The Most Beautiful
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, Part II
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 fool
ishness 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.
My intention was to go straight to the bath pool, jump in and get warmed up. But the water was so hot I couldn’t stand it, so I scurried to add cold water to it. I picked up a tub of cold water, but as I did so I slipped on the icy floor of the bathroom, and the bucket flew up in the air and emptied the cold water over my head. I have never been so cold in my life. In fact, compared to Yama-san’s short story about heat, this experience of mine rivals it for cold.
As I struggled along, stark naked, shaking like a leaf, trying desperately to mix cold water into the bath, my crew started to come into the bath. I yelled at them with violently chattering teeth to give me a hand. When they saw how cold I was, they dipped up buckets of hot water from the bath, added a little cold water to these and poured them over my head. With this I came back to life and wondered why I hadn’t thought of doing that myself. When the human animal gets panicky, he becomes stupid.
The second funny thing that happened at the Hoppo location involved Higaki Gennosuke’s youngest brother, Genzaburo. He is meant to be half crazy, so I spent a great deal of effort on his costume and makeup. We put him in a tousled long black wig like those used in the Noh drama. He wore white makeup all over his face, and bright red lipstick. We put him in a white costume and had him carry the “bamboo grass of madness” that crazed characters in Noh plays hold.
The role of Genzaburo was played by Kono Akitake. One day his scenes were finished early, so we sent him on back alone. The location for these scenes was on a cliff covered with deep snow. I looked down from the top and saw about seven skiers coming up the road to the cliff. Suddenly they all stood stock still, staring up the road ahead of them, and then in a flash they turned back and skied at breakneck speed down the hill. Small wonder. In the heart of the mountains, where you rarely see a trace of other human beings, if you suddenly saw someone dressed like Genzaburo coming toward you, you would run, too.
Though I have no evil intentions, for some reason in my business I end up giving a lot of people a terrible fright. I met these skiers later at the inn, explained what we were doing and apologized.
On this location the climactic duel between Sanshirō and Tesshin took place in deep snow. They both had to be barefoot, so it was a real test of endurance. Even now, whenever Fujita Susumu (who played Sanshirō) sees my face, he begins to talk about his feet on that 1944 location. He goes on and on about how cold they were and how much he holds it against me. Fujita had also had to jump into the lotus pond in the month of February for the first Sugata Sanshirō, so his resentments were really piled up. But I did not make him do these things because I dislike him. Considering that these films made him a star, I think he might go a little easier on me.
Sugata Sanshirō, Part II was not a very good film. Among the reviews was one that said “Kurosawa seems to be somewhat full of himself.” On the contrary, I feel I was unable to put my full strength into it.
Marriage
THE SAME MONTH Sugata Sanshirō, Part II came out in the movie theaters, I was married. To state it accurately, in 1945 at the age of thirty-five I married the actress Yaguchi Yoko (real name Kato Kiyo) in a ceremony at the wedding hall of the Meiji shrine in Tokyo. The official matchmakers for the ceremony were Yamamoto Kajirō and his wife.
My parents, who had been evacuated to Akita Prefecture, could not attend my wedding. The day after the ceremony took place, U.S. carrier-based planes launched a massive attack on Tokyo, and in the B-29 bomb raid the Meiji shrine became a raging conflagration. The result is that we don’t even have a photograph of our wedding. It was a thoroughly panicked event, our marriage, with the air-raid sirens howling throughout.
At that time if you made an official report of your intention to marry, the government gave you a ration of saké for the exchange of nuptial cups. I received this delivery and decided to taste it before the ceremony. It proved to be some kind of awful synthetic saké. But during the actual ceremony when I took a drink from my cup it wasn’t the synthetic saké; it was in fact delicious, and I wouldn’t have minded having a little more. Then at the reception held at my wife’s parents’ house, the only alcohol was a single bottle of medium-grade Suntory whiskey.
I’m afraid my wife will be very annoyed at me for writing about nothing but the liquor at our wedding. But I feel that, in order to convey a true sense of what it was like to get married at that time, these things should be part of the description. In any event, you can imagine that if the wedding ceremony was like this, the events leading up to it were hardly romantic.
It all began with my parents’ evacuation to the country. Morita Nobuyoshi, who was then head of the Toho production division, saw that I was having a difficult time taking care of myself in my day-to-day life. He suggested that I give some thought to getting married. “But who?” I asked, and Morita immediately replied, “What about Miss Yaguchi?” “Well, that does make sense,” I thought to myself, but since she and I had done nothing but fight all the way through The Most Beautiful, I told Morita I thought she was a little too strong-willed. But he countered with a big grin, “But don’t you see that’s exactly what you need?” I had to admit he had a point, and I made up my mind to ask her hand in marriage.
My proposal went something like this: “It looks as if we are going to lose the war, and if it comes to the point of the Honorable Death of the Hundred Million, we all have to die anyway. It’s probably not a bad idea to find out what married life is like before that happens.”
The answer was that she would think about it. To ensure that things would go smoothly, I asked a very close friend to intercede with her on my behalf. I waited and waited and no reply came. I got fed up with trying to keep cool. Finally I went to her and demanded, “Yes or no?” like General Yamashita Tomoyuki demanding surrender as he occupied Singapore in 1942.
She promised that she would reply very shortly, but the next time we met she handed me a thick stack of letters. She told me to read them and said, “I can’t marry a person like this.” They were all letters from the man I had asked to plead my case with her. I read them and couldn’t believe my eyes. I was horrified.
All these letters contained were slanderous statements about me. The variety and caliber of the phrasing of these terrible things were positively ingenious. The fullness of the hatred for me expressed in these letters sickened me. This fellow, who had accepted the job of aiding me in my suit, had been doing his utmost to ruin my chances. And on top of that, he had frequently accompanied me to the Yaguchi home and sat at my side wearing an expression of sincerest concern and cooperation in my efforts to persuade Miss Yaguchi to marry me.
Apparently Miss Yaguchi’s mother had observed all this and said to her, “Which are you going to put your faith in, the man who slanders his friend or t
he man who trusts the person who slanders him?” The result was that she and I were married. Even after we were married, this man felt no compunctions about coming to visit us. But my mother-in-law absolutely refused to let him in the house.
To this day I can’t understand it. I can’t think of any reason this fellow should have hated me so much. What dwells at the bottom of the human heart remains a mystery to me. Since that time I have observed many different kinds of people—swindlers, people who have killed or died for money, plagiarists—and they all look like normal people, so I am confused. In fact, more than “normal,” these people have very nice faces and say very nice things, so I am all the more confused.
My wife and I began our married life, and for her it must have been a devastating experience. She had given up her career as an actress in order to marry, but what she didn’t know was that my salary was less than one third of what hers had been. She had never dreamed that a director’s pay was so low, and our life became “like traveling in a burning horse cart.”
My fee for the Sugata Sanshirō script had been 100 yen (roughly $2,000), and the fee for directing the picture had also been 100 yen. After that, my fees for The Most Beautiful and Sugata Sanshirō, Part II had risen by 50 yen each. But I had drunk up the greater part of my pay on location, so we were in real trouble.
With Sugata Sanshirō, Part II I signed an official director’s contract with the company. I was to receive severance pay in compensation for my previous work as a regular company employee. But when I asked for this money, I was told that it was being put away for my future, and they refused to give it to me. I still have not received it. Maybe they are still keeping it for my future, or maybe they are planning to draw from it to help me repay the enormous debts I now owe to Toho.
Something Like an Autobiography Page 19