Shindo, who was determined to live life to the fullest, proved to be one of the greatest survivors of his generation. He died a month after celebrating his 100th birthday in April, outliving not just his contemporaries Akira Kurosawa, Keisuke Kinoshita and Kon Ichikawa, but also some of the so-called New Wave directors who emerged after him, such as Shohei Imamura, Hiroshi Teshigahara and Koreyoshi Kurahara.

Yet Shindo's genius could have been denied the world when he was conscripted into the Japanese Imperial Army in 1943, during the second world war. He had started working in the film industry in the 1930s and by the early '40s he had been art director for more than 50 films, a screenwriter for six, and then Kenji Mizoguchi's assistant on, among others, Straits of Love and Hate and The 47 Ronin.

But he was never sent to the battlefront, spending his time in Japan cleaning buildings for military use. As defeat loomed, he was thrown into a labour camp - a minor misfortune, as it turned out, compared to what would have happened if he had been allowed to return to his hometown, Hiroshima.

Shindo went back to Tokyo to restart his career, making his directorial debut in 1951 with the studio-backed domestic drama Story of a Beloved Wife.

The next year, he was approached by the leftist Japan Teachers' Union to direct a pacifist-themed project, a commission which led him to revisit his past with Children of Hiroshima, the first dramatic feature to examine the after-effects of the US atomic bomb attack on the city.

The film, about a schoolteacher's visit to Hiroshima and her encounters with its physically and mentally scarred citizens, is a bold anti-war treatise that blazed a trail in addressing what was then a very recent trauma in the Japanese national psyche.

Shindo would, time and again, revisit the spectre of the second world war with films such as Lucky Dragon No5 (1959, about a fishing crew who meet a sorry fate after travelling too near the Bikini Atoll, site of the US nuclear tests), Mother (1963, about an ostracised A-bomb survivor's tribulations in giving birth and raising a child) and Sakuratai-chiru (1988, a documentary about a progressive drama troupe who died in the Hiroshima bombing).

Rather than drawing constantly from his life experiences or his social milieu, however, the filmmaker was better known for films touching on a wide gamut of subjects.

He dealt with the suppressed underclass and the struggles of impoverished individuals such as geishas (Epitome, 1953), rural families (The Naked Island, 1960, and Onibaba, 1964), artists (the shamisen-playing musician in The Life of Chikuzan, 1977, or the woodblock painter Hokusai in Edo Porn [Hokusai Manga], 1981).

These are films varying in themes (with the female leading roles a loose unifying thread for most of them) and style (some are neo-realist while others are full-fledged horror films), building into a chronicle of the historical twists and turns that shaped modern-day Japan.

Having spent his life painting a grand national narrative for his country, Shindo's most personal film would finally emerge in his twilight years.

Made two years ago when he was already wheelchair-bound and frail, Postcard could be seen as the filmmaker's attempt to address the survivor's guilt he felt in emerging relatively unscathed from his two years of military service during the second world war.

Based on his real-life experience, the film revolves around Keita Matsuyama (Etsushi Toyokawa), who is part of a 100-man reservist unit drafted late into the war. Somehow, he manages to survive several ballots which send 94 of the men to their deaths on the frontline, and he ends up cleaning the Takarazuka Revue theatre when hostilities cease in August 1945.

True to form, Shindo accorded the central role of the film to a robust, indomitable woman in the shape of Tomoko (Shinobu Otake), who has to endure first the death of her husband - a colleague of Keita's - and then the death of her husband's younger brother, whom she married to keep the family (and specifically her in-laws) afloat and alive.

When Tomoko shrieks 'I'll live on to curse the war', she may be giving voice to the anger Shindo could not articulate loudly and explicitly throughout his life.

Some Japanese filmmakers continue to make films that contemplate the horrors of the nation's militaristic past - such as the ardently left-wing 75-year-old Koji Wakamatsu with his recent outings in Caterpillar and 11/25 The Day Mishima Chose His Own Fate. But the issue has largely receded into the background, its cultural and political currency fading as subsequent generations of directors engage with the completely different problems they were born into.

Of course, some directors do produce films questioning the brutal traditions that engendered Japan's nationalistic war-time mindset - such as Takashi Miike's remake of Hara-kiri last year - but the passing of Kaneto Shindo breaks a direct link to the past, with the loss of a unique perspective from a sage who had lived through a turbulent century and emerged to talk wisely and succinctly about it.

Postcard opens on Thursday