Education
Born in Namegata District, Ibaraki, Yanagimachi attended the Faculty of Law at Waseda University but began studying filmmaking.
柳町光男
Born in Namegata District, Ibaraki, Yanagimachi attended the Faculty of Law at Waseda University but began studying filmmaking.
Working as a freelance assistant director after graduating, he started his own production company in 1974 and produced the documentary film Black Emperor (1976) about bōsōzoku. He made his fiction film debut in 1979 with Jūkyūsai no Chizu. That and the later Himatsuri were based on novels by Kenji Nakagami.
His 1982 work Saraba Itoshiki Daichi showed in the Competition at the Berlin Film Festival.
His films have often focused on youth (), on ethnic minorities in Japan (Ai ni Tsuite, Tokyo), as well as on Asia (Shadow of China and the documentary Tabisuru Pao-jiang-hu).