Background

Akira Kurosawa was born on March 23, 1910, in Shinagawa, Tokyo, Japan. He was the youngest of eight children born to Isamu and Shima. His well-to-do family can trace its lineage as far back as the 11th century, and the young Kurosawa was taught early on that he was a descendant of samurai. His father was a teacher at the Army's Physical Education Institute, while his mother Shima came from a merchant family living in Osaka.

Education

In his autobiography, which several commentators have suggested reads much like a screenplay, Kurosawa recollects his father’s early influence on him. His father was a progressive thinker who considered films and theatre to have educational merit, he believed Akira and his siblings should be exposed to Western culture as well, so he frequently took them to see films.

In school, Akira was inspired by his elementary school teacher, Mr. Tachikawa, who helped him discover the joys of drawing. Akira was the captain of his school’s kendo club. He also learned calligraphy and Kendo swordsmanship. Initially, Kurosawa found himself drawn to art; after finishing high school, he studied at the Doshisha School of Western Painting.

Career

Akira Kurosawa began his career in 1936 as an assistant director at Photo Chemical Laboratories (known as PCL) cinema studio. He mostly worked under Kajiro Yamamoto who had taken a liking to him. He was given more responsibilities as a result and he dabbled in errands from stage construction to film development. Until 1943 he worked there mainly as an assistant to Yamamoto Kajirō, one of Japan’s major directors of World War II films. During this period Kurosawa became known as an excellent scenarist. Some of his best scenarios were never filmed but only published in journals, yet they were noticed by specialists for their freshness of representation and were awarded prizes.

Because he had been labeled unfit for military service after failing an earlier physical when Japan entered World War II Kurosawa was able to stay in Tokyo and continue to work. Despite the inherent economic hardships of the conflict, it was during this time that Kurosawa was promoted to director and made his first film, Sanshiro Sugata. The film was caught in a censorship battle because it was deemed too British-American. The intervention of director Yasujirō Ozu made the movie see the light of day. It was a story of Japanese judo masters of the 1880s and became a critical and commercial success.

Kurosawa followed with the World War II-themed Ichiban utsukushiku in 1944, an achievement made even sweeter when he married its star, Yōko Yaguchi, the next year. The movie was about wartime female factory workers. In August 1945, when Japan offered to surrender in World War II, he was shooting his picture Tora no o fumu otokotachi (They Who Step on the Tiger’s Tail), a parody of a well-known Kabuki drama. The Allied occupation forces, however, prohibited the release of most films dealing with Japan’s feudal past, and this outstanding comedy was not distributed until 1952.

For a brief period after the war’s end, Kurosawa’s budding career was placed on hold by the occupying United States forces, but he returned to filmmaking with his own criticism of Japan’s pre-war militarism, No Regrets for Our Youth in 1946. Two years later, he made his first significant breakthrough with Drunken Angel, a melodrama set in post-war Tokyo that not only demonstrated Kurosawa’s range but also marked his first collaboration with actor Toshirō Mifune.

Kurosawa followed his first domestic success with what would become his first international hit, Rashomon (1950), a samurai murder story told from the perspective of four different characters. It is now considered a masterfully innovative storytelling device for the time, but it was met with mixed reactions in Japan. Kurosawa’s Rashomon was shown at the Venice Film Festival in 1951 and was awarded the Grand Prix. It also won the Academy Award for best foreign-language film. This was the first time a Japanese film had won such high international acclaim, and Japanese films now attracted serious attention all over the world.

Now recognized as an important voice in cinema, over the course of the next decade, Kurosawa made some of his most influential and entertaining films. In 1952, he released the internationally acclaimed Ikiru, which is regarded by many critics as one of the finest works in the history of the cinema. It concerns a petty governmental official who learns he has only half a year until he will die from cancer. He searches for solace in the affection of his family but is betrayed, then seeks enjoyment but becomes disillusioned, and, in the end, is redeemed by using his position to work for the poor.

In this film, which abounds in strong moral messages, Kurosawa depicts in an extremely realistic manner the collapse of the family system, as well as the hypocritical aspects of officials in postwar Japanese society. The picture was an outstanding document of the life and the spiritual situation of Japanese people, who were then beginning to recover from the desperation caused by defeat in the war.

In 1954, he released the epic Seven Samurai, a homage to Westerns that would later come full circle when it was remade as The Magnificent Seven (1960). Once more demonstrating his range and flair for adaptation, in 1957, Kurosawa released Throne of Blood. A reimagining of Macbeth, it is widely considered to be one of the finest interpretations of Shakespeare’s works. Following on its heels was 1958's Hidden Fortress, the story of a princess, her general, and their two bumbling peasant companions on a quest to reach home. It marked a milestone as the first film in Japan to make use of the widescreen format, but it is arguably even more important for the influence it had on the young American filmmaker George Lucas, who names Hidden Fortress as a primary influence for Star Wars.

To gain greater artistic freedom in his work, in 1960, Kurosawa started his own production company. His first film from this new venture was Yojimbo (1961), which follows a nameless wandering samurai as he plays the middle between the two warring factions in a small town. Throughout the 1960s, Kurosawa made a number of entertainment films, mainly with samurai as leading characters; Yojimbo (1961; The Bodyguard) is a representative work. Akahige (1965; Red Beard) combines elements of entertainment with a sentimental humanism. In the 1960s, however, Japanese cinema fell into an economic depression, and Kurosawa’s plans, in most cases, were found by film companies to be too expensive.

Among his most popular and accessible films, Sergio Leone remade it as A Fistful of Dollars (1964), with Clint Eastwood starring as the archetypal Man with No Name. His first Hollywood project Tora! Tora! Tora! was produced by 20th Century Fox and Kurosawa Productions, in 1970. It dramatized the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor from both the American and the Japanese points-of-view. It was not well-received by critics and the public and thus began a period of struggle for him. The work progressed slowly, however, and the producer, fearing an excess in estimated cost, dismissed Kurosawa and replaced him with another director.

After a six-year interval, Kurosawa, at last, managed to present another of his films, Dodesukaden (1970). His first work in color, a comedy of poor people living in slums, it recaptured much of the poignancy of his best works but failed financially. Dejected, exhausted, and suffering financially, Kurosawa attempted suicide in 1971. Although he eventually recovered, he resigned himself to the fact that he would never direct again.

The period of personal despondency and artistic silence that followed ended in the mid-1970s. On the verge of fading into obscurity, Kurosawa was approached by a Russian production company to make the adventure epic Dersu Uzala. This story of a Siberian hermit won wide acclaim. Shot on location in Siberia and premiering in 1975, international audiences enthusiastically received the film. However, the production took a toll on Kurosawa’s health. Although he was finding it increasingly difficult to win backing for his projects, Kurosawa persevered in his efforts to bring his vision to the screen.

Kagemusha (The Shadow Warrior), released in 1980, was the director’s first samurai film in 14 years. It concerns a petty thief who is chosen to impersonate a powerful feudal lord killed in battle. This film was notable for its powerful battle scenes. Kurosawa's next film, 1985's Ran, is also a period piece, set in sixteenth-century Japan. Based on Shakespeare's King Lear, the project was the culmination of a ten-year dream that began when Kurosawa was having trouble finding funding. Ran was acclaimed as one of Kurosawa’s greatest films in the grandeur of its imagery, the intellectual depth of its screen adaptation, and the intensity of its dramatic performances.

In 1990, the 80-year-old director returned with Dreams, an experimental offering brought to the screen with help from yet another of his admirers, Steven Spielberg. Though the film met with a lukewarm reception, at that year’s Academy Awards Spielberg and Lucas presented Kurosawa with an honorary Oscar by in recognition of his body of work. The director made the mildly successful Rhapsody in August in 1990 and Madadayo in 1993. In 1995, he was working on his next project when he fell and broke his back. The injuries he sustained confined him to a wheelchair for the remainder of life and led to a rapid deterioration of his health.

Achievements

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  Akira Kurosawa introduced his country's cinema to the world with his 1951 Venice Festival Grand Prize winner, Rashomon. His international reputation has broadened over the years with numerous citations, and when 20th Century-Fox distributed his 1980 Cannes Grand Prize winner, Kagemusha, it was the first time a Japanese film achieved worldwide circulation through a major Hollywood studio.
  
  AsianWeek magazine named him Asian of the Century in the category of Arts, Literature, and Culture. CNN called him one of the five people who contributed most to the betterment of Asia in the past 100 years. Both these honors were bestowed on him posthumously.
  
  

Works

More photos

• movie

  • Throne of Blood

    (A vivid, visceral Macbeth adaptation, Throne of Blood, di...)

    1957
  • The Hidden Fortress

    (A grand-scale adventure as only Akira Kurosawa could make...)

    1958
  • I Live in Fear

    (When a wealthy foundry owner decides to move his entire f...)

    1950
  • High and Low

    (Toshiro Mifune is unforgettable as a wealthy industrialis...)

    1963
  • Seven Samurai

    (One of the most thrilling movie epics of all time, Akira ...)

    1954
  • Ran

    (Akira Kurosawa's brilliantly conceived re-telling of Shak...)

    1985
  • The Silent Duel

    (During a life-saving operation, young army surgeon Fujisa...)

    1949
  • Red Beard

    (A testament to the goodness of humankind, Akira Kurosawa'...)

    1965
  • Akira Kurosawa's Dreams

    (Academy Award-winning director Akira Kurosawa, whose cine...)

    1990
  • The Idiot

    (Akira Kurosawa’s The Idiot, his only adaptation of a Fyod...)

    1951
  • Ikiru

    (One of the greatest achievements by Akira Kurosawa (Seven...)

    1952
  • No Regrets for Our Youth

    (The daughter of a politically disgraced university profes...)

    1946
  • Kagemusha: Shadow Warrior

    (After a powerful Japanese warlord is mortally wounded in ...)

    1980
  • Sanshiro Sugata

    (Sugata, a young man, struggles to learn the nuance and me...)

    1943
  • Rhapsody in August

    (A Japanese family once torn apart by war and now facing p...)

    1991
  • Sanjuro

    (Toshiro Mifune swaggers and snarls to brilliant comic eff...)

    1962
  • Scandal

    (A paparazzi photo sparks a court case as a tabloid magazi...)

    1950
  • One Wonderful Sunday

    (Yuzo and his fiancée Masako spend their Sunday afternoon ...)

    1947
  • The Lower Depths

    (In a Japanese slum, various residents play out their live...)

    1957
  • Drunken Angel

    (A drunken doctor with a hot temper and a violence-prone g...)

    1948
  • The Bad Sleep Well

    (A young executive hunts down his father's killer in direc...)

    1960
  • Rashomon

    (An Akira Kurosawa film that brought Japanese cinema to th...)

    1950
  • Yojimbo

    (The incomparable Toshiro Mifune stars in Akira Kurosawa's...)

    1961
  • The Men Who Tread On The Tiger's Tail

    (A Japanese general and his men disguise themselves as mon...)

    1945
  • Stray Dog

    (During a sweltering summer, a rookie homicide detective t...)

    1949

Politics

Kurosawa was moved by Japan's changing political climate, which included the suppression of communist activity and a rise in proletarian movements. Although not a member of the Communist Party himself, Kurosawa did join the leftist Proletarian Artists League and edited one of the group's newsletters. In 1930 he was summoned by the army to determine his eligibility for the service. Suffering from hunger and exhaustion, he failed his physical examination. By 1932 disinterest and a serious illness led Kurosawa away from his political activities.

Views

Kurosawa's trademarks in movies include the wipe effect to fade from one scene to another an effect which later became famous due to its usage in the Star Wars trilogy. He also used the weather to heighten the mood, particularly rain. Despite criticism by some Japanese critics that Kurosawa was "too Western," he was deeply influenced by Japanese culture, including the Kabuki and Noh theaters and the jidaigeki (period drama) genre of Japanese cinema. Indeed, Throne of Blood can be considered a Noh drama on film.

Quotations: "No matter where I go in the world, although I can't speak any foreign language, I don't feel out of place. I think of the earth as my home. If everyone thought this way, people might notice just how foolish international friction is, and they would put an end to it. We are, after all, at a point where it is almost narrow-minded to think merely in geocentric terms. Human beings have launched satellites into outer space, and yet they still grovel on earth looking at their own feet like wild dogs. What is to become of our planet?"

"Although human beings are incapable of talking about themselves with total honesty, it is much harder to avoid the truth while pretending to be other people. They often reveal much about themselves in a very straightforward way. I am certain that I did. There is nothing that says more about its creator than the work itself."

"A film should appeal to sophisticated, profound-thinking people while at the same time entertaining simplistic people. A truly good movie is really enjoyable too. There’s nothing complicated about it. A truly good movie is interesting and easy to understand."

"I am not a special person. I am not especially strong; I am not especially gifted. I simply do not like to show my weakness, and I hate to lose, so I am a person who tries hard. That's all there is to me."

Personality

In December 1971, after a period of suffering from mental fatigue and frustrated with a run of unsatisfying and sub-par directing work, Kurosawa attempted suicide by slashing his wrist thirty times with a razor. Fortunately, the wounds were not fatal and he made a full recovery.

Kurosawa worshiped legendary American director John Ford, his primary influence as a filmmaker. When the two met, Ford was uncommonly pleasant to the younger Japanese filmmaker, and afterwards Kurosawa dressed in a similar fashion to Ford when on film sets. When Kurosawa eventually met Ford in the early '60s, Ford said to him: "You really like rain!" To which a delighted Kurosawa replied, "You've really watched my films!"

According to his family, he rarely thought about anything other than films. Even when at home, he would sit around silently, apparently composing shots in his head. Although the Japanese press tried to paint him as a tyrant, almost all of his casts and crews agreed he was a much more cool and detached presence on sets. Many also described him as "intense."

He was infamous for his perfectionism. Among the related tales are his insisting a stream be made to run in the opposite direction in order to get a better visual effect, and having the roof of a house removed, later to be replaced, because he felt the roof's presence to be unattractive in a short sequence filmed from a train. He also required that all the actors in his period films had to wear their costumes for several weeks, daily, before filming so that they would look lived in.

Interests

• Collecting Japanese lacquerware and antique French and Dutch glassware, Kabuki

• Writers

  William Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky

• Artists

  Sergei Eisenstein, Kenji Mizoguchi, Satyajit Ray, John Ford

• Sport & Clubs

  Golf, American football

• Music & Bands

  Symphonic music

Connections

During the production of The Most Beautiful, Kurosawa met Yōko Yaguchi, an actress. He and Yaguchi fell in love, despite their professional differences and constant fighting. Described by Kurosawa as both head-strong and stubborn, Yaguchi eventually married the director in 1945 amid the war.

They lived together till Yaguchi’s death in 1985. The couple had two children; a son, Hisao, and a daughter, Kazuko. Hisao went on to produce a few of Kurosawa’s films while Kazuko became a noted costume designer.

Father:

Isamu Kurosawa

Isamu Kurosawa embraced western culture both in the athletic programs that he directed and by taking the family to see films, which were then just beginning to appear in Japanese theaters. Later when Japanese culture turned away from western films, Isamu Kurosawa continued to believe that films were a positive educational experience.

Mother:

Shima Kurosawa

Spouse:

Yōko Yaguchi

Brother:

Heigo Kurosawa

Among the seven siblings, the one who influenced Kurosawa the most was Heigo, his senior by four years. He encouraged young Akira to face his fears and confront unpleasant truths which would later become the basis for many of his films.

When Akira was 23, Heigo committed suicide. This was a major tragedy in his life that would affect him deeply and left a lasting sense of loss.

Daughter:

Kazuko Kurosawa

Son:

Hisao Kurosawa

Acquaintance:

George Lucas

George Lucas has never been shy of acknowledging the huge debt that the Star Wars saga has to pay to Akira Kurosawa. As well as adopting this storytelling philosophy, Lucas borrowed prolifically from Kurosawa’s filmmaking in general.

References

• Something Like An Autobiography
  1981