Nagisa Oshima, the radical Japanese film-maker who scandalised his homeland with the explicit drama In the Realm of the Senses, has died of pneumonia at the age of 80. The director had been in ill health for a number of years, after suffering a series of strokes. His last film, the gay samurai drama Taboo, competed at the Cannes film festival in 1999.

A former law student and leftwing activist, Oshima worked in direct opposition to what he felt was the timid gentility of postwar Japanese cinema. "My hatred for Japanese cinema includes absolutely all of it," he said. Oshima once banned the colour green from his movies. He reportedly saw it as too calming an influence.

Billed by international critics as Japan's answer to Jean-Luc Godard, Oshima made his debut with 1959's A Town of Love and Hope before burnishing his reputation with a string of formally inventive, often furious political dramas throughout the 1960s. Death By Hanging was a diatribe against capital punishment and insititutionalised racism, while Diary of a Shinjuku Thief spun a playful thesis on the link between sexual freedom and leftist activism. His 1971 drama The Ceremony mounted an acid satire on bourgeois manners at a family wedding.

His other credits include the 1983 prison-camp drama Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence, starring David Bowie, Takeshi Kitano and Ryuichi Sakamoto, and 1986's acclaimed, oddball Max, Mon Amour, in which Charlotte Rampling plays a diplomat's wife who takes a chimpanzee for her lover. He won the best director prize at Cannes for his 1978 drama Empire of Passion.

Yet Oshima remains best known for his 1976 classic In the Realm of the Senses, a tale of carnal obsession in 1930s Japan that contained scenes of explicit, unsimulated sex. The film was initially banned in the US, censored in the UK and still cannot be viewed in Japan in its original, uncut form. In the Realm of the Senses also sparked controversy in Portugal when it was aired on TV – although not everyone was opposed. The Roman Catholic priest Eurico Dias Nogueira, then the archbishop of Braga, declared that he had "learned more in 10 minutes of the film than he had in his entire life".