Kumashiro also took breaks from the Roman Porno genre to direct mainstream films, beginning with "Bitterness of Youth" (1974), a story of student radicalism with similarities to Dreiser's "An American Tragedy" (1925). Other such films include "Light of Africa" (1975) for Toho and "Jigoku" (1979), a remake of Nobuo Nakagawa's 1960 film "Jigoku", for Toei. For the German-Japanese co-production, "The Woman with the Red Hat" (1982), Kumashiro worked with Pink Film producer-director Kōji Wakamatsu. The production was an unsuccessful attempt on Wakamatsu's part to emulate the success he had had in collaborating with the French in Nagisa Ōshima's "In the Realm of the Senses" (1976). The story, dealing with a Japanese man in Germany and his obsessive sexual relationship with a German woman during Hitler's rise to power, also seemed to echo Ōshima's film. Jasper Sharp notes with surprise that Kumashiro, who had long been an opponent of Japanese censorship, did not take advantage of the more liberal European laws. Instead he followed the Japanese practice of obscuring genital areas with props.