Filmmaker, President of the Society for the Studies of Audio Visual Documentation for Cultural Properties, President of TokyoCinema Inc., and Trustee of the Shimonaka Memorial Foundation.
Born in Tokyo in 1942. From 1961 to 1966 he studied in the Faculty of Feature Film Direction at the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) in Moscow under the supervision of Professor Mikhail Romm.
On returning to Japan, he joined Tokyo Cinema, founded by his father, Sōzō Okada. His first work as a director, The Human Mind and Society (1971), produced at Tokyo Cinema, marked his formal graduation from VGIK. From 1970 he supported Kuanzō Sōzō Okada in introducing to Japan the Encyclopaedia Cinematographica (EC Films), an international movement for the collection of scientific films, and in establishing and managing the EC Japan Archives under the Shimonaka Memorial Foundation. Since then, he has been engaged in a wide range of film production in education, science and culture, particularly in biological and ethnographic documentation, as well as in the international collection of scientific films.
Work in Okinawa: In 1975 he directed and edited the three-screen multi-vision film Marine Flowers: The Biospheare of Coelenterates for the Marine Pavilion at Expo ’75 Okinawa (produced for Panasonic). He subsequently made the ethnographic films The Izaihō of Kudaka Island , Okinawa (1979/2022) and Mayunganishi of Kabira, Ishigaki Island (1982).
From 1984 to 1996 he was a member of the International Editorial Board of the Encyclopaedia Cinematographica. He has served as jury member at international festivals devoted to scientific, educational, ethnographic and natural history films in the United Kingdom, Canada, Estonia, India, Iran and elsewhere. He has also been a Research Collaborator at the National Museum of Japanese History (for early Ainu films), a Research Associate at the Hokkaido Museum of Northern Peoples (for ethnographic film collection), and a member of the Film Review Committee of the National Ainu Museum. He is Vice-President of the non-profit organisation Kagaku Eizōkan (Science Film Museum), which distributes over 1,200 film titles free of charge on the web.
As a producer of natural history and life science films, his works have won numerous top prizes at festivals both in Japan and abroad. He is currently completing the scientific film on Tardigrades: The Space Bears 4 Ever.
In April 2021, together with Tomo Ishimura, Head of the Department of Intangible Cultural Heritage at the Tokyo National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, and Maki Mishima, an Okinawan folklorist and lecturer at Gakushuin University, he co-founded the Society for the Studies of Audio Visual Documentation for Cultural Properties. Okada was appointed its President. The Society initiated the Izaihō Film Digitisation Project, a crowdfunding effort to digitise, archive and create a database of surviving film materials of the Izaihō ritual of Kudaka Island.
With further support from a second crowdfunding campaign in 2023, Okada and his colleagues combined previously unreleased footage shot in Kudaka Island in 1977–79 with new documentation recorded in autumn 2023. This resulted in the feature-length ethnographic documentary IRABŪ of Kudaka Island, Okinawa, completed on 31 March 2024. Its English-language version was finished on 20 June 2024 and premiered on 13 August 2024.