoto received the Toshiko Tamura Award Gay Art Festival Award for her play Hitachi Boumimikoto.

In Akimoto's work death reoccurs and the various Japanese customs developed to conquer it. Topics included mourning which can be found in (Mourning Clothes, 1949), immortality in (The Life of Muraoka Iheji, 1960), and shinkō shūkyō, or "new religions" in (Thoughts on our Lady of Scabs, 1968). Her 1964 work, Kaison the Priest of Hitachi, deals with a group of boys whose parents die in the 1945 firebombing of Tokyo, this play is considered to be a landmark in Japanese drama. Despite her serious and often tragic topics, one of Akimoto's strengths lies in injecting comic elements into her plays.

The following year after Akimoto enrolled into Miyoshi's Drama Workshop Gikyoku Kenkyū she published her first play Keijin (The Light Dust) in the journal Gekisaku in 1946. 1949 was when her second play, Mourning Clothes (Reifuku), was published, and when her career started to take off working with important directors such as Koreya Senda and Yukio Ninagawa who staged her plays.

In 1945 at the age of 34 she became a student at the Drama Workshop Gikyoku Kenkyū (The Society of Drama Study) which was founded by leftist playwright Miyoshi Jūrō (1902-1958), a leading playwright of the time. Not only did Miyoshi encourage Akimoto to write professionally, but he also inspired her. While, Akimoto disregarded comments that pertained to her as a disciple of Miyoshi, she was nevertheless influenced by his works of humanism, communism, and nationalism. In 1947 she debuted A Sprinkling of Dust with Miyoshi’s expertise.

Akimoto Matsuyo (秋元松代, 2 January 1911 – 24 April 2001) was one of Japan's leading playwrights of post war Japan, and most respected as a realist Japanese playwright. She was known for her shingeki plays, but had written some classical puppet bunraku and kabuki dramas, and later became a scriptwriter for both radio and television shows. Along with Akimoto's childhood, World War II played a significant role in her career. As a realist playwright, she used her work to make political statements in order to warn the greater Japanese community that the government was trying to continue their pre-war imperial system which was fulfilled with capitalism, militarism, and patriarchy.

Akimoto was born in Yokohama on January 2, 1911, to a family of six consisting of her mother, father, and four older brothers; one of them being Fujio Akimoto, who was a haiku poet.