Something Like an Autobiography (19 page)

As I look back on the art scene, it’s clear to me that very few of the painters whose work I saw really had a personal style and vision. Most of them were just showing off with a lot of forced techniques, and the result was mere eccentricity. I don’t recall who wrote it, but there was a song about someone who is unable to state outright that what is red is red; the years go by, and it is not until his old age that he finally becomes certain. And that’s just how it is. During youth the desire for self-expression is so overpowering that most people end up by losing all grasp on their real selves. I was no exception. I strained to perform technical tours de force as I painted, and the resulting pictures revealed my distaste for myself. Gradually I lost confidence in my abilities, and the act of painting itself became painful for me.

What is worse, I had to do boring outside work in order to earn the money to buy my canvases and paints. It consisted of things like illustrations for magazines, visual teaching aids for cooking schools on the correct way to cut giant radishes, and cartoons for baseball magazines. The result of spending my time on a kind of painting for which I
felt no enthusiasm at all was a further, more irrevocable loss of my real desire to paint.

I began to think about going into some other profession. Deep down inside I really felt that anything at all would do; all I was concerned about was putting my mother’s and father’s minds at ease. This feeling of casting about was intensified by my brother’s sudden death. Since I had been doing nothing but follow my brother’s lead, his suicide sent me spinning like a top. I believe this was a very dangerous turning point in my life.

Through all of this my father did not let me loose to spin on my own. He just kept telling me, as I became more and more panicky, “Don’t panic. There’s nothing to get excited about.” He told me if I would just wait calmly, my road in life would open up to me of its own accord. I don’t know exactly what kind of viewpoint led him to tell me such things; perhaps he was speaking from his own experience of life. As it turned out, his words proved amazingly accurate.

One day in 1935, as I was reading the newspaper, a classified advertisement caught my eye. The P.C.L. (always called that, though the full name was Photo Chemical Laboratory) film studios were hiring assistant directors. Up until that moment it had never occurred to me to enter the film industry, but when I saw that advertisement, my interest was suddenly aroused. The ad said that the first test for prospective employees would be a written composition. The theme of this essay was to be on the fundamental deficiencies of Japanese films. One was to give examples and suggest ways to correct the problems.

This struck me as very interesting. From this test question I got a sense of the youthful vigor of the newly established P.C.L. company. The theme of fundamental deficiencies and the ways to overcome them gave me something I could sink my teeth into, and at the same time it appealed to my perverseness and sense of mischief. If the deficiencies were fundamental, there was no way to correct them. So I began writing in a half-mocking spirit.

I don’t remember the precise contents of my essay, but I had thoroughly savored and consumed foreign films under my brother’s tutelage, and as a movie fan I found many things in Japanese cinema that did not satisfy me. I undoubtedly gave vent to all my accumulated criticisms and had a fine time doing so. Along with the test essay an applicant for the assistant director’s job was to submit a curriculum vitae and a copy of the family register setting forth his antecedents. Since I was prepared to take any job that came along, I already had copies of my curriculum vitae and family register waiting in my desk drawer. I dispatched them with my essay to P.C.L.

A few months later I received notification of the second round of testing. I was told to appear at the P.C.L. studios on a certain day at a certain time. Feeling as if I had been bewitched by a fox to have written that kind of essay and have it accepted, I proceeded as ordered to the P.C.L. studio.

I had once seen a photograph of the P.C.L. studios in a film magazine. It showed a white building with palm trees in front of it, so I had thought it must be located along the beach in Chiba Prefecture, many miles from Tokyo. It turned out to be in a southwestern suburb of the city, a very prosaic place. How little I knew of the realities of the Japanese film industry, and how little I dreamed of ever working in it! But I found my way to the P.C.L. studios, and there I met the best teacher of my entire life, “Yama-san”—the film director Yamamoto Kajirō.

AS I WRITE
this, I can’t help thinking how very strange it all was. It was chance that led me to walk along the road to P.C.L. and, in so doing, the road to becoming a film director, yet somehow everything that I had done prior to that seemed to point to it as an inevitability. I had dabbled eagerly in painting, literature, theater, music and other arts and stuffed my head full of all the things that come together in the art of the film. Yet I had never noticed that cinema was the one field where I would be required to make use of all I had learned. I can’t help wondering what fate had prepared me so well for this road I was to take in life. All I can say is that the preparation was totally unconscious on my part.

The inner courtyard of P.C.L. was overflowing with people. Later I heard that more than five hundred people had responded to the newspaper announcement for the job of assistant director. Apparently the company had rejected about two thirds of the applicants on the basis of their essays, but more than 130 people assembled in the courtyard for the second round. I knew that out of all these only five people would actually be hired. I no longer felt like taking the second test.

But by this time I had developed a real curiosity about seeing a
studio. I busied myself with looking around. Apparently no films were being made at the moment, and no one who looked like an actor was anywhere in sight. But one fellow among the assistant-director applicants was wearing a morning coat. It’s odd that I should recall this, but every so often I remember this fellow in his tails for a job examination, and I shake my head in wonder.

The first part of our examination consisted of scenario writing. We were to be divided into groups and given a theme to write on. Each group was given a subject, but each applicant had to write alone. Afterward we would have an oral examination. My group was assigned a page-three newspaper item about the crime of an industrial laborer from Kotochi Ward who fell in love with a dancer from Asakusa. I had no idea how to write a scenario and I was sitting there nonplused when I stole a glance to one side. The fellow next to me was scribbling away at a furious rate as if totally accustomed to it. I really had no intention of cheating, but I couldn’t help watching him. It seemed that first you decide where the story is to take place and then go about writing it. I took note of this and proceeded to write. As an aspiring painter, I decided to draw a contrast between the bleak industrial area and the gaudy dressing room of a revue backstage, showing the laborer’s life-style in black and the dancer’s in pink. That’s how I started my story, but I don’t remember the rest of it.

After submitting my finished scenario I had to wait a long time for my oral examination. Noon had passed while I was writing, and since I had eaten only my usual breakfast before coming to the exam, I was ravenous. There was a cafeteria in the studio, but I didn’t know if we were allowed to eat there, so I asked the fellow next to me. He turned out to be quite an operator and said he knew someone who worked here, so we’d have his friend treat us to lunch. This person he dragged along treated me to a plate of rice curry. But I still had to wait a long time after that, and it wasn’t until almost dusk that I was summoned for my interview.

Naturally, I didn’t know my examiners. But our conversation was most enjoyable, covering everything from painting to music. Since it was a film-company examination, we of course talked about movies, too. I’ve forgotten exactly what we said, but some years later Yama-san wrote a magazine article about me in which he said I liked the Japanese painters Tessai and Sotatsu as well as Van Gogh and the music of Haydn. When I saw this article, I remembered talking about these four artists during that oral examination. Anyway, we talked a lot.

Suddenly I noticed that it was getting dark outside, so I excused
myself, reminding them that a great number of applicants were still waiting for their oral examinations. Yama-san said, “Oh, that’s right,” and bowed to me with a friendly smile. He even advised me that if I was going home in the direction of Shibuya, there was a bus that stopped right in front of the studio. I got on this bus and stared out the window all the way to Shibuya, but I never saw anything that looked like the ocean.

About a month later I received notification of a third examination from P.C.L. This was to be the last test, so it involved meeting the studio head and the managing director. At this interview the executive secretary began asking me a lot of questions about my family, and something in his manner and tone irritated me. Suddenly I couldn’t contain myself any longer and burst out with “Is this an interrogation?” The studio head (at that time it was Mori Iwao) stepped in and tried to mollify me, so I was sure this meant I would not be accepted for the job.

Nevertheless, a week later I received the job offer. But that executive secretary at the final examination had really put me off, and seeing all the actresses with their thick pancake makeup that same day had made me feel sick. I showed the offer of employment to my father and explained to him that although I had been accepted I was not actually eager to take the job. My father responded that if I found I didn’t like the work, I could always quit. He said anything I tried would be worth the experience, so I should give it a month or even a week just to see what it was like. That seemed to me to be a valid idea, so I joined P.C.L.

Although I had understood that only five people were to be hired, the day I joined the company I found myself among some twenty new employees. I thought this was very strange until it was explained that tests had been given on other days for the hiring of five camera assistants, five recording assistants and five administrative assistants, along with the five assistant directors. The monthly salary for all but the administrative assistants was to be 28 yen (in today’s money, very roughly $560). The administrative assistants were to receive 30 yen (about $600) a month, because their opportunities for advancement were fewer. That same executive secretary I had taken a dislike to at my last interview explained this.

(The executive secretary in later years became managing director. While he held the position, one of the assistant directors who had entered with me was crushed by a falling light. Six of his ribs were broken, and the shock caused a torsion of his intestines which later resulted in the further complication of appendicitis. When the appendicitis
complication was revealed, our executive secretary came forth with the extraordinary statement that the broken ribs from the falling light were the company’s responsibility, but the appendicitis wasn’t. After the Pacific War, when the company labor union was formed, he was voted the most hated executive in the studio.)

With the first duties I was assigned as a new assistant director, I made up my mind to quit. My father had said that anything I tried would be worth the experience, but everything I was ordered to do turned out to be something I under no circumstances wanted to do twice. The assistant directors who were my seniors did their utmost to persuade me to stay. They assured me that not all movies were like the one I had been working on, and not all directors were like the one I had been working for.

I listened to them, took a second assignment and ended up working for Yama-san. They had been right. I learned there are many kinds of films and many kinds of directors. The work in the Yamamoto “group” was fun. I didn’t want to work for anyone else after that. It was like the wind in a mountain pass blowing across my face. By this I mean that wonderfully refreshing wind you feel after a painfully hard climb. The breath of that wind tells you you are reaching the pass. Then you stand in the pass and look down over the panorama it opens up. When I stood behind Yama-san in his director’s chair next to the camera, I felt my heart swell with that same feeling—“I’ve made it at last.” The work he was doing was the kind that I really wanted to do. I was standing in the mountain pass, and the view that opened up before me on the other side revealed a single straight road.