List of Famous people born on January 1st

Kenji Shimizu , b. 1940, is an aikido teacher and founder of the aikido style Tendo-ryu Aikido (天道流).

H. Bruce Franklin, is an American cultural historian and scholar. He is notable for receiving top awards for his lifetime scholarship in fields as diverse as American studies, science fiction, prison literature and marine ecology. He has written or edited twenty books and three hundred professional articles and participated in making four films. His main areas of academic focus are science fiction, prison literature, environmentalism, the Vietnam War and its aftermath, and American cultural history. He was instrumental in helping to debunk false public speculation that Vietnam was continuing to hold prisoners of war. He helped to establish science fiction writing as a genre worthy of serious academic study. In 2008, the American Studies Association awarded him the Pearson-Bode Prize for Lifetime Achievement in American Studies. A critic of the Vietnam War, he was fired from Stanford in 1972 for allegedly inciting to riot, and the termination brought nationwide attention to the issue of academic freedom. Since 1975, he is the John Cotton Dana Professor of English and American Studies at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey.

Choi Dong-hoon is a South Korean film director and screenwriter. He ranks as one of the most consistently successful directors working in contemporary Korean cinema, with all five of his films becoming commercial hits -- The Big Swindle attracted 2.12 million viewers, Tazza: The High Rollers at 6.84 million, Jeon Woo-chi: The Taoist Wizard at 6.13 million, The Thieves at 12.9 million, and Assassination at 12.7 million.