Keisuke Shibata

Keisuke Shibata (Japanese: 柴田啓佑; born 1984 in Shizuoka City, Shizuoka Prefecture) is a Japanese director and screenwriter. He is a graduate of the Japan Institute of the Moving Image, and he has directed four verified boys’ love series: Mr. Sahara & Toki-kun (2023), Although I Love You, and You (2024), Our Youth (2024) and Hold on, Harutora-kun (2026).

He came to notice through festival short film. His 2014 short Hitomazu Susume (ひとまずすすめ) took four major prizes at the eighth Tanabe-Benkei Film Festival, which was a record for the festival at the time. His earlier films include Yagi, Omae no Sei da (ヤギ、おまえのせいだ, 2012) and Mado no Sotogawa (窓の外側, 2016).

From 2017 his work moves almost entirely into Japanese late-night television drama, and a striking pattern emerges. A large part of his output is food drama, the Japanese format built around meals: The Meal with Hokusai (2017, 8 episodes), The Way of the Hot & Spicy (2021, 12 episodes), Rokuhoudou Colorful Days (2022, 10 episodes) and Eating Crab with a Yukionna (2022, 4 episodes). Alongside these he directed Ten: The Nice Guy on the Path of Tenho (2018, 12 episodes), a mahjong drama, and The Shadows of Who We Once Were (2023, 12 episodes).

His BL work sits in exactly the same slot and at exactly the same scale. Mr. Sahara & Toki-kun (2023, 8 episodes) is a manga adaptation involving an age-gap relationship and a difficult school history. Although I Love You, and You (2024, 10 episodes) is a manga adaptation about a chef and an office worker, friends turned something else. Our Youth (2024, 10 episodes) is adapted from a manhwa rather than a manga. Hold on, Harutora-kun (2026, 8 episodes) is a high school story.

He also directed Tokyo Holiday (2025, 12 episodes), The Yakuza Boss’s Beloved (2025, 8 episodes) and My Fave, the Killer (2025, 13 episodes).

BLGLFlix editorial view. His record answers a question the anime side of this site raises separately. We noted elsewhere that Japanese BL anime is made in the same short-form production pipeline as material for an adult audience, and that this is why it looks so unlike Thai BL. Live-action Japanese BL turns out to have exactly the same explanation, just with a different neighbour. It lives in the late-night drama slot, eight to twelve episodes, adapted from an existing manga, and it is directed by the same people who make food dramas. He shot four series about eating and four about men falling in love, in the same slot, at the same scale, in the same decade. Our own read is that this is not a diminishment of Japanese BL but the key to understanding its texture. Late-night Japanese drama is a form built for small casts, interiors, restraint and adaptation fidelity, which is precisely why Japanese live-action BL feels quieter, shorter and more faithful to its source than the Thai equivalent. The genre did not choose that register. The slot did.