How Japan’s Greatest Director Was Exiled from His Country

Akira Kurosawa’s contributions to movies are evident, and his role in shaping the art form as a pioneer is indisputable today. A master of staging large-scale battles and small personal dramas alike, his decades of films illustrated his range and knack for creating powerful images. In fact, even as early as 1960, still in his prime, his skill behind the camera was recognized by the world. At the top of his game, bringing a new-found international respect and enthusiasm to Japanese cinema, he faced one of the most inexplicable and cruel reassessments in film history.

In the 1950s, he fostered the enthusiasm of the world as one of the greatest minds in the film world, a living genius. The ’60s would see a continuation of his quality, but something had changed. As generations of young filmmakers stumbled onto his work, enraptured by his talents, in his own country, he was dismissed as yesterday’s news. Poet and fascist Yukio Mishima critiqued Kurosawa’s attempts to convey humanism as lacking depth, but this too could be seen as a larger part of a backlash against an artist warmly embraced by the West, stirring some nationalist paranoia against him. The director had his fair share of naysayers heckling him from the peanut gallery, and his fame only intensified the disdain.

By the ’70s, Japan was done with Kurosawa. In a last-ditch effort to preserve his career, dignity, and more importantly, his sanity, he sought refuge on the outside. This isn’t to say he ceased considering himself Japanese or a Japanese director, but it’s the very level of the “Japaneseness” of his character that singled him out for scorn, betraying some duty to conform to very narrow and contrived ideals. The environment that created him, and birthed his imagination, had turned into an emotional prison. The sting of the rejection he carried for the rest of his life.

Seizing the Spotlight

Rashomon, Hidden Fortress (which would heavily inspire Star Wars), Ikiru, and Seven Samurai propelled Kurosawa to fame, popularizing Japanese cinema (singlehandedly introducing the jidaigeki genre, a type of Edo-period samurai films) to the outside world. His body of work wasn’t limited to just sword-fighting films, exploring post-war crime in his noir Stray Dog, and existential dread in the form of nuclear annihilation in I Live in Fear. Kurosawa didn’t look only to the traditions or style of his own nation, Throne of Blood played on his interest in all things Shakespearean, especially Macbeth, not even trying to hide that the movie was a reinterpretation of the play.

Ironically, he didn’t hold his masterpiece Rashomon in high regard at all. “The Japanese are always terribly critical of Japanese films, so it is not surprising that a foreigner should be responsible …” he recalled when learning the film being sent without his knowledge to the Venice Film Festival, where it was received with great fanfare. “It was the same way with the Japanese woodcuts; foreigners first appreciated them.” Appreciated his films were.

Many of his samurai movies were essentially copied beat for beat in the US and Italy, partly responsible for inventing spaghetti westerns, if indirectly. Though A Fistful of Dollars director Sergio Leone was forced to cough up 15% of the film’s profits for this copyright infringement, it should be noted that Yojimbo was lifted from Dashiell Hammett’s noir novel Red Harvest, the influence of the story ceaselessly transcending boundaries and genres.

When asked in his final years if he changed his films to cater to foreign audiences, he said matter-of-factly he didn’t even understand why anyone liked his films, nor could he ever accurately predict what reaction a film would provoke, amused that Western audiences liked his films despite never trying to pander to them. “I thought people overseas wouldn’t understand it, but it got a great response,” he said of the reaction to his 1993 film Madaday. “They understood some parts of it better than the Japanese audience.” After 50 years of making movies, he still was at the mercy of fickle audiences, and none were more vicious and opinionated than his home crowd.

Not So Big in Japan

What was probably just a shift in public perception or profitability, Kurosawa took as an affront, calling into question his skills as an artist. By the late ’60s, he parted ways with superstar Toshiro Mifune, leaving many to wonder if he could survive without the box office drawing power of his leading man and a nation’s matinée idol. The two never worked again after completing the Fyodor Dostoevsky adaptation Red Beard. Kurosawa’s perfectionism is usually cited as the final straw in the disintegrating relationship.

Red Beard would prove to be the crossroads of his professional and personal life, unclear what to occupy himself with, without Mifune to rely on, and changing trends in the industry seemingly rendering him obsolete. As television ownership grew in Japan, the big-screen spectacles Kurosawa specialized in were seen as unprofitable gambles. Fewer companies wished to stake their future on his expensive projects, regardless of his track record. Instead, they poured their resources into more reliable, low-brow content, which is why the image in the West in the ’70s regarding the Japanese film industry (after Kurosawa left) was mostly that of “soft pornography and monster movies,” to quote Dick Cavett. Jokes aside, the golden age of Japanese cinema was already over.

Box-office returns were one of many concerns facing him, with critics in Japan taking him to task for supposedly turning his back on some unnamed, “correct” manner of making Japanese films. The common refrain that he was too apolitical and pandering was so pervasive that the view found its way into the mouths of French critics who parroted the opinion; critics like Jean-Luc Godard were content to pigeonhole and stereotype what Japanese movies were supposed to be, and how real Japanese artists were supposed to think. He tried to shrug it off, saying, “The Western and the Japanese live side by side in my mind naturally, without the least bit of conflict.”

The mere fact that a foreigner could rise to such high levels of import and imitation abroad, perplexed and unsettled many power brokers and other figures in Japanese film circles. Coincidentally, the fluid nature of Japan was noticed by Kurosawa, who pointed out that most modern Japanese saw themselves as more Western than traditional Japanese, desiring new Western media, not Noh or Kabuki theater. The ramifications would become clear after the ’60s as he was left metaphorically destitute and forced to re-examine his own life and artistic instincts, briefly moving to America. His turmoil culminated in a suicide attempt in 1971, as his prospects in Japan and with production partner Toho petered out after the film Dodes ‘Ka-Den bombed in Japan.

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Friends in Unexpected Places

Akira Kurosawa’s persona grew so tainted that at one point it looked like he’d never make another big-budget film again, bridges burnt to a crisp. In one of the few moments of the USSR playing the god guys in cinema, the Soviet film studio Mosfilm lured the disenfranchised director away from Japan in the early ’70s. In an interesting twist, the Russians — much like the new crop of American and Italian film directors who analyzed every one of his edits and cinematographic flourishes — had unbridled respect and awe for Kurosawa.

Despite rediscovering glory and an Academy Award for his film made in Russia, Dersu Uzala, Kurosawa still couldn’t rekindle any feelings in the hearts of the Japanese film industry. For the better part of a decade, Kurosawa tried in vain to get his script for Ran made in Japan. After all the success he had established, he needed to once again find a sympathetic figure in the West, this time in France, finally finding a Frenchman who didn’t slander him as a sellout, salvation coming in the form of Serge Silberman.

His final quarter-century of life was surprisingly productive but bittersweet, Francis Ford Coppola and fanboy George Lucas — both riding high in the late ’70s — stepping in to browbeat Toho to finance the director’s epic Kagemusha. In the last decade of his life, he focused on a more personal project called Dreams. Yet again, he had to turn to his admirers in Hollywood to help him get it off the ground, the production duties, special effects, and distribution being handled by American companies. The premiere skipped Japan, revealing just how low his reputation with Japanese audiences and film moguls had sunk.

This time, Lucas and friend Steven Spielberg were there to assist him, later on hand to present him with an honorary Oscar in 1990. In his autobiography, he struggled to explain why his movies were rejected at home, uttering “Why is it that Japanese people have no confidence in the worth of Japan?” For the last few years of his life, he fluctuated between depression and detached satisfaction, coming to grips with his awkward place in Japanese cinema, an artisan who had outlived his usefulness, feeling like an embarrassing relative who kept showing up at the family reunion only to be politely tolerated.