Akira Kurosawa, the director Japan exiled and the world refused to forget

Akira Kurosawa

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	March 23, 1910 Ōmori, Tokyo, Japan
Died	September 6, 1998 (88)
Occupation	Film director, screenwriter
Known for	Seven Samurai, Rashomon, Yojimbo
Awards	Golden Lion · 4 Academy Award

The most celebrated Japanese director who ever lived nearly starved for work in Japan. After Dodesukaden failed at the box office, the country’s film studios closed their doors to Kurosawa so thoroughly that he mortgaged his house, dissolved the production company he had co-founded with three other directors, and attempted suicide. He was sixty-one years old. The same man George Lucas would later call «the pictorial Shakespeare of our time» spent the next decade begging for budgets.

Born in Ōmori, Tokyo, on March 23, 1910, the eighth child of a military family that traced its lineage to a clan of provincial samurai, Kurosawa arrived at filmmaking sideways. His early ambition was painting — he studied at the Doshisha School of Western Painting before discovering that his eye worked better through a lens than on canvas. A craftily written essay for the Photo Chemical Laboratories entrance exam caught the attention of director Kajirō Yamamoto, who hired him as an assistant and drilled into him the principle that would anchor everything: the screenplay is not the servant of cinema, it is its foundation.

The work that established his signature was Drunken Angel (1948), a post-war drama set in a cholera-contaminated Tokyo backstreet. More importantly, it was the first collaboration with Toshirō Mifune, an untrained actor another director had turned away from a casting call, whom Kurosawa saw something primal in and cast anyway. Over the next seventeen years, the two would make sixteen films together — a creative partnership without a plausible equal in twentieth-century cinema. When Red Beard (1965) ended their collaboration, Mifune said the year-long shoot had consumed him professionally. Kurosawa later said Mifune was irreplaceable. He was right, in ways that would become clear only after the break.

Rashomon arrived in 1950 and rewrote the rules. A story told four times from four irreconcilably different perspectives — samurai, wife, bandit, woodcutter — it won the Golden Lion at Venice and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, opening a door between Japanese cinema and international audiences that had barely been ajar before. The studio that produced it had considered the script so impenetrable it only greenlit the film to fill a production gap. When it won at Venice, the Daiei executive who received the telegram asked a subordinate what the Golden Lion was.

Seven Samurai (1954) is the defining argument of his full powers. Filmed over 148 shooting days — nearly three times the originally budgeted schedule — it is a film that knows exactly what it costs to protect the weak. John Sturges remade it as The Magnificent Seven in 1960. Sergio Leone adapted Yojimbo, his 1961 follow-up, as A Fistful of Dollars without asking permission and eventually had to settle a lawsuit. George Lucas borrowed the relationship between a small robot and a bumbling companion from The Hidden Fortress (1958) when designing R2-D2 and C-3PO. The plagiarism, largely uncontested, is its own kind of homage.

His Shakespeare adaptations — Macbeth into Throne of Blood (1957), King Lear into Ran (1985) — became the most discussed cinematic reworkings of those texts. Through the late 1950s and 1960s he also made sharp contemporary thrillers: High and Low (1963), a kidnapping drama that operates structurally in two radically different halves — a penthouse and a slum connected by a single ransom — remains one of the most formally audacious crime films ever made.

The canonical narrative of Kurosawa — universally beloved genius — obscures a decade of abandonment. After Dodesukaden, he could not finance a film in Japan. He shot Dersu Uzala (1975) for the Soviet Mosfilm studio, on location in Siberia, because that was the only money available to him. It won a second Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. For Kagemusha (1980), his epic about a warlord’s double, it was Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas who stepped in as foreign executive producers, using their leverage with 20th Century Fox to guarantee the budget. The Japanese film industry had essentially outsourced the rescue of its greatest director to Hollywood. The irony was lost on nobody — except possibly on the studios.

Ran (1985) came to him as a dream he had sketched in watercolors for years before he could afford to make it: a Japanese warlord destroys his family by dividing his kingdom among his sons, and the world ends in fire and indifference. At an estimated twelve million dollars — the most expensive Japanese film ever produced at the time — it was largely financed by French producer Serge Silberman. Kurosawa was seventy-five when it was released. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director, the first Japanese director to receive that nomination, and lost to Sydney Pollack for Out of Africa.

His wife, actress Yōko Yaguchi, died in 1985, the same year Ran was released. The last films — Dreams (1990), Rhapsody in August (1991), Madadayo (1993) — are quieter, more personal, less interested in spectacle than in the question of what a long life means. Madadayo, whose title translates roughly as «not yet» — the old professor answering «not yet» when students ask if he is ready to die — is a farewell that refuses to be one.

He died of a stroke on September 6, 1998, at his home in Setagaya, Tokyo, at the age of eighty-eight. Martin Scorsese called him «simply one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century, in any medium.» The Academy Museum’s 2026 retrospective, «Darkness and Humanity: The Complete Akira Kurosawa,» spanning thirty-five films in 35mm, is the most comprehensive presentation of his work assembled since his death. The question his films keep raising — how much of ourselves we sacrifice to protect what we love — remains precisely as unanswered as when he first asked it.

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Etiquetas: Japanese cinema, Akira Kurosawa, Ran, Rashomon, Seven Samurai, Toshiro Mifune

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