Rick Lyman (obituary date 7 September 1998)

SOURCE: "Akira Kurasawa, Director of Rashomon and Seven Samurai, Dies at 88," in New York Times, September 7, 1998, p. A1.

[In the following obituary, Lyman summarizes Kurosawa's life and career.]

Akira Kurosawa, who personified Japanese movies to most of the world and who grew into one of the handful of truly important directors that the cinema has produced, died yesterday at his home in Tokyo. He was 88.

The cause was a stroke, his family said.

Mr. Kurosawa, the son of a military institute's athletic instructor, stumbled into filmmaking after failing as a painter and became one of the colossal figures in film history—an autocratic perfectionist with a painter's eye for composition, a dancer's sense of movement and a humanist's quiet sensibility. Dozens of directors spanning two generations have acknowledged his enduring influence.

When Mr. Kurosawa's Rashomon reached Western audiences in 1951, little was known outside Japan about the country's cinema. That changed overnight with Rashomon, a compelling study of ambiguity and deception that provides four contradictory accounts of a medieval rape and murder recalled by a bandit, a noblewoman, the ghost of her slain husband and a woodcutter. The characters, Mr. Kurosawa said, have a "sinful need for flattering falsehood" and "cannot survive without lies to make them feel they are better people than they really are."

Mr. Kurosawa's calculated blend of Japanese folklore with Western acting styles and storytelling techniques provided a link between the two worlds, reintroducing Japanese culture to a postwar global audience and leading to an amazingly fertile decade that saw him produce several films that have widely been acclaimed as among the finest ever made, including Seven Samurai, Ikiru and Yojimbo.

"I suppose all of my films have a common theme," Mr. Kurosawa once told the film scholar Donald Richie. "If I think about it, though, the only theme I can think of is really a question: Why can't people be happier together?"

Tall and large-boned, Mr. Kurosawa mixed a workingman's thick, powerful hands with the face of a professor, sometimes a very stern professor. He was known by colleagues, not always affectionately, as "the Emperor."

Mr. Kurosawa's ecumenical interests in Western literature, Japanese folk tales and American westerns led him to source material as diverse as Gorky's Lower Depths, Shakespeare's Macbeth and Ed McBain's King's Ransom.

He was a master of both of the most popular Japanese film genres of his era, the jidai-geki (a costume-action film involving medieval samurai) and the gendai-geki (a more realistic, often domestic drama rooted in contemporary Japanese life).

In her introduction to Voices from the Japanese Cinema (1975), Joan Mellen wrote: "It is possible to draw a line from Kurosawa's finest film, 'Seven Samurai,' which Donald Richie has called the greatest Japanese film ever made, back to Daisuke Ito's 'Man-Slashing, Horse-Piercing Sword' in 1930. But if Ito created the genre of jidai-geki, Kurosawa perfected the form and gave it so deep a historical resonance that each of his jidai-geki has contained within it the entire progress of Japan from feudal to modern times."

Mr. Kurosawa chafed when Japanese critics described his work as too Western: "I collect old Japanese lacquerware as well as antique French and Dutch glassware," he said. "In short, the Western and the Japanese live side by side in my mind naturally, without the least bit of conflict."

Seeking Perfection With Real Arrows

Stories of his perfectionism are plentiful. He once halted production to reconstruct a hugely expensive medieval set because he noticed a nail head was barely visible in one shot. For the climax of Throne of Blood, his 1957 samurai version of Macbeth, he insisted that his star, Toshiro Mifune, wear a protective vest and perform the scene while being shot with real arrows.

On the set, where he rarely brooked dissent, Mr. Kurosawa developed his own technique for filmmaking that allowed him to edit each day's scenes that night and be finished with a rough draft of the film within hours of shooting the final scene.

He rehearsed all of the scenes meticulously, sometimes for weeks, then shot them from beginning to end, using three cameras positioned at strategic points. "I put the A camera in the most orthodox positions, use the B camera for quick, decisive shots and the C camera as a kind of guerrilla unit," he said.

This is quite different from the way films arc normally made, beginning with a "master shot" that is then augmented with close-ups and reverse-angle shots that are pieced together into a final version. Mr. Kurosawa wanted his scenes to be a record of a single performance.

"The editing stage is really, for me, a breeze," he said. "Every day, I edit the rushes together, so that by the time I am finished shooting, what is called the initial assembly is already completed. It's not all that bad. I just stay for maybe an hour or an hour and a half after everyone has left. That's all it takes me."

While he was quite strict with his technical crew, Mr. Kurosawa was more patient with actors.

"It is really strange," said Shiro Miroya, one of Mr. Kurosawa's assistant directors. "Kurosawa, who can be a real demon at times, when he'll scream out, 'The rain isn't falling like I want it to,' or 'That damn wind isn't blowing the dust right,' is always so terribly gentle with actors."

Mr. Kurosawa described his approach this way: "Unless you can see, as an actor, what the director is trying to express simply by how he looks and acts himself, you are going to miss the finer points. When my cast and I are on location, we always eat together, sleep in the same rooms, are constantly talking together. As you might say, here is where I direct."

The approach paid off with an intense loyalty. Kyoko Kagawa, who starred in The Lower Depths (1957) and the contemporary thriller The Bad Sleep Well (1960), told an interviewer, "It is only when I work with the Kurosawa group that I feel fulfilled as an actress—and coupled with that is the feeling of relief that I know when I see that Kurosawa is satisfied."

Perhaps the greatest loyalty was between Mr. Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune, his most famous star. Mr. Kurosawa made 17 films between 1948 and 1965, and all but one of them starred Mifune. But the director and his top star had a falling out following the making of Red Beard (1965), partly because of Mifune's desire to mount his own productions and partly due to his annoyance over what he saw as Mr. Kurosawa's growing perfectionism. They never worked together again; Mr. Mifune died last year.

World Famous, But a Homebody

Though internationally renowned, Mr. Kurosawa was not much of a globe-trotter. He spent most of his time, when not working at his Tokyo studio, at the nearby home that he shared with his wife, Yoko Yaguchi, a former actress, who died in 1984. They had one son, Hisao, and one daughter, Kuzuko, both of whom survive him.

His global fame was not always matched by popularity at home, and Japanese audiences seemed to tire of his costume epics. Financial reversals following the release of Dodeskaden in 1970 combined with a persistent and painful ailment (later diagnosed as gallstones) led him to attempt suicide in 1971. Though he recovered, he seemed changed. After having made 19 films between 1946 and 1965, he made only 6 in the 28 years following Dodeskaden, although two of them are considered among his finest works: the historical epics Kagemusha (1980), centered on a thief in feudal Japan who assumes a dead man's identity and becomes heroic, and Ran (1985).

His final films, Rhapsody in August (1990) and Madadayo (1993), were poorly received and struck many as containing a new, strident note of Japanese nationalism. But his influence on American filmmakers continued unabated.

In 1960, Mr. Kurosawa's Seven Samurai was remade by the director John Sturges as The Magnificent Seven. In 1964, Rashomon was remade by Martin Ritt as The Outrage. In 1964, Yojimbo was remade by Sergio Leone as A Fistful of Dollars, then remade again in 1996 by Walter Hill as Last Man Standing.

And George Lucas has acknowledged The Hidden Fortress, a 1958 adventure by Mr. Kurosawa in which a princess is escorted to freedom with the help of two bickering peasants, as one of the inspirations for his Star Wars series, in which he replaced the peasants with two bickering robots.

Western Interests Of a Strict Father

Akira Kurosawa was born in Tokyo on March 23, 1910. His father was a former military officer who had become an athletic instructor at the Imperial Army's Toyama Academy. His mother had come from a well-to-do merchant family. "My mother was a very gentle woman," Mr. Kurosawa said, "But my father was quite severe."

Mr. Kurosawa's father was also a movie fan with a passion for other Western pasttimes. He organized one of the first baseball teams in Japan and built the country's first athletic swimming pool.

The Kurosawa family had once been in the feudal nobility, tracing its lineage to a legendary 11th-century samurai, Abe Sadato. But they had been living in Tokyo for four generations by the time Akira was born and no longer had wealth or status.

Akira was the youngest of four sisters and four brothers. In the book he wrote about the first decades of his life, Something Like an Autobiography, he remembered himself as "a crybaby and a real little operator." He also suffered from periodic seizures caused by a form of epilepsy.

While Mr. Kurosawa was in his second year of primary school, the family moved to the neighborhood of Edogawa and he entered the Kuroda School, where a charismatic teacher inspired an interest in painting. Mr. Kurosawa's father encouraged this, but the family often did not have enough money to buy art supplies. Later, Akira moved on to a more militaristic middle school and gravitated toward a brother, Heigo, who shared his interest in art. Heigo, who was four years older than Akira, did not get along with their father and no longer lived at home.

Without his father's knowledge, Akira spent much of his time with Heigo during his teen-age years. Heigo was very interested in a traditional form of storytelling known as kodan, which featured tales of samurai and often involved intricate, stylized swordplay.

But what Akira remembered most about those years was going to the movies with his brother, who had taken a job as a benshi, or silent-film narrator. "We would go to the movies, particularly silent movies, and then discuss them all day," Mr. Kurosawa later wrote. "I began to love to read books, especially Dostoyevsky, and I can remember when we went to see Abel Gance's 'La Roue' and it was the first film that really influenced me and made me think of wanting to become a filmmaker."

When sound came to films, Heigo lost his livelihood. Shortly thereafter, with what at the time seemed to Akira to be no warning, Heigo went on a trip to the mountains outside Tokyo and killed himself.

"I clearly remember the day before he committed suicide," Mr. Kurosawa wrote. "He had taken me to a movie in the Yamate district and afterward said that that was all for today, that I should go home. We parted at Shin Okubo station. He started up the stairs and I had started to walk off, then he stopped and called me back. He looked at me, looked into my eyes, and then we parted. I know now what he must have been feeling."

Akira enrolled in the Doshusha School of Western Painting in 1927 and tried to supplement the family's income with his work, but was never able to make much money. Finally, he postponed his hopes of becoming a serious artist and took piecework for magazines and cookbook publishers.

In 1936, desperate for cash, he noticed a small advertisement for Tokyo's P.C.L. Studios, which later became the Toho Film Production Company. It was looking for a half-dozen young men interested in becoming apprentice assistant directors.

All applicants—there were 500 of them—were asked to present themselves for an interview and to bring along an essay they had written on "The Basic Defects of the Japanese Film Industry." Armed with his own essay, a 26-year-old Mr. Kurosawa found himself facing Kajiro Yamamoto, then the most prominent film director in Japan. Yamamoto later remembered the young Mr. Kurosawa as extremely intelligent and refreshingly honest. He recommended that Mr. Kurosawa be hired and, shortly afterward, took the young man under his wing.

Mr. Kurosawa worked as Yamamoto's assistant for seven years. Finally, in 1943, he was given the chance to direct his first film, Sanshiro Sugata, a slick judo adventure aimed at the popular market. It was a box-office smash in wartime Tokyo. Mr. Kurosawa followed it with The Most Beautiful, a blending of documentary and dramatic scenes about Japanese women working in factories, and Sanshiro Sugata, Part II, another huge hit. He also made The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail at that time, but it was not released until 1952.

"During the war, I hungered for the beautiful," Mr. Kurosawa said. "I therefore drowned myself in the world of Japanese traditional beauty. I perhaps wanted to flee from reality, but through these experiences I learned and absorbed more than I could ever express."

After the war, Mr. Kurosawa found traditional, stylized storytelling too confining and hungered for realism and the kind of film-making he saw in the works of Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica.

In 1946, Mr. Kurosawa directed No Regrets for Our Youth, about persecutions in postwar Tokyo by elements in the Japanese right wing. "It was the first film in which I had something to say and in which my feelings were used," Mr. Kurosawa said.

Two years later, he made Drunken Angel, a crusading drama about an alcoholic doctor in the Tokyo slums. The film made his critical reputation in Japan.

In 1950, Mr. Kurosawa released Rashomon in Tokyo. The Japanese critics thought it a commendable though not exemplary work, nowhere near the director's best. Nevertheless, the film won the Venice Film Festival's grand prize and an Academy Award as best foreign-language movie. Its success made Mr. Kurosawa Japan's most famous and popular filmmaker.

"For the Japanese people, who had lost the war as well as their pride, this meant immeasurable encouragement and hope," Mr. Kurosawa said.

His next film, a strange adaptation of The Idiot by Dostoyevsky, was poorly received. But he followed it, in 1952, with Ikiru, which some consider his finest work. Ikiru, which means "to live," is entirely unlike the later samurai epics that would cement his international reputation. Set in contemporary Tokyo, it follows a joyless, dying bureaucrat, memorably played by Takashi Shimura, who decides to help slum parents build a playground. The film was immediately recognized as a great work, both in Japan and abroad. But it was soon overshadowed.

Lifting Restrictions Fans Artistic Flames

In 1953, the Allied occupation forces rescinded the restrictions on the making of films and the freedom stirred an amazing burst of creativity. In that one year alone, Yasujiro Ozu made The Tokyo Story, Kenji Mizoguchi made Ugetsu, Kon Ichikawa made Mr. Pu, and Akira Kurosawa made Seven Samurai. It was the high water mark of Japanese filmmaking.

Mr. Kurosawa's four-hour epic, often referred to as among the greatest action films ever made, tells the story of down-on-their-luck samurai who agree to defend a small village from bandits. What Mr. Kurosawa did in Seven Samurai is often compared with what John Ford did in Stagecoach: take an otherwise formulaic genre and inject it with vivid imagery and complex characters. He took the same kind of characters he had been featuring in his neo-realist films and put them into a jidai-geki.

Following the commercial disappointment of Red Beard in 1965, Mr. Kurosawa found it harder to find backing. He was hired by 20th Century Fox to direct the Japanese sequences in Tora! Tora! Tora!, its 1970 epic about Pearl Harbor, but he left the production shortly after shooting began.

Mr. Kurosawa was said to have thrown tantrums on the set and demanded levels of perfection that caused a mutiny among the crew. His supporters said that he was angry when he discovered that the American sequences would be filmed by Richard Fleischer, not David Lean, as he had been told, and that he had staged the tantrums to force Fox to fire him.

Whichever was the case, it further undermined his flagging reputation. In response, Mr. Kurosawa became more withdrawn, at times traveling around Tokyo with a retinue of bodyguards, like a Yakuza kingpin.

Though he had a major international success in 1974 with Dersu Uzala, a Soviet production about the friendship between a Russian explorer and a Manchurian hunter, he remained elusive and incommunicative. It won the 1975 Academy Award for best foreign-language film.

Even in 1980, at the premiere of Kagemusha at the New York Film Festival, Mr. Kurosawa struck many as cold and distant, even hostile. To some, he seemed to shrug off the film, saying he would rather have made Ran, an epic version of King Lear. But the success of Kagemusha made Ran possible.

When he returned to the New York Film Festival in 1985 with Ran, he seemed a changed man: friendlier, more relaxed, even granting a handful of interviews.

"As my son frequently says to me now," Mr. Kurosawa said in one of those interviews, "'Dad, you have changed completely. You are a much more relaxed, open person than you were.' I am not sure why this is. It is simply a greater degree of relaxation and peace with myself, not having the tension that I had before."

Even his sets had become happier places.

In The New York Times, Vincent Canby described Ran as "almost a religious experience—an epiphany" that "stands above all other 1985–1986 movies with the implacable presence of a force of nature."

His subsequent films, Akira Kurosawa's Dreams in 1990, which harked back to his early years as a painter, Rhapsody in August and Madadayo never reached the critical or popular success of Ran.

Though he often diverted the conversation when asked about his approach to filmmaking, Mr. Kurosawa frequently described his attitude toward art in similar terms. "To be an artist," he once said, "means never to avert one's eyes."

Mr. Kurosawa also once described a trip he made with his brother, Heigo, through the ruins of Tokyo after a massive earthquake in 1923. More than 140,000 people died in the fires that followed the quake. But as the pair moved through the ruins, Mr. Kurosawa said, his brother insisted that the young Akira look closely at the charred corpses.

"If you shut your eyes to a frightening sight, you end up being frightened," Akira remembered Heigo telling him. "If you look at everything straight on, there is nothing to be afraid of."

Kevin Thomas (obituary date 7 September 1998)

SOURCE: "Kurosawa Brought Japan—and Inspiration—to West," in Los Angeles Times, September 7, 1998, pp. Al, All.

[In the following obituary, Thomas praises the achievements of Kurosawa's career.]

At the time of his death Sunday of a stroke at his Tokyo home, Akira Kurosawa, who was 88, was widely regarded as the greatest director still living and one of the most influential filmmakers of any era.

His 1950 Rashomon, a period tale in which a bandit's assault on an aristocratic woman traveling through a forest is told from four different viewpoints, is one of the key films in the history of Japanese cinema and spawned many imitators. When it took the grand prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1951. Japanese films were virtually unknown in the West, but it went on to win a special Oscar as the best foreign film of the year. A Hong Kong broadcast today declared that "Kurosawa was one of the few Asians to whom Hollywood paid attention."

Director Steven Spielberg, in France to promote Saving Private Ryan, described Kurosawa on Sunday as "the visual Shakespeare of our time."

"I am deeply saddened by Kurosawa's death," Spielberg told reporters. "But what encourages me is that he … is the only director who right until the end of his life continued to make films that were recognized as, or will be recognized as, classics."

In Japan, Kurosawa's death was front-page news in every paper today. Tokyo film critic Yoshio Shirai said: "Before Rashomon, the outside world's image of Japan was Mt. Fuji, geisha and cherry blossoms. After the movie, it changed to Kurosawa, Sony and Honda, in that order."

Kurosawa thus became a source of national pride to a people who had only recently suffered a devastating defeat in World War II, director Yoji Yamada said.

"When Rashomon won the grand prize [in Venice] Japanese, who were still living in the aftermath of the war, were greatly encouraged that Japanese art was recognized by the world," Yamada said.

Often described as the "most Western" of Japanese directors, Kurosawa—a bold, innovative stylist and master storyteller—admired the films of John Ford and other Hollywood directors. It's not hard to see the impact of the Western on one of his most celebrated films, Seven Samurai (1954), in which a small village, regularly attacked by bandits, hires a group of swordsmen to defend it. So popular was this saga that Hollywood remade it in 1960 as The Magnificent Seven.

The late Sergio Leone freely admitted pirating one of Kurosawa's most popular, and amusing, films, Yojimbo (1960). Leone called his version A Fistful of Dollars, and it gave rise to the spaghetti western and established Clint Eastwood as a major star. George Lucas has acknowledged The Hidden Fortress (1958), one of Kurosawa's liveliest samurai epics, as a key inspiration for Star Wars. Fay and Michael Kanin turned Rashomon into a successful Broadway play, and Martin Rill turned it into The Outrage, starring Paul Newman.

For 50 years, Kurosawa created images that stick permanently in the memory—the swift tracking shots through the forest in Rashomon; the shot in Ikiru ("To Live," 1952) of the great character actor Takashi Shimura as a petty bureaucrat sitting in a swing under softly falling snow, dying but content in his belief that he has succeeded in giving his life meaning; the shocked expression of Toshiro Mifune's Macbeth-like monarch in Throne of Blood (1957) as he realizes that he has been fatally impaled by a flurry of arrows.

Although his films were routinely described by critics and scholars alike as being profoundly humanistic, Kurosawa remained modest about his work.

"I just make up stories and film them," he said in 1985 after he introduced Ran, his period epic version of King Lear. "When I am lucky, the stories have a lifelike quality that makes them appealing to people, and the film is successful."

Born in Tokyo, Kurosawa was the youngest of seven children of an army officer turned athletic instructor. Young Akira first showed talent in art and at 17 enrolled in the Tokyo Academy of Fine Arts to study painting. Unsuccessful as a commercial artist, he answered an advertisement for assistant directors in 1936 and joined what was to become Toho Film Co., one of Japan's major studios.

To his surprise, Kurosawa not only got the job but soon found that film was his true art form. He made his directing debut in 1943 with Judo Saga, stressing the spiritual side of martial arts at the very moment Japanese filmmakers were expected to be at their most militaristic. Chafing at wartime censorship, he made only two more films during World War II—The Most Beautiful (1944), about women's everyday lives on the home front, and The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail, parodying samurai ideology in 1945.

The refreshingly natural actress who starred in The Most Beautiful, Yoko Yaguchi, retired from acting and married Kurosawa, becoming his personal support system until her death in 1985. The couple had a son, Hisao, and a daughter, Kazuko. She and her son were with him at his death.

After the war, Kurosawa won recognition as the best Japanese director of the year in 1947 for his love story One Wonderful Sunday. His next film, Drunken Angel, began his long association with actor Mifune, who played a tuberculosis-stricken gangster aided by a slum doctor in postwar Tokyo. "In this picture," Kurosawa later said, "I finally discovered myself."

Mifune, who died in December at 77, was the star of many of Kurosawa's finest films, including Rashomon. During their 17-year collaboration, Kurosawa transformed the fledgling film actor into Japan's most internationally renowned star.

As the '60s and '70s wore on, Kurosawa made fewer and fewer films. Kagemusha (1980) would most likely never have been made at all had not two of his fans, Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, stepped in as executive producers, persuading 20th Century Fox to buy the international distribution rights. Lucas later commented that for Kurosawa not to have been able to make Kagemusha would have been "like telling Michelangelo, 'All right, you're 70, and we're not letting you paint anymore.'"

In person, the 6-foot Kurosawa was a commanding figure. Sometimes he would be in a mood for an interview, sometimes not, but he was always cordial, speaking through his U.S. interpreter, film historian Audie Bock. In a 1980 interview, he said, "I have never made a film someone has ordered me to make."

Kurosawa was in a jovial mood while in Los Angeles on his 80th birthday, March 23, 1990—three days before he was to receive another honorary Oscar, this one for lifetime achievement. "I sure don't feel like I'm 80," he said in his Beverly Hills hotel suite. "To be honest, I feel like behaving like a total fool, but I can't do it because my producers are here!" he exclaimed, indicating his son and his nephew Mike Y. Inoue.

Kurosawa had rarely been seen in public in recent years. Three years ago, he broke his leg and spine in a fall at an inn in Kyoto, and afterward he spent most of his time in bed, but he was still doing rehabilitation exercises at the time of his death, his son said at a news conference Sunday.

His condition worsened two weeks ago, however—although he was able to have conversations until the end, Hisao said.

A private funeral for the family will be held Tuesday, and there will be a public farewell service Sunday at the Kurosawa Film Studio in Yokohama, which is headed by his son.

His children reported that Kurosawa's passing was "as peaceful as if he were going to sleep."

"He did not utter any last words," Hisao said. "But his films were his testament."