Known for elegantly linking desire and destruction, beauty and violence, Shinoda's exquisitely composed films often explore the ways history informs the modern Japanese character. Profoundly affected by World War II, Shinoda has made this crucial experience the theme or subtext of a number of his films. Dealing with one man's memory of the terror pervading the atmosphere just before and during World War II, Punishment Island employs a hypnotically compelling complex flashback format to tell of a man's return to the island where, as a boy, having seen his family killed because his father was an anarchist, he himself was brutally mistreated by a reform-school headmaster. Albert Johnson introduced the film at the 1966 San Francisco Film Festival, and wrote: "The story is multilayered, not only in terms of plot, but within the growing sense of self-discovery in the hero himself. Once the spectator realizes that half the man's life has been spent in accomplishing his revenge, the ultimate denouement reaches the level of ironic allegory....the mordant fascination of recognizing that the most evil of human creatures have the shortest memories."