Something Like an Autobiography (25 page)

At a hot-spring inn while writing a script, about 1950.

Ever since
The Saga of the Vagabonds
I have felt an affinity for the town of Gotenba, the plains at the base of Mount Fuji and the people and horses of the area, and I have made several period films here. My experience of the spirited charge of horses in
Saga
so impressed me that I revived it in
Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood
and most recently in
Kagemusha
.

The last good person I want to write about is Fushimizu Shu. Although he and I were born the same year, he a few months after me, he died at the very early age of thirty-one, in 1942. He had seemed to be the one who would inherit Yama-san’s talent with musical films, so it is all the more tragic that his life was cut short. We all called him “Mizu-san,” and Mizu-san’s appearance was exactly what you would imagine the ideal image of a film director to be. He had fine features and was always dashingly well dressed. Yama-san, too, was handsome and dressed well, so Mizu-san seemed to be his most suitable heir. Somehow, perhaps because he had already been promoted to director, none of us—Taniguchi Senkichi or Honda Inoshiro or I—no matter how big we acted elsewhere, could ever look like anything but little brothers next to Mizu-san.

Two or three days after we heard from Yama-san that our “older brother” Mizu-san was seriously ill, I was waiting for the bus to the Toho studios at Shibuya Station in Tokyo. Suddenly Mizu-san stepped out of the crowd in the station. I knew he was supposed to be confined to his bed at his family home in the Kyoto-Osaka region, so I was shocked. But even if I hadn’t known that, I would have caught my breath at the way he looked. Weakened from his illness, he appeared truly ghostly.

I ran over to him and asked, “Are you all right? What are you doing here?” He drew up his pale face into a kind of smile at last and replied, “I want to make films. I’ve got to make movies.” I couldn’t say anything else. He must have been thinking all along, “I’ve only just begun, just begun,” and couldn’t stay still in his bed. That same day Yama-san took him to a hotel in Gora in the Hakone Mountains and had him given full nursing care, but it was too late.

There was also a marvelously talented assistant director to Mizu-san named Inoue Shin. He died before he became a director. On location in the Philippines he contracted a fatal illness, but before he went off to the Philippines he came to me for advice on whether or not to go. I had some kind of premonition about it and told him I thought it would be better to stay home. If only I had been more persuasive!

With Inoue’s death the line of succession to Yama-san’s musicals was cut off. The proverb says that beautiful people do not live long,
but it also seems that good people have short lives. Naruse, Takizawa, Mizu-san, Inoue Shin—they all died much too soon. I must say the same for directors Mizoguchi Kenji, Ozu Yasujirō, Shimazu Yasujirō, Yamanaka Sadao and Toyoda Shiro. For them, too, I have to say “Good person, short life.” But I am probably just being sentimental about those I have lost.

WHEN THE MAKING
of
Horses
came to an end, I was relieved of my duties as an assistant director. From that point on, I did only occasional second-unit shooting for Yama-san, and spent the major part of my time in scriptwriting. I submitted two of my scripts to a contest sponsored by the Information Ministry;
Shizuka nari (All Is Quiet)
won a second prize of 300 yen (roughly $6,000) and
Yuki (Snow)
won a first place, with a prize of 2,000 yen ($40,000). My salary at the time was only 48 yen (about $960) a month, and this was the highest any assistant director received, so the Information Ministry prize money was to me a fabulous sum.

I used it to take my friends drinking day after day. The schedule went like this: First we’d drink beer near Shibuya Station, then proceed to Sukiyabashi near Ginza and drink saké with an array of Japanese dishes, and finally we’d end up in the Ginza bars to drink whiskey. We talked about nothing but movies the whole time, so I can’t really say it was pure dissipation, but it is a fact that we burdened our digestive systems thoughtlessly.

When I had drunk up all my money, I sat down at my desk again and began to write. What I wrote was in the main for money, and my client at the time was Daiei Motion Picture Company. For them I wrote such scripts as
Dohyosai
(
Wrestling Ring Festival)
and
Jajouma monogatari (The Story of a Bad Horse)
, and they sent me my payment in care of my employers, Toho. But Toho took fifty percent. When I asked why, the answer was: “You’re under contract to Toho and we pay you a regular salary, so of course we get a percentage of what you do on the outside.”

But to me it looked a little different. Daiei paid me 200 yen for
each script. My salary at Toho was 48 yen a month, or 576 yen a year. If I wrote three scripts a year for Daiei, Toho would be making an average of 25 yen a month from me—over half my salary. So it appeared to me that Toho was not employing me for 48 yen a month, but rather that I was employing Toho for 25 yen a month. This seemed pretty strange, but I didn’t say anything about it. When an executive from Daiei later asked me if I had received my money all right, I told him very straightforwardly what had happened. He looked astounded for a moment, said, “That’s terrible!” and disappeared into the accounting office. He reemerged with 100 yen, which he handed to me directly.

From that time on, whenever I wrote a script for Daiei, we went through this rigmarole. Perhaps Toho was worried that if I received too much money I would drink too much.

As a matter of fact, I did develop a case of incipient gastric ulcers from drinking too much. So I went on a mountain-climbing expedition with Taniguchi Senkichi. After spending the whole day clambering around the peaks, I was so sleepy in the evening I could drink hardly any saké at all, so I got well right away. Once cured, I started writing another script in order to drink again.

(All this drinking had begun with
Horses
, We assistant directors were so busy we couldn’t drink saké with our evening meals at the inn on location because we had to rush through our dinner and start preparing for the next day’s shooting. And when we came back, everyone else was already asleep. The people who ran the inn felt so sorry for us that they always set out a serving bottle full of saké for each of us by our pillows, and they left a kettle on the hibachi coals for us to heat it up with. Every night we drank our saké in bed, with just our heads sticking out of the covers. We looked like tortoises poking our heads out of our shells, and eventually we became stewed tortoises.)

My life of writing and drinking went on like this for about a year. Then at last it was proposed that I direct my own script
Daruma-dera no doitsujin (A German at Daruma Temple
). But as soon as we went into pre-production, the project was abandoned because of the restrictions on film distribution. The Pacific War had begun. And at this inauspicious time my desperate battle to become a director also started in earnest.

During the Pacific War, freedom of speech became more restricted day by day in Japan. Even though my script had been selected by the production company for filming, the Ministry of the Interior’s censorship bureau rejected it. The verdict of the censors was final; there was no recourse.

Nor were the censors lax. At that time it was determined an offense to make use of the chrysanthemum crest of the imperial household, and any pattern even resembling it was proscribed. Because of this we took great care that among the costumes we used in our films there were no designs that looked like chrysanthemums. Nevertheless, one day I was summoned by the censorship bureau for using the chrysanthemum crest, and was ordered to cut an entire scene.

Thoroughly baffled, as I knew we couldn’t possibly be using anything with a chrysanthemum pattern on it, I went back to check. I found that the objectionable item was a sash with an oxcart design. I took the sash and returned to the censor’s office to show him. But he held fast. “Even if it is an oxcart in reality, since it looks like a chrysanthemum it is a chrysanthemum. Cut the scene.” The censorship bureau was unrelenting in its perverseness, so such occurrences were by no means rare.

The censors echoed the official wartime xenophobia, and if they were able to find something that was “British-American-looking,” they excitedly condemned it to destruction. My next two scripts,
Mori no sen’ichiya
(A
Thousand and One Nights in the Forest)
and
San Paguita no hana (The San Paguita Flower)
, were buried forever by the Interior Ministry censorship bureau.

In
The San Paguita Flower
there was a scene where the Japanese employees of a factory join in the celebration of a Filipino girl’s birthday. The censorship bureau found this “British-American-looking” and put me through a cross-examination. I tried asking if it was wrong to celebrate a birthday. The censor replied that it was obviously a British-American custom to celebrate birthdays, and the idea of writing a scene like that at a time like this was an outrage. But this censor, pursuing his censor’s logic, fell right into the trap of my question. At the beginning he had called into question only the use of a birthday cake, but now his argument had escalated to the point of rejecting the entire birthday celebration. Without a moment’s hesitation, I countered, “Well, then, is it wrong to celebrate the Emperor’s birthday? In Japan the celebration of the Emperor’s birthday is a national holiday, but if this is a British-American custom, then surely it must be a terrible outrage.” The censor turned ashy pale and rejected my script summarily.

At that time the censors in the Ministry of the Interior seemed to be mentally deranged. They all behaved as if they suffered from persecution complexes, sadistic tendencies and various sexual manias. They cut every single kiss scene out of foreign movies. If a woman’s
knees ever appeared, they cut that scene, too. They said that such things would stimulate carnal desires.

The censors were so far gone as to find the following sentence obscene: “The factory gate waited for the student workers, thrown open in longing.” What can I say? This obscenity verdict was handed down by a censor in response to my script for my 1944 film about a girls’ volunteer corps,
Ichiban utsukushiku (The Most Beautiful)
. I could not fathom what it was he found to be obscene about this sentence. Probably none of you can either. But for the mentally disturbed censor this sentence was unquestionably obscene. He explained that the word “gate” very vividly suggested to him the vagina! For these people suffering from sexual manias, anything and everything made them feel carnal desire. Because they were obscene themselves, everything seen through their obscene eyes naturally became obscene. Nothing more or less than a case of sexual pathology.

Nevertheless, I must say the sniffing Dobermans of the censorship bureau certainly underwent a full-scale domestication at the hand of the reigning powers of the day. There is nothing more dangerous than a worthless bureaucrat who has fallen prey to the trends of the times. In the Nazi era, of course, Hitler was a madman, but if you consider people like Himmler and Eichmann behind him, you understand that it is in the subordinate positions that the geniuses of horror and insanity appear. When it comes down to the level of the jailers and operators of the concentration camps, you find beasts that exceed the power of the imagination to conceive.

I believe the wartime censors in the Ministry of the Interior constitute one example of this phenomenon. They were the people who really should have been put behind bars. I am doing my best right now to suppress the anger that makes my writing about them become violent, but just thinking about them and remembering it all makes me shudder with rage. That is how deep my hatred for them remains. Toward the end of the war I even made a pact with some of my friends: If it came to the point of the Honorable Death of the Hundred Million and every Japanese would have to commit suicide, we vowed to meet in front of the Ministry of the Interior and assassinate the censors before we took our own lives.

I must end my discussion of the censors here. I have become too excited over it, and that is not good for me. I learned from having an X-ray taken of the vascular system of my brain that my main artery has a peculiar bend in it. Apparently a normal artery is straight, and my condition was diagnosed as congenital epilepsy. As a matter of fact,
I used to have frequent seizures as a child, and Yama-san often said to me, “you have a habit of falling into a state of distraction.” I never noticed it myself, but it seems I would sometimes have brief lapses during my work when I completely forgot what I was doing and went into a kind of trance. The brain needs a lot of oxygen, and apparently a lack of oxygen in the brain is extremely dangerous. When I am overworked or overly excited, it seems this bent main artery in my brain cuts off the blood supply and causes me to have small epileptic seizures.