At any rate, with no severance pay, I faced insurmountable financial difficulties at the outset of my married life. I had no choice but to go back to scriptwriting. I even forced myself to write three scripts at once. Probably the only reason I was able to do this was because I was still young, but I really reached the outer limits of exhaustion. The night I finished writing all three scripts I found tears streaming down my face as I drank my saké. There was nothing I could do to stop them.
The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail
IN THE EARLY days of my marriage I suddenly realized that the wartime air raids were a real threat. We moved from the Ebisu area of Shibuya Ward out to Soshigaya in Setagaya Ward. The following day an air raid sent our Ebisu house up in flames. The war was hurtling Japan along the road to defeat at breakneck speed, and yet the Toho studios, employing the hands of people with empty stomachs, continued to show remarkable vitality in the production of motion pictures. But those who were not running around frantically trying to complete a picture were sitting on their heels in the central courtyard talking. They were so hungry it was painful for them to stand up.
Around this time I had written a script called Dokkoi kono yari (The Lifted Spear) for Okochi Denjiro and Enomoto Ken’ichi to star in. We were already in pre-production, but the last scene was going to require special attention. It was to show the Battle of Okehazama, where the feudal leader Oda Nobunaga defeated a northern Japanese clan in 1560. We needed to show Nobunaga and his generals spurring their horses forward into the final battle, so we set out for Yamagata Prefecture to select an appropriate location and horses.
But even Yamagata Prefecture, which had always been a breeding ground for horses and had provided us with great numbers of them, now had only old nags and sickly beasts. There wasn’t a single horse in the entire prefecture that could run. This discovery led to the shelving of the whole Lifted Spear project, and it was as if we had gone location-scouting only to ruin our film. In my disappointment, I decided at least to take the opportunity to visit my parents, who had been evacuated to Akita Prefecture. This would be the only thing I gained from the entire trip.
I arrived in the middle of the night at the house where my parents were. When I banged on the big front door, my older sister Taneyo, who had gone with my parents to help them, peeped through a crack in it and shouted, “It’s Akira!” Then she left me standing outside in the dark and ran to the kitchen to start cooking rice. I was baffled. It turned out that her behavior was not at all laughable. The first thing she wanted to do for the younger brother who she knew was not getting enough to eat was to cook him a meal with real rice. I was almost moved to tears.
These few days I spent with my father were to be our last together. He had been evacuated from Tokyo after the release of Sugata Sanshirō, and had never seen my new bride. He wanted to hear all about her. Immediately after the war I myself became a father, but my own father was never to see his grandchild.
When I was ready to return to Tokyo, my father loaded me up with a huge backpack full of rice. Because I understood painfully well my father’s feeling of wanting to be sure that my pregnant wife at least had rice to eat, I allowed myself to be treated like a pack mule. The thing was so heavy that if I relaxed my muscles I fell over backward. In my topheavy condition I squeezed onto the train for Tokyo, which was already jammed with people like a sardine can.
At a station partway down the line an Army officer and his wife forced their way onto the overflowing train. A woman complained about their pushiness, and the man snapped at her, “How dare you address a soldier of the Imperial Army in such a way?” The woman came back with, “And as a soldier of the Imperial Army, just what do you think you’re doing?” The officer had no reply, and remained meekly silent all the way to Tokyo. This incident gave me a strong feeling that Japan had already lost the war.
The next morning, completely exhausted by the rice-filled backpack, I made my way to the entry of my house in Soshigaya. I sat down on the step with the weight still on my back, and when I tried to stand up again, I could not.
The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail came about as a result of the cancellation of the Lifted Spear project, and it was thrown together in great haste. The idea was to base it on the Kabuki play Kanjincho (The Subscription List), about the escape of the early feudal lord Yoshitsune across a heavily guarded barrier with his generals disguised as priests collecting temple subscriptions. The overall structure would be the same as that of the play, with Okochi as the lord’s strongest retainer, Benkei. It was only a matter of writing in a role as a porter for Enomoto, so I told the executives that I could come up with a script in two or three days. For the company, which didn’t have enough product to put on its screens, my words were a godsend.
On top of the speed I promised with the script, I assured them I would need only one set. For the location shots I would make do with the imperial forest that at that time stretched right to the back gate of the studio. The company was pleased.
But it all proved to be a case of calculating the price the hide will bring before you have caught the badger. Just as things were progressing smoothly on Tiger’s Tail, Japan lost the war and the U.S. Army came to occupy the country.
It came to pass that from time to time American soldiers visited the set where I was shooting. One day a whole landing party of them converged on my set. Maybe the customs being shown in my production struck them as quaint, I don’t know. At any rate, they clicked away with their still cameras or buzzed away with 8-mm. cameras, and some even wanted to be photographed while being slashed at with a Japanese sword. Things got so out of hand I had to call a halt to the day’s shooting.
On another such occasion I was up on top of the soundstage setting up an overhead shot when a group of admirals and high-ranking commissioned officers came onto the set. They were remarkably quiet as they observed the shooting and departed, and later I found out that the movie director John Ford had been among them. It was he himself who told me this years later when I met him in London, and I was amazed. Apparently he had asked my name at the time and left a message of greeting for me. “Didn’t you receive it?” he asked. But I had of course not received it, nor did I have any idea that John Ford had ever visited a movie set of mine until that day I met him in England.
So what finally happened to Tiger’s Tail? For the answer to that question, the censors come onstage once again. When the U.S. Army moved in to occupy Japan, it immediately began crusading against Japanese militarism. Part of this crusade consisted of dismissing the censors and the judicial police.
And yet I was called in by these very same old censors. They said they had an objection to Tiger’s Tail. Even Mori Iwao, who was then Toho’s executive in charge of production, was so surprised that he summoned me to his office and said, “These people have no right to say anything at all now, so you just go there and tell them exactly what you think of them.” Mori had always been the one to handle my hot temper by saying, “Gently, now, gently,” so for him to encourage me to tell them “exactly what you think of them” must have meant he, too, had reached the limits of his patience with the censors. With my spirits thus boosted, I set out to meet them.
Indeed the censors had been driven out of their offices in the Ministry of the Interior and were regrouped in a different place. Here they were burning their official papers in big tin cans and sawing off the legs of their chairs to feed the fire. The sight of all this power reduced to such poverty almost moved me to sympathy.
Nevertheless, these diehards could not give up their pride and presumptuousness, and they lit into me with an interrogating vengeance. “Do you know what this Tiger’s Tail of yours is? It’s a distortion of one of the great Japanese classic Kabuki plays, Kanjinchō. It is a mockery of that classic.”
I am not exaggerating what they said. This was their word-for-word statement. Even if I wanted to forget what they said, I can’t. My response was this: “Tiger’s Tail is being called a distortion of t
he Kabuki play Kanjinchō, but I believe that the Kabuki play itself is already a distortion of the Noh play Ataka. [The Kabuki is in fact based on this original Noh play.] Moreover, although my film is being called a mockery of the Kabuki classic, I most certainly had no such intention, nor do I understand what aspects of my film can be said to ridicule the play. I would like you to explain to me in concrete detail exactly where such mockery occurs.”
All of the censors fell silent for a long moment. Finally one of them replied, “The mere fact that you have put the comedian Enoken into Kanjinchō is an act of mockery.” My answer was, “Well, that is very strange. Enoken is a great comedian. If you say that merely having him act in this film is an affront to the Kabuki, you are casting aspersions on his talent as an actor. Are you saying that comedy is a lesser form than tragedy? Are you saying that comedians are lesser actors than tragedians? Don Quixote has a comic companion named Sancho Panza; what’s wrong with the master Yoshitsune and his retainers having Enoken as a porter who is a comic figure?”
My argument was a little confused because I was so angry, and I started to rattle on. But then a young stripling censor who reeked of an elite background came at me with bared teeth: “In any event, this film is meaningless. Just what do you intend by making such a boring movie?” All my pent-up anger broke loose against this fellow: “If a meaningless person says something is meaningless, that’s probably proof that it isn’t meaningless; and if a boring person says something is boring, that’s probably proof that it’s interesting.” The young censor’s face went through changes from blue to red to yellow, covering all three primary colors. I watched this display for a while and then stood up and went home.
But, thanks to this incident, the U.S. Army’s General Headquarters banned the release of Tiger’s Tail. This was because out of all the reports on films in production in the Japanese industry, the censors pulled only the one on Tiger’s Tail and failed to submit it to the G.H.Q. As a result, it became an “illegal” unreported film, and G.H.Q. shelved it.
Three years later, however, the head of the film division for the G.H.Q. saw Tiger’s Tail, found it very interesting and lifted the ban. Something interesting is interesting, no matter who sees it—with the exception, of course, of boring people.
The American censors are worth a comment. Japan lost the war, and the Allied Occupation of the country was carried out by the U.S. military. Democracy was glorified; freedom of speech was recovered (within the limitations permitted by General MacArthur’s military policies). As these things occurred, the film industry came to life again and flourished. For us, of course, the rout of the censors in the Ministry of the Interior was a delight beyond measure.
We who had been able to express nothing of what we were thinking up to that time all began talking at once. Right after the end of the war I wrote a one-act play called Shaberu (Talking). Setting it in a fish shop on an urban street, I wrote a comic treatment of such Japanese who all begin talking at once. My play aroused the interest of the head of the G.H.Q.’s drama division. He called me in and we spent almost a whole day talking.
I don’t know what this American’s name was, but he seemed to be a drama specialist. He had made notes on the blocking for every single line of my play and asked me very minute and elaborate questions on every detail of the directing. He sometimes smiled and sometimes sputtered with mirth over my answers.
The reason I am writing about this now is that this was an experience of a strange kind of pleasure I had never felt during the war. Rather, it wasn’t strange at all, but a kind of pleasure that we should always be able to feel. This man did not insist on any one-sided viewpoint, but set the desire for mutual understanding as a pre-condition for our talk. My meeting with this American censor is a heart-warming memory. Having lived through an age that had no respect for creation, I recognized for the first time that freedom of creation can exist. I am only sorry that I never learned this man’s name.
Of course I am not saying that all the American censors were like him. But they all behaved toward us in a gentlemanly fashion. Not a single one among them treated us as criminals, the way the Japanese censors had.
The Japanese
AFTER THE WAR my work went smoothly again, but before I begin to write about that, I would like to look back once more at myself during the war. I offered no resistance to Japan’s militarism. Unfortunately, I have to admit that I did not have the courage to resist in any positive way, and I only got by, ingratiating myself when necessary and otherwise evading censure. I am ashamed of this, but I must be honest about it.
Because of my own conduct, I can’t very well put on self-righteous airs and criticize what happened during the war. The freedom and democracy of the post-war era were not things I had fought for and won; they were granted to me by powers beyond my own. As a result, I felt it was all the more essential for me to approach them with an earnest and humble desire to learn, and to make them my own. But most Japanese in those post-war years simply swallowed the concepts of freedom and democracy whole, waving slogans around without really knowing what they meant.
On August 15, 1945, I was summoned to the studio along with everyone else to listen to the momentous proclamation on the radio: the Emperor himself was to speak over the air waves. I will never forget the scenes I saw as I walked the streets that day. On the way from Soshigaya to the studios in Kinuta the shopping street looked fully prepared for the Honorable Death of the Hundred Million. The atmosphere was tense, panicked. There were even shopowners who had taken their Japanese swords from their sheaths and sat staring at the bare blades.
However, when I walked the same route back to my home after listening to the imperial proclamation, the scene was entirely different. The people on the shopping street were bustling about with cheerful faces as if preparing for a festival the next day. I don’t know if this represents Japanese adaptability or Japanese imbecility. In either case, I have to recognize that both these facets exist in the Japanese personality. Both facets exist within my own personality as well.
If the Emperor had not delivered his address urging the Japanese people to lay down their swords—if that speech had been a call instead for the Honorable Death of the Hundred Million—those people on that street in Soshigaya probably would have done as they were told and died. And probably I would have done likewise. The Japanese see self-assertion as immoral and self-sacrifice as the sensible course to take in life. We were accustomed to this teaching and had never thought to question it.
I felt that without the establishment of the self as a positive value there could be no freedom and no democracy. My first film in the postwar era, Waga seishun ni kui nashi (No Regrets for Our Youth), takes the problem of the self as its theme.
But before I go on to talk about it, I would like to say a little more about myself during the war. In wartime we were all like deaf-mutes. We could say nothing, or if we did, all we could do was to repeat in parrot fashion the tenets taught by the militarist government. In order to express ourselves, we had to find a way of doing so without touching on any social problems. This was the reason that haiku poetry enjoyed a new vogue during the war.
The doctrine of “Flowers, Birds and Suggestion in Poetry” put forth by the modern haiku poet Takahama Kyoshi was, in short, one way to avoid the censors’ teeth. We even organized a haiku club at the Toho studios. From time to time we would meet to compose poems at a Buddhist temple outside of Tokyo. The motive, however, was not simply the enjoyment of writing haiku; it was because outside of Tokyo the food situation was a little better and we could be assured of finding something to eat.
However, people with empty stomachs can’t gather together with a vacant feeling and produce good haiku even if they knock their heads together. You can’t do anything well unless you have your full strength and will to pour into it. During this time I, too, wrote many haiku, but not one of them is worth setting down here. They are all superficial and affected.
Around this time in a
book of Takahama Kyoshi’s poetry theories I came across a haiku I must recommend. It was entitled “A Waterfall.”
On the mountaintop
water appears
and tumbles down.
When I first read it, I was struck with amazement. It was apparently a poem by an amateur, but I felt as if its pure, clear vision and simple, straightforward expression had hit me over the head. My affection for my own poems, which were no more than words lined up and twisted around in different ways, dried up completely. Simultaneously I recognized my lack of education and talent, and I felt deeply ashamed. There must be many such things I thought I understood and yet really knew nothing about.
My reaction was to resume a study of traditional Japanese culture. Up until that time I had known nothing at all about pottery and porcelain, and my familiarity with the other industrial arts of Japan was superficial at best. In fact, as far as my esthetic judgment goes, the only art I knew how to appraise at all was painting. And in the performing arts I had never even seen that peculiarly Japanese dramatic form, the Noh. I began by going to visit a friend who was well versed in ancient Japanese implements and asking him to teach me about pottery.
I had always been rather contemptuous of this friend’s interest in curios without knowing exactly why. But as I listened to his instruction, I gradually came to understand that not everything can be lumped together or dismissed as “an interest in curios.” In antiques there are deep and shallow as in other fields. There is everything from the retired dilettante to the serious scholar and esthete in the connoisseurship of Japanese art and culture. The spirit of the age, the life-style of the people of the age, can emerge from a single old food bowl. As I listened to my friend teach me about ceramics, I realized that there were still limitless things for me to study and absorb.
Something Like an Autobiography Page 20