Read Something Like an Autobiography Online
Authors: Akira Kurosawa
Around this time in a book of Takahama Kyoshi’s poetry theories I came across a haiku I must recommend. It was entitled “A Waterfall.”
On the mountaintop
water appears
and tumbles down
.
When I first read it, I was struck with amazement. It was apparently a poem by an amateur, but I felt as if its pure, clear vision and simple, straightforward expression had hit me over the head. My affection for my own poems, which were no more than words lined up
and twisted around in different ways, dried up completely. Simultaneously I recognized my lack of education and talent, and I felt deeply ashamed. There must be many such things I thought I understood and yet really knew nothing about.
My reaction was to resume a study of traditional Japanese culture. Up until that time I had known nothing at all about pottery and porcelain, and my familiarity with the other industrial arts of Japan was superficial at best. In fact, as far as my esthetic judgment goes, the only art I knew how to appraise at all was painting. And in the performing arts I had never even seen that peculiarly Japanese dramatic form, the Noh. I began by going to visit a friend who was well versed in ancient Japanese implements and asking him to teach me about pottery.
I had always been rather contemptuous of this friend’s interest in curios without knowing exactly why. But as I listened to his instruction, I gradually came to understand that not everything can be lumped together or dismissed as “an interest in curios.” In antiques there are deep and shallow as in other fields. There is everything from the retired dilettante to the serious scholar and esthete in the connoisseurship of Japanese art and culture. The spirit of the age, the life-style of the people of the age, can emerge from a single old food bowl. As I listened to my friend teach me about ceramics, I realized that there were still limitless things for me to study and absorb.
During the war I had been starved for beauty, so I rushed headlong into the world of traditional Japanese arts as to a feast. I may have been motivated by a desire to escape from the reality around me, but what I managed to learn despite the motive was nevertheless of great value to me. I went to see the Noh for the first time. I read the art theories the great fourteenth-century Noh playwright Zeami left behind him. I read all there was to read about Zeami himself, and I devoured books on the Noh.
I was attracted by the Noh because of the admiration I felt for its uniqueness, part of which may be that its form of expression is so far removed from that of the film. At any rate, I took this opportunity to become familiar with the Noh, and I had the pleasure of viewing the performances of the great actors of each school—Kita Roppeita, Umewaka Manzaburo and Sakurama Kintaro.
Among their plays there are many performances I will never forget, but the most memorable of all was Manzaburo’s
Hanjo (The Lady Han)
. It was thundering and raining outside, but while I watched him on the stage I heard nothing of the weather. Then when he came out on stage again and began the dance of the jo introduction
act, the evening sun was suddenly reflected off his form. “Ah, the moonflower has bloomed,” I thought, entranced. It was a moment that allowed me to savor to the fullest the play’s melancholy poetic reference to the moonflower chapter of
The Tale of Genji
.
The Japanese have rare talents. In the midst of the war it was the encouragement of the militarist national policies that led us to a fuller appreciation of traditions and arts, but this political sponsorship is not necessary. I think Japan can be proud at any time of having a very special esthetic world of its own. This recognition led me also to a better understanding of myself—and greater self-confidence.
THE TITLE OF
my first post-war film became a popular phrase. After the release, one frequently came across the usage “no regrets for our ———” in the newspapers and other media. But for me personally the feeling is the opposite; I have many regrets about this movie. The reason is that the script was rewritten against my will.
This film was born amid the two great union strikes at the Toho studios. The first Toho dispute took place in February of 1946, and the second in October of the same year.
No Regrets for Our Youth
was produced during the seven months between the two outbreaks. As a result of the victory of the first strike, the Toho employees’ union became very powerful, and the number of Communist Party members among the employees increased. Their voice in matters of film production became more important than before, and a Scenario Review Committee was formed. This committee decided that the script for
No Regrets
required changes, and the film was shot from a rewrite. The reason was not because of any offense found in the content of my script, but because another script based on similar material had also been submitted to the committee.
I felt, however, that although the two scripts were based on similar material, they treated it in entirely different ways. The result, I was sure, would be two entirely different films. Anyway, this is what I said before the Review Committee, but my opinion was rejected.
When the two films were completed, members of the Review
Committee said to me, “You were right. If we had known they would turn out like this, we would have let you shoot from your first script.” This was the height of irresponsibility. Playwright Hisaita Eijiro’s first script for my film was such a beautiful piece of work that it still pains me to remember that it was shelved at the hands of such thoughtless people.
The second draft of the script for
No Regrets
was a forced rewrite of the story, so it became somewhat distorted. This shows in the last twenty minutes of the film. But my intention was to gamble everything on that last twenty minutes. I poured a feverish energy into those two thousand feet and close to two hundred shots of film. All of the rage I felt toward the Scenario Review Committee went into those final images.
When I had completed the film, I was so agitated and exhausted I couldn’t evaluate it with a cool head. But I was convinced that I must have made something very strange. The company arranged a screening for the American censors. They sat talking among themselves while it was being shown, so I was all the more certain that I had failed. But then as the film went into its last twenty minutes a hush fell over the group, and they began to gaze at the screen with deep concentration. They looked as if they were holding their breath right up until the end title appeared on the screen. When the lights came on, they all stood up at once and reached out to shake hands with me. They praised the film to the skies and congratulated me warmly, but I just stood there amazed.
It wasn’t until after I left them that I really began to feel that the film had succeeded. One of these American censors, a Mr. Garky, later gave a party in honor of the film. During the second dispute at Toho the stars who had played the leading roles in
No Regrets
had banded together with other actors to form the Flag Group of Ten. They had opposed the strike and gone off to join the company Shin [New] Toho. But Mr. Garky disagreed with our thinking on the matter and insisted on inviting them to the party. His hope was that we would all see that because we had cooperated to make
No Regrets
he was able to give a party to celebrate it. This was a chance, he thought, for everyone to shake hands again. (As it turned out, they did not come to the party, nor did they come back, not for about ten years. It was not only these stars who refused to return, but the movie technicians who went with them to form Shin Toho. Toho seems to have thrown away in a single move not only the harmony that had taken ten years to establish among its employees, and the very people it had trained, but on top of that another ten years to train new people went out the window.)
No Regrets for Our Youth
was born in the midst of these great upheavals. I felt peculiarly deep emotions about this film, the first to be made in the post-war atmosphere of freedom. The locations we used in the old capital of Kyoto—the grassy hills, the flower-lined side streets, the brooks reflecting the sun’s rays—are all employed in the most trivial films today, but at that time they had special meaning for us. For me it was as if my heart could dance, as if I had grown wings and could fly among the clouds.
During the war we had had to be very careful about shooting such scenery. Under wartime conditions we had not been able to portray the fullness of youth in the movies. As the censors viewed things, love was indecent and the fresh, keen sensibilities of youth were a psychological state of “British-American” weakness. Being young in those times consisted of suppressing the sound of one’s breathing in the jail cell that was called the “home front.”
But in order for Japan’s post-war youth to regain its life breath, it would have to endure yet more hard times. These would be the subject of my next film.
WHEN THE GROUP
of ten stars left to form Shin Toho, we who remained behind at Toho were left without a single name actor or actress to put in our films. The two studios accidentally distinguished themselves clearly through their differing approaches—the director system for the older organization and the star system for the new one—and these emerged as rallying points. The result was in fact a civil war with brother turning against brother.
Shin Toho began by announcing a schedule of productions featuring a dazzling roster of stars. At Toho all of the contract directors, screenwriters and producers responded by gathering for a conference at a hot-spring inn on the Izu Peninsula south of Tokyo. The atmosphere of this conference had all the fervor of generals planning their strategy the night before a big battle. It was a most pompous affair, the result of which was a schedule of new releases to be publicized with the directors’ names. Kinugasa Teinosuke, Yamamoto Kajirō,
Naruse Mikio and Toyoda Shiro were each to direct a segment of a film called
Yotsu no koi no monogatari (Four Love Stories)
. Gosho Heinosuke was to make
Ima hitotabi no (One Time Now)
and Yamamoto Satsuo was to codirect
Senso to heiwa (War and Peace)
with Kamei Fumio, while I was to make
Subarashiki nichiyobi (One Wonderful Sunday)
and Taniguchi Senkichi was to direct his first film,
Ginrei no hate
(
To the End of the Silver Mountains
). My responsibilities included not only writing the script for my own film,
One Wonderful Sunday
, but also writing one segment of
Four Love Stories
as well as the screenplay for Sen-chan’s
Silver Mountains
.
I began by meeting with Uekusa Keinosuke to discuss the overall structure of
One Wonderful Sunday
, and then left the details in his hands. Taniguchi Senkichi and I stayed on at the hot-spring inn after everyone else went back to Tokyo, to work on the scenario for
Silver Mountains
, which we intended to finish there. I decided I could dash off the script for one of the
Four Love Stories
in a few days after
Silver Mountains
was done and before I went back to work with Uekusa on the final draft of
One Wonderful Sunday
.
As it turned out, I actually accomplished all that I set out to do on this insane schedule, and the three scripts got written on time. But if I hadn’t had as an impetus the pressure of the competition with Shin Toho’s star system and my desire to react against it, I never could have done it. First of all, the only ideas we had to go on for the
Silver Mountains
script were that it should be a manly sort of action film and, since Sen-chan was a mountain man, we should use an alpine location.
Sen-chan and I sat for three days glaring at each other across a writing table, but came up with nothing very inspiring. Finally, deciding there was no way out of it but a frontal attack, I wrote out something like a newspaper headline: “Three Bank Robbers Escape to Mountains of Nagano Prefecture; Investigation Headquarters Moves to Base of Japan Alps.” Then I had the three robbers hide out in the snows of the Japan Alps, sent a police inspector after them, and, adding in Sen-chan’s mountaineering experiences and general knowledge, we wrote a little every day. At the end of three weeks we had a complete script for
To the End of the Silver Mountains
, with a story that was not bad at all.