Something Like an Autobiography (28 page)

That day I walked the corridors of the Ministry of the Interior in a deep melancholy. Then I noticed two young office boys tussling in the hallway. One of them yelled, “Yama arashi!” (“Mountain storm!”) and, using Sanshirō’s special technique, threw the other to the floor. So I knew the screening of
Sugata Sanshirō
was over. But I was still made to wait for three hours. During that time the boy who had imitated Sanshirō brought me a cup of tea wearing a compassionate expression on his face, but that was all.

When the test finally began, it was horrible. In a room with a long table, the censors were all lined up on one side. Down at the very end were Ozu and Tasaka, and next to them an office boy. All of them, including the office boy, were drinking coffee. I was instructed to sit in the single chair on the other side that faced them all. It was really like being on trial. Naturally, no coffee appeared for me. It seems I had committed the heinous crime called
Sugata Sanshirō
.

The point of the censors’ argument was that almost everything in the film was “British-American.” They seemed to find the little incident of the “love scene” between Sanshirō and his rival’s daughter on the shrine stairs—the censors called this a “love scene,” but all the two did was meet each other for the first time there—to be particularly “British-American,” and they harped as if they had discovered some great oracular truth. If I listened attentively, I would fly into a rage, so I did my best to look out the window and think of other things.

But I reached the limits of my endurance with their spitefulness. I felt the color of my face changing, and there was nothing I could do about it. “Bastards! Go to hell! Eat this chair!” Thinking such thoughts, I rose involuntarily to my feet, but as I did so, Ozu stood up simultaneously and began to speak: “If a hundred points is a perfect score,
Sugata Sanshirō
gets one hundred twenty! Congratulations, Kurosawa!” Ignoring the unhappy censors, Ozu strode over to me, whispered the name of a Ginza restaurant in my ear and said, “Let’s go there and celebrate.”

Later Ozu and Yama-san arrived at the restaurant, where I was already waiting. As if to calm me down, Ozu praised
Sugata Sanshirō
with all his might. But I was not so easy to console, and I sat there thinking how much better I would have felt if I had taken that defendant’s chair and hit the censors over the head with it. Even today the thing I am most grateful to Ozu for is that he prevented me from doing just that.

I THINK THE
easiest way to talk about myself from the time I became a film director is by following my filmography and going through my life film by film.
Sugata Sanshirō
was released in 1943; I was thirty-three years old.
The Most Beautiful
was released in 1944; I was thirty-four. But a picture is usually released the year after the actual filming, so, for example,
The Most Beautiful
was a film I started shooting in 1943.

Before I began work on
The Most Beautiful
, I had a request from the Information Section of the Navy. They called me to see if I wouldn’t make a big action picture using Zero fighter planes. I understand that American pilots called Zero fighters “Black Monsters” and seemed to be terrified by them, so probably what the Navy had in mind was a propaganda film to fan the Japanese war spirit. I said I would think about it. But it was already evident that Japan was going to lose the war, and the Navy’s ability to carry on was reaching the bottom. They really couldn’t have spared any Zero fighters to make a movie with, and I never heard anything more about the project.

The Most Beautiful
was the project that replaced the Zero film. It deals with a volunteer corps of teenage girl workers. The setting is a military-lens factory belonging to the Nippon Kogaku company in the town of Hiratsuka, and the girls are engaged in the manufacture of precision lenses.

When I received this project to direct, I decided I wanted to try doing it in semi-documentary style. I began with the task of ridding the young actresses of everything they had physically and emotionally acquired that smacked of theatricality. The odor of makeup, the snobbery, the affectations of the stage, that special self-consciousness that only actors have—all of this had to go. I wanted to return them to their original status of ordinary young girls.

So I began with running practice, and went from there to volleyball. Then I had them form a fife-and-drum corps, practice marching and playing and finally parade through the streets. The actresses didn’t seem to object to the running and the volleyball, but the very thought of doing something so attention-getting as marching through
the streets in a fife-and-drum corps affronted them. I had to deal with a strong resistance to this request.

But with repetition they became accustomed even to parading. Their makeup lost its artificiality, and at first glance, and even at a harder second look, they appeared to be in all respects a healthy, active group of ordinary young girls. I then took this group and put them in the Nippon Kogaku company dormitory. I sent several of them to each section of the factory, and they began leading the same life as the actual workers, on the same daily schedule.

Reflecting upon my actions now, I must conclude that I was a terribly rough director to work for. It is really quite amazing how they all did without question what I told them to do. But then, in the mood that prevailed during wartime, everyone took orders as a matter of course. I was not consciously asking these girls to behave in a selfless, patriotic fashion. The fact is that the theme of the film is self-sacrificing service to one’s country, and if we had not gone about preparing for it in this way, the characters would have been like cardboard cutouts and lacked all reality. I had the actress Irie Takako playing the dormitory mother for the girls at the factory, and her natural ability to show maternal affection made her very popular among the young actresses; her presence was a great help to me.

At the same time the cast entered the factory women’s dormitory, the crew and I moved into a men’s dormitory. Our mornings began every day with the distant strains of the fifes and drums. When we heard this music, we leaped out of our beds, pulled on our clothes and rushed off to the Hiratsuka railroad crossing. Along the white frost-covered road came the fife-and-drum corps, all wearing headbands and playing a simple but inspiring march tune. While playing their instruments, they glared at us out of the corners of their eyes as they passed by us, crossed the railroad tracks and marched into the front gate of the Nippon Kogaku factory. We would watch them disappear and then return to our dormitory for breakfast. After our meal we gathered our equipment and proceeded to the factory for filming.

The spirit with which we shot was exactly the same as if we had been making a pure documentary film. The girls in each section of the factory of course spoke the lines of the drama that were set down in the script, but rather than paying attention to the camera they were totally absorbed in carrying out the factory job they were learning and in monitoring the workings of the machinery. In their concentrated expressions and movements there was almost no trace of the self-consciousness actors have, only the vitality and beauty of people at work.

The full impact of this quality comes through best in the sequence I edited together of many, many closeups of each girl at her place in the factory. As background music for these closeups I used the inspiring sound of the battle drum from the John Philip Sousa march “Semper Fidelis,” which lent them the courage and heroism of soldiers in the front lines fighting the war. (Oddly enough, even though I used march music by an American composer, the censors from the Ministry of the Interior sat through this sequence without labeling it “British-American.”)

The food at the factory was awful. It usually consisted of broken rice mixed with corn or millet, or broken rice mixed with some other weedy grain. The main dish was always some kind of seaweed or kelp that had been culled from the nearby shore. We on the crew felt sorry for the actresses, who had to eat this miserable fare and then work more than an eight-hour day. We each contributed from our own pockets every day and had someone go out and buy sweet potatoes. We steamed them in the kettle-style dormitory bathtub, which was heated with a wood fire, and gave them to the girls.

Later it came to pass that I married the girl who played the leader of the girls’ volunteer corps, Yaguchi Yoko. At that time she represented the actresses and frequently came to argue with me on their behalf. She was a terribly stubborn and uncompromising person, and since I am very much the same, we often clashed head on. These battles could only be brought to a peaceful resolution through the intervention of Irie Takako, who had no easy task of it.

In any event,
The Most Beautiful
was a film that occasioned a very special kind of hardship. Much more than for me or for my crew, it affected the young actresses, who would never see the likes of it again. I don’t know if it was due to the stress of acting in this film, but for some reason almost all of them gave up their careers and got married when
The Most Beautiful
was over. Since among these women there were many who had great acting talent and of whom I had hopes for the future, I didn’t know whether I should rejoice or lament. And I certainly didn’t want to believe that they all gave up acting because I had been so mean to them.

In later years when I asked the ones who quit what their reasons were, they all denied that my demands on them had had anything to do with it. In fact, they said that working on my film had been their first opportunity to return to being ordinary women, following the same path ordinary women do, casting off the various dead layers of skin that had clung to them as actresses. But in their protestations I heard much that was meant to keep my feelings from being hurt. The
truth of the matter is, I am sure, that the severity of the work I put them through was one of the primary causes of their decision to give up acting.

But they really did their best for me, this group of actresses.
The Most Beautiful
is not a major picture, but it is the one dearest to me.

Sugata Sanshirō
had been a hit, so the studio asked me to make a sequel. This is one of the bad points about commercialism: It seems the entertainment sections of Japan’s film-production companies haven’t heard the proverb about the fish under the willow tree that hangs over the stream—the fact that you hooked one there once doesn’t mean you always will. These people continually remake films that were successful in the past. They don’t attempt to dream new dreams; they only want to repeat the old ones. Even though it has been proved that a remake never outdoes the original, they persist in their foolishness. I would call it foolishness of the first order. A director filming a remake does so with great deference toward the original work, so it’s like cooking up something strange out of leftovers, and the audience who have to eat this concoction are in an unenviable position, too.

Sugata Sanshirō, Part II
was not a remake, so the situation could have been worse, but it was still a question of refrying to a certain extent. I had to force myself to arouse the desire to go back to it and continue it. But one aspect of the story of Higaki Gennosuke’s younger brothers seeking a revenge battle with Sanshirō interested me. This was the fact that Gennosuke is forced to see himself as he was in his younger days through the similarly impetuous actions of his younger brother Tesshin, and the recollection causes him to suffer.

The climax of the
Sanshirō
sequel is a duel between Tesshin and Sanshirō on a snow-covered mountain. The location was a place called Hoppo, a hot-spring and ski resort, and two funny things occurred during our shooting. On the day I was helping the set builders construct the hut the brothers are living in, my gloves got covered with sticky snow and I had to melt it off over a bonfire. Then when evening
came, the temperature fell suddenly and I lost all sensation in my wet and stiffened hands. I went back with the rest to the hot-spring inn.