When I had drunk up all my money, I sat down at my desk again and began to write. What I wrote was in the main for money, and my client at the time was Daiei Motion Picture Company. For them I wrote such scripts as Dohyosai (Wrestling Ring Festival) and Jajouma monogatari (The Story of a Bad Horse), and they sent me my payment in care of my employers, Toho. But Toho took fifty percent. When I asked why, the answer was: “You’re under contract to Toho and we pay you a regular salary, so of course we get a percentage of what you do on the outside.”
But to me it looked a little different. Daiei paid me 200 yen for each script. My salary at Toho was 48 yen a month, or 576 yen a year. If I wrote three scripts a year for Daiei, Toho would be making an average of 25 yen a month from me—over half my salary. So it appeared to me that Toho was not employing me for 48 yen a month, but rather that I was employing Toho for 25 yen a month. This seemed pretty strange, but I didn’t say anything about it. When an executive from Daiei later asked me if I had received my money all right, I told him very straightforwardly what had happened. He looked astounded for a moment, said, “That’s terrible!” and disappeared into the accounting office. He reemerged with 100 yen, which he handed to me directly.
From that time on, whenever I wrote a script for Daiei, we went through this rigmarole. Perhaps Toho was worried that if I received too much money I would drink too much.
As a matter of fact, I did develop a case of incipient gastric ulcers from drinking too much. So I went on a mountain-climbing expedition with Taniguchi Senkichi. After spending the whole day clambering around the peaks, I was so sleepy in the evening I could drink hardly any saké at all, so I got well right away. Once cured, I started writing another script in order to drink again.
(All this drinking had begun with Horses, We assistant directors were so busy we couldn’t drink saké with our evening meals at the inn on location because we had to rush through our dinner and start preparing for the next day’s shooting. And when we came back, everyone else was already asleep. The people who ran the inn felt so sorry for us that they always set out a serving bottle full of saké for each of us by our pillows, and they left a kettle on the hibachi coals for us to heat it up with. Every night we drank our saké in bed, with just our heads sticking out of the covers. We looked like tortoises poking our heads out of our shells, and eventually we became stewed tortoises.)
My life of writing and drinking went on like this for about a year. Then at last it was proposed that I direct my own script Daruma-dera no doitsujin (A German at Daruma Temple). But as soon as we went into pre-production, the project was abandoned because of the restrictions on film distribution. The Pacific War had begun. And at this inauspicious time my desperate battle to become a director also started in earnest.
During the Pacific War, freedom of speech became more restricted day by day in Japan. Even though my script had been selected by the production company for filming, the Ministry of the Interior’s censorship bureau rejected it. The verdict of the censors was final; there was no recourse.
Nor were the censors lax. At that time it was determined an offense to make use of the chrysanthemum crest of the imperial household, and any pattern even resembling it was proscribed. Because of this we took great care that among the costumes we used in our films there were no designs that looked like chrysanthemums. Nevertheless, one day I was summoned by the censorship bureau for using the chrysanthemum crest, and was ordered to cut an entire scene.
Thoroughly baffled, as I knew we couldn’t possibly be using anything with a chrysanthemum pattern on it, I went back to check. I found that the objectionable item was a sash with an oxcart design. I took the sash and returned to the censor’s office to show him. But he held fast. “Even if it is an oxcart in reality, since it looks like a chrysanthemum it is a chrysanthemum. Cut the scene.” The censorship bureau was unrelenting in its perverseness, so such occurrences were by no means rare.
The censors echoed the official wartime xenophobia, and if they were able to find something that was “British-American-looking,” they excitedly condemned it to destruction. My next two scripts, Mori no sen’ichiya (A Thousand and One Nights in the Forest) and San Paguita no hana (The San Paguita Flower), were buried forever by the Interior Ministry censorship bureau.
In The San Paguita Flower there was a scene where the Japanese employees of a factory join in the celebration of a Filipino girl’s birthday. The censorship bureau found this “British-American-looking” and put me through a cross-examination. I tried asking if it was wrong to celebrate a birthday. The censor replied that it was obviously a British-American custom to celebrate birthdays, and the idea of writing a scene like that at a time like this was an outrage. But this censor, pursuing his censor’s logic, fell right into the trap of my question. At the beginning he had called into question only the use of a birthday cake, but now his argument had escalated to the point of rejecting the entire birthday celebration. Without a moment’s hesitation, I countered, “Well, then, is it wrong to celebrate the Emperor’s birthday? In Japan the celebration of the Emperor’s birthday is a national holiday, but if this is a British-American custom, then surely it must be a terrible outrage.” The censor turned ashy pale and rejected my script summarily.
At that time the censors in the Ministry of the Interior seemed to be mentally deranged. They all behaved as if they suffered from persecution complexes, sadistic tendencies and various sexual manias. They cut every single kiss scene out of foreign movies. If a woman’s knees ever appeared, they cut that scene, too. They said that such things would stimulate carnal desires.
The censors were so far gone as to find the following sentence obscene: “The factory gate waited for the student workers, thrown open in longing.” What can I say? This obscenity verdict was handed down by a censor in response to my script for my 1944 film about a girls’ volunteer corps, Ichiban utsukushiku (The Most Beautiful). I could not fathom what it was he found to be obscene about this sentence. Probably none of you can either. But for the mentally disturbed censor this sentence was unquestionably obscene. He explained that the word “gate” very vividly suggested to him the vagina! For these people suffering from sexual manias, anything and everything made them feel carnal desire. Because they were obscene themselves, everything seen through their obscene eyes naturally became obscene. Nothing more or less than a case of sexual pathology.
Nevertheless, I must say the sniffing Dobermans of the censorship bureau certainly underwent a full-scale domestication at the hand of the reigning powers of the day. There is nothing more dangerous than a worthless bureaucrat who has fallen prey to the trends of the times. In the Nazi era, of course, Hitler was a madman, but if you consider people like Himmler and Eichmann behind him, you understand that it is in the subordinate positions that the geniuses of horror and insanity appear. When it comes down to the level of the jailers and operators of the concentration camps, you find beasts that exceed the power of the imagination to conceive.
I believe the wartime censors in the Ministry of the Interior constitute one example of this phenomenon. They were the people who really should have been put behind bars. I am doing my best right now to suppress the anger that makes my writing about them become violent, but just thinking about them and remembering it all makes me shudder with rage. That is how deep my hatred for them remains. Toward the end of the war I even made a pact with some of my friends: If it came to the point of the Honorable Death of the Hundred Million and every Japanese would have to commit suicide, we vowed to meet in front of the Ministry of the Interior and assassinate the censors before we took our own lives.
I must end my discussion of the censors here. I have become too excited over it, and that is not good for me. I learned from having an X-ray taken of the vascular system of my brain that my main artery has a peculiar bend in it. Apparently a normal artery is straight, and my condition was diagnosed as congenital epilepsy. As a matter of fact, I used to have frequent seizures as a child, and Yama-san often
said to me, “you have a habit of falling into a state of distraction.” I never noticed it myself, but it seems I would sometimes have brief lapses during my work when I completely forgot what I was doing and went into a kind of trance. The brain needs a lot of oxygen, and apparently a lack of oxygen in the brain is extremely dangerous. When I am overworked or overly excited, it seems this bent main artery in my brain cuts off the blood supply and causes me to have small epileptic seizures.
Anyway, the censors put me through some horrible experiences. Because I resisted them, they all looked like enemies to me. But even though I had had two scripts in succession shelved by them, I went on and wrote another one. It was called Tekichu odan sanbyakuri (Three Hundred Miles Through Enemy Lines). This was a big action-adventure story based on the novel by Yamanaka Hotaro, and it dealt with the Tatekawa reconnoitering party during the Russo-Japanese war just after the turn of this century. Tatekawa himself, who had been a second lieutenant at the time of his famous exploits nearly forty years before, had advanced to lieutenant general in the Pacific War, and was also ambassador to the Soviet Union. He was most enthusiastic about the idea of filming the story of his reconnoitering party, and I had calculated that with this kind of subject and support the censors in the Ministry of the Interior were not likely to complain.
Moreover, at that time around the city of Harbin in Manchuria there were a great many White Russians. Among these were a number of Cossacks, and they had preserved their military uniforms and flags from before the revolution very carefully. Everything needed for the filming was thus available, and I proposed the project to the company.
Morita Nobuyoshi was then head of the Toho planning division, and he was among the best film people I have ever met. But he looked over my script and groaned. “It’s good. It’s very good, but …” He trailed off. What he was trying to say was that the script was good and they certainly would want to film it, but that the scale of the picture was much too large to be given to a first-time director like me.
It was true that although there were no actual battle scenes in the script, the action is set in the battle camps of both sides as they pull back to a stand-off after the Battle of Mukden. And in the end I had to wave goodbye to this script as well. (It would be filmed much later, in 1957, by the director Kazuo Mori.)
Years afterward Morita recalled this incident as the greatest mistake of his life. “If only I had let you make that movie—but I felt bad about it even at the time. I really had no choice.” I saw his point—under wartime conditions, when the film industry as a whole was so full of hardships, no one could consider giving a large-scale picture to a complete novice. My feelings were assuaged somewhat when, after the project had been shelved, Yama-san and Morita succeeded in getting it published in Eiga hyoron magazine.
One day around this time I saw an advertisement in a magazine called Nihon eiga (Japanese Cinema) in which the name Uekusa Keinosuke appeared. I learned from it that this magazine had published my old schoolmate’s script Haha no chizu (A Mother’s Map). I went to a bookstore on the Ginza and bought the magazine. As I walked out the door, I ran straight into Uekusa, who was carrying in his pocket a copy of the Eiga hyoron with my script printed in it. I don’t remember what we did or what we talked about that day on the Ginza, but Uekusa came to join the screenwriters’ section of Toho, and finally we had the opportunity to work together.
My Mountain
AFTER MY Three Hundred Miles project was shelved, I gave up fighting to become a director. All I did was go on writing scripts in order to earn the money to drink, and I drank as if it were going out of style. The scripts I wrote were things like Seishun no kiryu (Currents of Youth, directed by Fushimizu Shu in 1942) and Tsubasa no gaika (A Triumph of Wings, directed by Yamamoto Satsuo in 1942). They were stories that the times required, about the aircraft industry and boy aviators. Their aim was to fan the flame of the national war spirit, and I did not undertake them out of any personal inclination. I just dashed them off in the suitable formulas.
In the midst of this I was reading the newspaper one day when an advertisement for a new book caught my eye. It was for a novel called Sugata Sanshirō, and for some reason my interest was terrifically aroused. The advertisement described the content only as the story of a rowdy young judo expert, but I just had a gut feeling that “This is it.” There was no logical explanation for my reaction, but I believed wholeheartedly in my instinct and did not doubt for an instant.
I rushed to see Morita and showed him the ad. “Please buy the rights to this book. It will be a great movie,” I begged. Morita replied happily, “All right, let me read it, too.” But then I said, “It hasn’t come out yet. I haven’t even read it myself,” and Morita gave me a funny look. I hastily tried to reassure him, “It’ll be all right. I’m positive this book will make a good movie.” He laughed, “O.K. If you’re that sure about it, you’re probably right. But just because you tell me a book you haven’t read is sure to be good I can’t go rushing out and buy the rights. When it comes out, you read it right away and if it’s good come back. Then I’ll buy it for you.”
After that I haunted the bookstores in Shibuya. I checked morning, noon and night, three times a day every day, to see when the book would arrive. When it finally appeared, I leaped to buy it. This happened in the evening, and by the time I had returned home and read it it was 10:30 p.m. But I had been right. It was good, and it was exactly the kind of material I was looking for to film. I couldn’t wait until morning.
In the dead of night I set out for Morita’s house in Seijo. A very sleepy Morita came out when I banged on the door of the darkened house. I thrust the book at him and said, “It’s a sure thing. Please buy the rights.” “All right,” he promised, “I’ll see to it first thing in the morning,” and he had a look on his face that very clearly said, “There’s no stopping this fellow.”
The next day producer Tanaka Tomoyuki (now president of the Toho Eiga film production arm of Toho Ltd., and co-producer of my latest film, Kagemusha) was dispatched to visit the author of Sugata Sanshirō, Tomita Tsuneo. He requested the film rights for Toho, but came away without an answer.
Later I heard that the next day two of the other majors, Daiei and Shochiku, had also requested the rights. Both of them had promised to cast a big star in the role of the judo expert, Sugata Sanshirō. But, very fortunately for me, Mrs. Tomita had read about me in the film magazines, and told her husband she thought I showed promise.
So at least in a way I owe the start of my career as a director to the wife of the author of the novel Sugata Sanshirō. But in the course of my work as a film director, whenever my fate has hung in the balance, some kind of guardian angel has always appeared out of nowhere. I myself can’t help being surprised by this strange destiny. This fate nudged me into my first experience as a fledgling movie director.
I wrote the script for Sugata Sanshirō at one sitting. Then I took it to the naval air station on the coast of Chiba Prefecture, where Yama-san was shooting Hawai-Marei oki Kaisen (The War at Sea from Hawaii to Malaya). My purpose was, of course, to have him look at my script and give me his advice.
When I arrived at the base, I saw a massive aircraft carrier moored with its deck facing the ocean. Zero fighters were landing, taxiing and taking off from it in rapid succession, circling into the sky. The shooting of the film, in other words, betrayed all the tension of a real-life battle. All I could do was greet Yama-san, tell him the purpose of my visit in a word or two and get out of the way.
At the barracks where the camera crew were housed I waited for Yama-san to return. But a message came that he would be delayed because he had to have dinner with the admiral and the commissioned officers. My instructions were not to wait up. I waited until about 11:00 p.m. and then gave up and crawled into bed. I fell asleep immediately.
In the middle of the night I woke up. When I turned over, I saw light coming through the cracks around the door of Yama-san’s room. I got up and very softly walked over
and peeked in. I saw Yama-san seated on top of his bed with his back to the door. He was reading.
He was poring over the manuscript of my Sugata Sanshirō screenplay. He was going through it very carefully page by page, sometimes turning back the pages and rereading. In that concentrated silhouette there should have been some sign of the exhaustion of the day’s shooting and the evening’s drinking. Not a trace. The barracks occupants had all gone to sleep; there wasn’t a sound anywhere, except for the pages turning. I wanted to say, “You have to get up early in the morning—it’s all right, you don’t have to do this for me, please go to sleep.” But for some reason I couldn’t bring myself to speak. His seriousness was intimidating. I sat down and waited with my back erect for him to finish reading. I will never forget that view of Yama-san’s back and the sound of those pages turning.
I was thirty-two years old. At last I had climbed to the base of the peak I had to scale, and I stood gazing up at my mountain.
Ready, Start!
THE SHOOTING of Sugata Sanshirō began on location in Yokohama in 1942. My first step as a director, the first shot we set up, was Sanshirō and his teacher, Yano Shogoro, coming up a long flight of stone steps leading to a Shinto shrine. After the tests were done and we were ready to shoot, with the cameras rolling I gave the call for action, “Yoi, staato!” (“Ready, start!”) The whole crew turned to stare at me. Apparently my voice sounded a little peculiar. I had done plenty of second-unit directing for Yama-san, but, no matter how much experience you have, when you finally reach the point of directing your own first film you are in a state of extreme tension.
Something Like an Autobiography Page 17