Akira Kurosawa

Akira Kurosawa (黒澤 明 or 黒沢 明, Kurosawa Akira; March 23, 1910 – September 6, 1998) was a Japanese filmmaker who directed 30 feature films in a career spanning six decades. With a bold and dynamic style strongly influenced by Western cinema yet distinct from it, he is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers in the history of cinema. Known as a hands-on filmmaker, he was heavily involved with all aspects of production as a director, writer, producer, and editor.

Following a brief stint as a painter, Kurosawa entered the Japanese film industry in 1936. After years of working on numerous films as an assistant director and screenwriter, he made his directorial debut during World War II with the popular action film Sanshiro Sugata (1943), released when he was 33 years old. Following the war, he cemented his reputation as one of the most important young filmmakers in Japan with the critically acclaimed Drunken Angel (1948), in which he cast the then-unknown actor Toshiro Mifune in a starring role; the two men would then collaborate on 15 more films.

Rashomon (1950) premiered in Tokyo and became the surprise winner of the Golden Lion at the 1951 Venice Film Festival. The commercial and critical success of the film opened up Western film markets to Japanese films for the first time, which in turn led to international recognition for other Japanese filmmakers. Kurosawa directed approximately one film per year throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, including a number of highly regarded and often adapted films, including Ikiru (1952), Seven Samurai (1954), Throne of Blood (1957), The Hidden Fortress (1958), Yojimbo (1961), High and Low (1963), and Red Beard (1965). He became much less prolific after the 1960s, though his later work—including two of his final films, Kagemusha (1980) and Ran (1985)—continued to receive critical acclaim.

In 1990, Kurosawa accepted the Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement. He was posthumously named "Asian of the Century" in the "Arts, Literature, and Culture" category by AsianWeek magazine and CNN, who cited him as one of the five people who most prominently contributed to the improvement of Asia in the 20th century. His career has been honored by many releases in many consumer media in addition to retrospectives, critical studies, and biographies in both print and video.

Kurosawa was born on March 23, 1910, in Ōi Town [ja], Ebara County [ja] (now Higashi-Ōi [ja] in the Shinagawa ward of Tokyo). However, he once claimed he was born in Akita and later came to Tokyo as an infant. His mother, Shima (1870–1952), came from a merchant's family in Osaka; his father, Isamu (1864–1948), was a member of a samurai family from Akita Prefecture and worked as the director of the Army's Physical Education Institute's lower secondary school. Akira was the eighth and youngest child of the moderately wealthy family, with two of his siblings already grown up at the time of his birth and one deceased, leaving him to grow up with three sisters and a brother.

In addition to promoting physical exercise, Isamu was open to Western traditions, and considered theatre and cinema to have educational merit. He encouraged his children to watch films; a young Kurosawa viewed his first films at the age of six. He attended elementary school and became close friends with Keinosuke Uekusa, while an important formative influence was his teacher Mr. Tachikawa, whose progressive educational practices ignited in him first a love of drawing and then an interest in education in general. During this time, he also studied calligraphy and Kendo swordsmanship.

Another major childhood influence was Kurosawa's older brother by four years, Heigo (1906–1933). In the aftermath of the Great Kantō earthquake and the subsequent Kantō Massacre of 1923, Heigo took the 13-year-old Kurosawa to view the devastation. When Kurosawa wanted to look away from the corpses of humans and animals scattered everywhere, Heigo forbade him to do so, encouraging him to instead face his fears by confronting them directly. Some commentators have suggested that this incident would influence Kurosawa's later artistic career, as he was easily willing to confront and explore unpleasant truths in his work. Heigo was academically gifted, but after failing to secure a place in Tokyo's foremost high school, he began to detach himself from the rest of the family and preferred to concentrate on his interest in foreign literature. In the late 1920s, Heigo quickly made a name for himself as a benshi (silent film narrator) for Tokyo theaters showing foreign films. Kurosawa, who at this point planned to become a painter, moved in with Heigo and the two became inseparable.

With Heigo's guidance, Kurosawa avidly watched not only films but also theater and circus performances, while exhibiting his paintings and working for the left-wing Proletarian Artists' League. He was never able to make a living with his art, and lost his enthusiasm for painting due to this and his growing belief that most of the proletarian movement boiled down to "putting unfulfilled political ideals directly onto the canvas". With the increasing production of talking pictures in the early 1930s, film narrators like Heigo began to lose work, and Kurosawa moved back in with his parents. In July 1933, Heigo took his own life; Kurosawa has commented on the lasting sense of loss he felt at his brother's death, and the chapter of Something Like an Autobiography that describes it—written nearly 50 years after the event—is titled "A Story I Don't Want to Tell". Just four months after Heigo's suicide, Kurosawa's eldest brother also died, leaving 23-year-old Kurosawa as the sole surviving brother amongst his three sisters.